Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  When the helicopter finally came to rest, Steve felt a searing pain shooting through his leg. He looked for the commander, who should have been in the seat to his left. Instead, he saw snow. Steve released his safety harness and tried to stand, then noticed the lower part of his leg was turned inward at a forty-five-degree angle and blood was seeping through his pants.

  The commander’s head popped out of the snow, but he, too, was injured, and both men were trapped in the steaming, hissing aircraft that could ignite at any moment. In the rear of the helicopter, basic aircrew member Gina Panuzzi was critically hurt with severe internal injuries. Luckily, rescue swimmer Darren Hicks and flight mechanic Edward Sychra were relatively unscathed and started pulling the injured from the wreckage, which was scattered over hundreds of feet, including up in the trees.

  The accident had happened so quickly that no emergency call could be made, and the lead helicopter pilots that had been in front of Steve’s aircraft didn’t know it had gone down. Now, the five survivors were in a race against time; their injuries and hypothermia would sap their strength and soon snuff out their lives.

  Flight mechanic Edward Sychra used his cell phone to send a text message to the flight mechanic of the lead helicopter, who texted back that they were alerting authorities and were going to land as close to the crash site as possible. Meantime, Steve’s open compound fracture was causing excruciating pain, and the rescue swimmer did his best to help by using a tree branch as a splint. Steve thought to himself, Well, I’m responsible for getting us into this jam, and maybe now God is going to help us get out of it. Despite his pain he felt a calmness come over him, and his thoughts turned to the more seriously injured Gina Panuzzi. He knew she needed medical attention immediately.

  A short time later the lead helicopter returned, but the Jayhawk was incapable of hovering at that altitude. Pilot Steven Bonn flew to a lower altitude and lightened the aircraft by dumping fuel and equipment. Then he returned and, in an amazing display of skill, somehow guided the helicopter down into a confined opening in the woods, just a couple hundred yards below the crash site. A MedFlight helicopter also landed nearby, and the injured were whisked off to Salt Lake City. Snowmobilers arrived on scene and took Sychra and rescue swimmer Hicks down off the mountain.

  When Steve was identified as one of the injured, authorities called his mother. The pilot’s mother had the same feeling Steve did on the mountain: that her son would pull through. The date of the accident—March 3—was significant to her. This was the day her infant daughter had died years earlier. God’s not going to take two away, she told herself. Steve is being watched over and will be fine.

  Steve did pull through, but he wasn’t fine. He had surgery on his leg, and afterward his orthopedic doctor warned him that the damage was so serious he could still lose the limb. After a month on his back in the hospital, a second surgery was performed, which included bone grafts and the bitter news that he might not ever be able to put weight on his leg and his flying days were likely over.

  While recuperating Steve went over the rescue events and counted several things that had had to go precisely as they did for him and the others to survive. First, they landed in an incredible nine feet of snow, softening their impact and reducing the risk of fire. Second, in hundreds of miles of woods they crashed just two hundred yards from a clearing. And third, pilot Bonn managed to maneuver his helicopter into the opening despite it being difficult to hover at such an altitude. Steve considered several other factors, such as had the accident happened at night, they would likely not have been found until morning. He thought how pilots like himself who fly into dangerous situations need confidence, but how in the big scheme of things some factors are beyond control, and how faith can get you through the toughest of times.

  For the next several months Steve directed his energy into physical therapy, and with each step he began to realize he might someday fly again. Approximately a year and a half after the accident, in October of 2011, Steve was behind the controls of a Jayhawk and throttled the helicopter off the tarmac and into the sky.

  • • •

  Now Steve was lying awake, wondering what was happening aboard the tall ship Bounty. He didn’t have to speculate for long. At 3:00 a.m. Todd Farrell called him and asked him to come into the Operations Center because Steve might have to fly out to the ship and drop pumps. Copilot Jane Peña had also been alerted, and all three reviewed the situation with Sector. Bounty had not yet capsized, but Wes McIntosh on the C-130 described brutal conditions at the distress scene. That the captain of the vessel thought the crew could hang on until morning suggested to the Operations Center that Bounty’s situation was not acute, though potentially volatile. Weighing the safety of their rescue teams against this information, they decided the risks of flying immediately were just too great. But Steve and Jane were ready to fly instantly if the situation changed.

