by Rachel Slade
The tools he’d been given to do his job were useless. But Chancery is the kind of guy who had to do something. He is built big and looks like a classic marine, with a buzz cut and a cleft chin. If he wasn’t chained to that desk, you could easily imagine him jumping into a boat himself and heading into the storm.
Captain Coggeshall, Chancery’s commanding officer, was confused by Lawrence’s assertion that Davidson was calm and had things under control. Maybe the vessel was disabled, maybe its antennae had been knocked off, which is why they couldn’t communicate with the ship. But Coggeshall may have also had known about the hydrophones that had picked up a giant thud on the ocean floor near El Faro’s last known position. Then again, though the hurricane was intense, Davidson had said that all was well. It didn’t add up.
From his coast guard training, Coggeshall knew the basics of search planning the old-fashioned way. In desperation, he and Chancery turned to pen and paper, drawing lines on a map, and calculating vectors. Objects drift within a 45-degree vector downwind. “So I used the last known position of El Faro as my minimum,” Coggeshall explained. “I figured that the hurricane was going to be the biggest factor—that ocean currents were not going to be the driving force for the drift of the vessel or the life rafts or lifeboat. So I basically ran the drift at 40 knots, multiplied it by three, and applied it in a northeast direction, which was basically the direction the storm came from and was heading out again. I figured wherever the storm was going it’d pull anything on the surface with it.”
It was the only thing they could do to keep moving forward, because they’d eventually have to tell their planes, helicopters, and cutters something.
Chapter 20
Search and Rescue
Great Inagua, the second largest island in the Bahamas, is home to mosquitoes, donkeys, and a gleaming white $20 million US Coast Guard hangar. The previous hangar was flattened in 2008 by Hurricane Ike whose 145-mile-per-hour winds ripped off its roof and bent its massive steel I-beams like paperclips. The new hangar is designed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. Above its high-strength precast concrete panels, a thick web of steel trusses keeps the roof on during extreme updrafts. On one side, four sixty-thousand-pound motorized doors slide open so the coast guard’s Jayhawks can be towed in and out.
All of District 7’s aircrew serve a two-week stint on the southernmost Bahamian island each quarter. Most of them don’t mind being out there—staying up late, cooking steaks on the open grill, playing games on Xbox. For a handful of men and women in their thirties, it’s about as close as you can get to sleepaway camp. Except every twenty-four hours or so, you get to fly the coast guard’s bright orange-and-white $30 million Sikorsky birds.
On September 15, 2015, MH-60T rescue pilot Lieutenant Dave McCarthy deployed to Great Inagua. (Coasties call it GI.) Dave had never been there before, but he’d heard about it from his colleagues. With his Roman profile and small blue eyes, Dave looks ice cold until he breaks into a warm, generous grin, which, fortunately, he wears most of the time. Exactly one decade ago, he arrived at the doorstep of the US Coast Guard’s Tampa Bay recruiting station after a rocky career in technology. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He’d just come back from a trip to DC, and after visiting the Pentagon, the memorials, and Arlington Cemetery, Dave found himself “truly moved” to help his country. He told the recruiter, “I just want to serve.” After signing up for the reserves, he started to think more seriously about a military career. Helicopter pilot came up as an option. His grandfather had been a pilot in World War II, almost an ace. When Dave told his dad, who’d served in the air force during the Vietnam War, that he was thinking about becoming an aviator, his dad said, Make sure you like flying first. So he paid for a short helicopter ride around Disney “just to see if I enjoyed it,” Dave says. “And I was like, yeah, this is pretty cool.”
Dave was deploying to GI with fellow pilot Lieutenant Rick Post, a God-loving Christian from Nebraska with a boyish face, big brown eyes, and hard-to-miss jug ears. Rick grew up hunting and fishing, driving tractors and chasing cows, “doing all the Nebraska country boy stuff,” he says. He’d always wanted to fly jets. He applied to the Air Force Academy but, he says, “I guess the good Lord had other plans.” He didn’t get in, but he did get accepted to the Coast Guard Academy. “So I was, like, do they have an aviation program? Yes? Okay, I’ll do it.”