  Because Steve had been on duty since 8:00 a.m. the prior morning, a fresh crew would be called in to fly at dawn if Bounty stayed afloat that long. Farrell made the calls. Then just a short time later, Sector called and relayed the urgent message from Wes that the people on Bounty were abandoning ship. That call changed everything. There was no time to wait for the new crew, no time to wait for safer conditions at dawn.

  The SAR alarm sounded its whooping warble, and rescue swimmer Randy Haba and flight mechanic Michael Lufkin ran to the Operations Center to join up with Steve and Jane. Steve explained what was happening with Bounty, then described the extreme conditions at the accident scene. He asked each crew member if he or she felt alert enough to do the mission, knowing that all of them were near the end of their twenty-four-hour shift. They responded positively and raced to their helicopter, which was already out of the hangar, fueled, and ready to go.

  Michael Lufkin and Jane Peña had only done a couple of rescues and were glad to have been paired with veterans such as Randy and Steve. Lufkin, a tall and lanky twenty-five-year-old, had been in the coast guard for five years serving in different roles, but had only been a qualified flight mechanic for seven months, and it would be his job to raise and lower the cable and help guide the pilots during the hoists. Randy’s life would literally be in his hands because Michael, not Randy, controlled the movements of the cable when the rescue swimmer was on the other end. Lufkin would also be responsible for hoisting survivors, which was usually done by basket. In his work, timing was everything; he would need to factor in the wind and the waves to get the swimmer in the sweet spot of the back side of a wave, with just enough slack in the cable to allow the swimmer to maneuver. He would want to avoid putting Haba in the middle of a breaking wave where he could get buried.

  As Lufkin sat in the helicopter’s cabin during liftoff into the darkness, all the various hoisting scenarios were going through his mind. He would need to combine quickness and strength in many of the procedures, such as dropping the swimmer into the sea, bringing the hook up, attaching the basket, and getting survivors into the helo as quickly as possible. Fortunately, Lufkin was a natural athlete and had the coordination required. Still, he had never flown into any weather remotely like Hurricane Sandy, and with possibly multiple survivors in the water, it would take every bit of concentration and endurance he could muster. Prior to launching, when he first heard that Bounty was taking on water, Michael went online and investigated the ship’s website. On it was the path of the ship with the hurricane not far away, and for a brief moment he wondered what in the world the vessel was doing out there. But he pushed the thought out of his mind and tried to learn as much as he could about the ship and its crew. He knew for certain he didn’t want his swimmer or the basket anywhere near the ship’s masts. Should the cable become entangled in the rigging, it could pull the giant helo right out of the sky.

  The pilots flew at an altitude of three thousand feet, using a strong tailwind to propel them at 170 knots. Off Cape Hatteras they slowly descended and reduced speed. Steve ordered his crew to “goggle up,” meani
ng to don the NVGs, so they could see the water, which came into focus at about three hundred feet in altitude. Squalls of rain and wind gusts began rocking the Jayhawk, and a couple powerful gusts made the helo rise and fall unexpectedly by as much as fifty feet. Through their headsets the on-scene C-130 pilot, Peyton Russell, was updating them, and they knew conditions would deteriorate with each passing mile. Michael Lufkin paid particular attention to the talk about the many strobe lights blinking in the water. He knew they would be searching, and fuel could become an issue, making quick hoists imperative. Lufkin reckoned that not only would a second helo be needed immediately, but most likely a third, considering that up to sixteen survivors could be scattered around the capsized Bounty.