Rick and Dave geared up for two weeks on GI like modern-day Robinson Crusoes—night-vision goggles, flight suits, and forty pounds of plastic-wrapped raw steak and chicken packed in coolers. They boarded the C-130 in Clearwater and flew across Florida, past Miami, and then over open water. On their right, they could glimpse the coast of Cuba. They flew over the hundreds of islands that make up the Bahamas, and when they reached GI, the plane did an “ass pass” to clear the donkeys off the runway before touching down.
After two uneventful weeks out there, they were preparing to head back with their crew to Florida when on Tuesday, September 29, Clearwater called to tell them that they were staying put. A hurricane was coming; they might need extra hands out there. The C-130 from the Air Station landed in GI a day later, but not to take them home. Instead, it carried an additional aircrew. District 7 was staffing up for something big.
Back at Air Station Clearwater, Florida, Captain Rich Lorenzen was hedging his bets. As one of the commanding officers responsible for the coast guard’s air assets in D-7, he worked with his fellow officers to shuffle helicopters and flight crews among the air bases like chess pieces. He’d served eight years in the army and twenty-five years as a coast guard pilot and operations officer in District 7’s hurricane-prone territory and, in that time, learned that being prepared always paid off. He’d overseen the evacuation of GI ahead of Hurricane Ike, a huge effort that’s still a point of pride for the career military man: “We got eight C-130 sorties to empty that place out before it hit. I call it the greatest coast guard airlift story that was never told.”
Now Lorenzen was watching Tropical Depression 11 and didn’t like what it was doing. It defied expectations—a very bad sign. “Usually depressions that start up in the higher latitudes zigzag up and then go off Bermuda and you never see them again,” he says. “This was up there meandering around. And all of a sudden, it started growing. And I’ll never forget—it was on Monday morning. We came in and we’re having our morning briefing. And I was thinking, We gotta keep an eye on that one.
“So I got together with a small group of folks after the meeting and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got the swap-out at GI happening tomorrow. Instead of pulling those folks out, I have a feeling this storm could get bigger, based on the potential track. How about we leave those folks where they are and bring in additional crews? So if this turns into a big storm we’re not caught saying, Man, I wish I had crews there.’
“And sure as heck, it started to blossom into a hurricane pretty quick and then took the southerly jog straight toward our bases.”
Stranded on GI, Rick and Dave, along with the rest of the crew, spent Wednesday afternoon prepping the base for hurricane-force winds in case Joaquin went right over them, like Ike did seven years before. They tied down anything that a storm could send rolling or flying. They filled up buckets with water to flush the toilets, and others with drinking water. Once everything was secured, Rick and a few other guys drove around the island in the truck the coast guard keeps down there. It was a gray stormy day. To clock wind speed, they drove with the wind at their backs until it stopped pushing against their outstretched hands—40 miles per hour. Where they could really tell that there was a hurricane offshore was by watching the ocean. “It was just churning, heaving, roiling,” Rick says. “It was way higher than normal, tearing up the boat ramp, putting rocks up on the road.”
At the island’s lighthouse where the Bahamian waters are usually a calm cerulean, waves crashed halfway up the tower. “Poor little crabs were clinging onto the rocks for dear life, trying not to get swept away,” Rick r
emembers. “It was definitely the sea state that tells you there’s a hurricane going on.”
Thursday morning, they got the call directly from District 7 command center in Miami: an American ship called El Faro was heading through the storm. It was having communications issues. Could they fly over and check it out?
Mission requests came from District 7 but all missions had to be cleared by Clearwater’s expert operations officers who work with the on-site pilots to assess risk and either accept or decline. This mission presented insurmountable challenges. In Clearwater, Commander Scott Phy examined the radar with the pilots on GI—El Faro looked like it was dead center in the eye of a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds up to 125 miles per hour. The Jayhawks could get close—maybe within fifty miles or so, but that wouldn’t help anyone. They’d have to wait until the storm edged off.
Part of that risk assessment with Clearwater included discussion about the ambiguity of El Faro’s situation. “We didn’t have good reports,” says Commander Phy, a decorated pilot who was working with Lorenzen as the operations officer that day. “D-7 was talking to El Faro through the shipping agent who said that they had a couple of mechanical casualties but they were okay. So at first, it just seemed like they were—from the reports we were getting—having some mechanical failures, but they were okay.”
Lorenzen, the commanding officer, remembers it the same way: “The first real El Faro report I got was during one of those hurricane phone conferences with the command center, maybe in the afternoon,” he says. “And the message was, Hey, they seem to be doing okay. And I remember personally thinking, Whoa. Why is this thing heading through that storm? That’s not a good idea. And I’m starting to wonder if they had communication problems. Do they not have the ability to look at weather graphics or talk back to their home base or to their ownership and see that this storm is brewing and they’re heading toward it?”
He and Phy waited for more information from the command center, and slowly, the full extent of El Faro’s situation emerged. “There were a lot of hours of uncertainty when a lot of us just assumed, Okay, they’re probably going to get to ride this out. Hopefully they turned away, but maybe they’ve lost communications because they’re in the middle of a hurricane. So nobody can communicate. Got it. That doesn’t mean they’ve sunk. It just means nobody can talk to them. But when I heard that the ship’s captain had said they’d lost propulsion and had flooding, I knew things were going bad. Once those containers start shifting over the side of the thing, you get too much weight on one side, and with twenty-, thirty-, forty-foot seas hitting that thing, anything can happen. I knew it probably got ugly real quick.”
The pilots on GI told Chancery that there was no way they could reach El Faro in their Jayhawks that day and declined the mission. So he spent Thursday working with the sketchy information he’d been given by TOTE’s designated person ashore, John Lawrence, and tried in vain to establish communications with El Faro. He also struggled to create a drift model for a search-and-rescue plan working with the conflicting position data he’d received. Was the ship actually in trouble? Though his instincts told him yes, there was nothing else he could do. Joaquin had whipped itself into a frenzy and wasn’t budging from where El Faro theoretically was.
As evening approached, the officers in Clearwater agreed to send a C-130 to El Faro’s last known position by first light Friday morning.
Rick and Dave were on standby on GI. They headed to bed early, assuming they’d fly out at dawn the following day to work with the C-130 to find El Faro.
Around 9:00 at night, the phone rang. It was D-7. But the call wasn’t about El Faro. A 212-foot Bolivian-flagged container ship named the Minouche had been brutally battered by Joaquin and lost her engines. The Minouche was listing thirty degrees, and the twelve people aboard were preparing to abandon ship.
For the second time that day, the pilots on GI discussed flying into Joaquin with their commanding officers in Clearwater. The Minouche was farther south than El Faro, so conditions would be slightly better, but flying at night is always challenging. The visibility ceiling out there was low, about three hundred to four hundred feet high, and the winds were in excess of 40 knots. That meant they’d have to fly close to the water if they wanted to see anything. If they hit a downdraft, they wouldn’t have far to fall before they got tangled up in the ocean’s waves.
Dave, Rick, rescue swimmer Aviation Survival Technician Ben Cournia, and flight mechanic Aviation Maintenance Technician Josh Andrews would be flying under extreme conditions at night, hoisting survivors one by one into the Jayhawk. Josh would man the hoist and call out positioning commands to his pilots up front. It was a dangerous, delicate operation, requiring a symphony of perfectly timed maneuvers.
Dave and Rick had never flown in a hurricane before. But there were twelve people in the water. That’s twelve lives they could save. “That’s pretty significant gain, right?” Dave said to me later. After a brief risk assessment over the phone with Commander Phy, the crew agreed to take the mission.
They had thirty minutes to get airborne. The crew zipped into their olive drab flight suits, grabbed their helmets and night-vision goggles, and headed to the hangar as the mechanics rolled back its massive doors and towed the bird onto the tarmac into the howling storm. The flight crew climbed in and flicked on the lights. In spite of the winds, mosquitoes were swarming—thousands of black specks appeared across the windshield and lurked inside. Once strapped in, the four men could barely move; they were being eaten alive right through their suits. They quickly started up the engine, scaring off the mosquitoes with the machine’s vibrations, got the rotors going, and lifted up into the black of night.
Rain washed sideways across the windshield as 80-mile-per-hour gusts knocked them around. Visibility was zero. Jayhawks always shook, but in those conditions, it was bumpier, like driving down a rocky road at high speed, Dave says. Even with their night-vision goggles, Dave and Rick couldn’t see anything in the darkness, so they flew by instruments. Before they took off, Dave was concerned that his radar would pick up too much noise to reliably warn him of hazards on land so he used his computer mouse to input the outline of Inagua as flight points on his screen; that helped him follow the island’s coastline to ensure they didn’t hit anything like buildings or antennas. It would also help them find the unlit runway on their return.
They went slowly to get the hang of flying in those conditions, taking almost half an hour to reach the Minouche—just forty miles south of base.
When they arrived at the distressed vessel, they saw a ship glowing brightly in a black sea, listing wildly to port. They flew a wide circle around the scene to get a sense of what was going on. The Minouche was a cheaply built foreign-flagged ship not known for its seaworthiness; under the pounding waves, its hull had cracked in half. Luckily, its crew had good lifesaving equipment. Their life jackets, equipped with personal locator beacons, madly pinged the Jayhawk’s sensors, making it easy for Rick and Dave to get properly positioned and strategize the rescue.
A big cargo ship and a Coast Guard cutter lingered a couple of miles away, but seas were too heavy for them to make any attempt to save the crew. If the rescue vessels got too close, one big wave could launch them right on top of the raft, crushing the people huddled inside.
On their first pass around the Minouche, Dave and Rick saw water washing up on her as waves battered her broadside. The small rubber life raft with twelve men bobbed nearby. During their second lap around, the aircrew pulled together a game plan—they’d go into a hover, lower Ben in, and have him pick the guys up out of the raft one by one. They had continuously trained for this scenario, but never under such crazy conditions. It was baptism by fire.
Rick threw a few flares into the water to help set up a visual horizon for himself, but the ocean immediately swallowed them. At that point, water was halfway up the Minouche’s deck as the sea pulled her deeper in.
On the third lap around, they prepared
to lower their rescue swimmer when Rick looked down. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Do you guys see what I’m seeing? Am I seeing this right?” he said in horror. The Minouche’s lights were still on, but she was completely under water. Getting smaller and smaller, vanishing into the deep. It was one of the eeriest things Rick had ever seen: watching a big ship sink before his eyes. Dave lifted his goggles to get a better look. But she was gone.
Wearing his neoprene wetsuit, mask, flippers, and snorkel, Ben buckled on his life vest, attached himself to the hoist, and crouched at the open door, watching the roiling seas below twist and heave in the bright white of the helicopter’s spotlight. He took a minute to time the waves. His plan was to drop on the backside of a large wave, which would give him a few moments to orient himself before the next wave hit.
Josh braced himself against the chopper’s doorway, blocking Ben from jumping, while calling out steering commands to Rick over the radio in his helmet—forward right 15, forward right 10, forward right 5, easy, hold—easing them into position above the raft.
Rick and Dave sat too far forward in the Jayhawk to see the hoist and raft directly below them, so they relied on Josh to be their eyes and ears. When they were in a good place, Josh gave Ben the signal—go time. The rescue swimmer gauged the rhythm of the waves, aimed for a trough, took a deep breath, and plunged flippers first, arms tight to his body, into the blackness. Josh quickly fed out the hoist cable, taking care not to jerk his swimmer, which could seriously injure him. Once during training, a rescue swimmer had two teeth knocked out that way.