  Jane Peña, who sat in the left cockpit seat, had already started making fuel calculations to establish their bingo time: the moment they absolutely had to leave the accident scene to make it back to land with the fuel left. She used a computer to enter the route of their flight, the wind, and other factors to help calculate the fuel being used. Most important, the return flight would likely be directly into strong headwinds. She wanted to be certain that the calculations were accurate, so she also kept a pad of paper nearby to manually record fuel burn rates to make sure the computer calculations were in line with her own. She had the responsibility to continually update Steve on their fuel status as they approached bingo.

  The thirty-one-year-old copilot with short brown hair had been a bit on edge when they were flying at three thousand feet in the pitch dark, but now that she could see the ocean through her NVGs, she felt fine. Water was her element, and just seeing it had a calming effect. As with Michael Lufkin, this was her first major SAR case, and she knew she would be learning from Steve Cerveny, a top pilot, and felt glad for the opportunity. She had done a medical evacuation off a ship and rescued stranded kayakers from a sandbar, but flying into hurricane conditions to hunt down individual strobe lights and hopefully extract survivors was a bit more challenging. This is what all those hours of training and studying were for, she thought, remembering her long and difficult quest to become a pilot.

  Jane had grown up in Washington State and was the quintessential tomboy—climbing trees, camping, hiking, playing soccer and baseball. She had always wanted to fly but was unsure how to go about it and instead majored in history at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her longtime boyfriend, who later became her husband, joined the coast guard, and Jane began to see the opportunities. She applied to Officer Candidate School, was accepted, and graduated in 2007. In her first position, she did offshore security boardings of foreign vessels, a job she loved, but she hadn’t given up on flying and kept applying for flight school until she was finally selected. Graduating, or “winged,” in March 2010, Jane’s first air station was Elizabeth City. Now, she was about to see why the ocean off Cape Hatteras is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

  It took about an hour to reach Bounty. Peyton Russell in the C-130 told Jane that he had passed over one strobe and survival suit that did not float like the others. “We’ve marked the location, and we think there might be a person in that suit.” Jane and Steve understood this was the target they needed to go to first. Unlike the large rafts, this single strobe light, far from the Bounty, could be easy to lose sight of in the waves. And should the strobe light’s batteries die, they might never find that potential survivor.

  Steve guided the helo to the coordinates Jane relayed to him, a full three-quarters of a mile from the ship and the rafts. As they descended toward the lone strobe light, Jane got her first close-up view of the ocean—it looked crazed. “Normally,” recalled Jane, “waves would be advancing from a single direction and there would be a set amount of space between each one. These waves, however, had nothing normal about them.” They were coming from various directions, with no pattern, and oftentimes they slammed into one another, shooting spray into the dark sky. The pilots had a good view of the chaos below: besides the windows directly in front of the cockpit, small windows were at their feet and on the sides. In the cabin, Haba and Lufkin peered out small windows on either side of the aircraft, and they, too, were in awe of the unusual waves, varying in size from twenty-five to thirty feet.

  Winds made hovering in place nearly impossible, and Steve did his best to hold the bird in position over the single strobe light. The crew could see the outline of the immersion suit, but there was no sign of life. To get lower, Steve let the wind blow the helo back a bit, then he angled the nose down, descending to sixty feet. Jane watched the radar altimeter, which shows exactly the distance between the aircraft and the ocean. It fluctuated between twenty-five and sixty feet, meaning that when a large wave passed beneath the helicopter, it was only twenty-five feet from them. Jane wanted to make sure they never got any closer than twenty-five feet, so she focused on scanning the seas to make sure no extreme or “rogue” waves were coming their way. Even if the wave itself didn’t hit the helicopter, its spray could be ingested by the engine and cause flameout. If that happened, the Jayhawk would stall and drop like a stone. When it hit the water, it would turn turtle as the heavy rotors, extending fifty-four feet in diameter, pulled the helicopter upside down. The crew trained for this dire scenario, but successfully exiting the aircraft at night in thirty-foot seas would be a long shot. With that in mind, Jane kept her eyes peeled for an extreme wave that could kill them all.

  Michael Lufkin removed his goggles in preparation for a possible hoist. Suddenly, over his headset, he heard Steve say, “I just saw the arm of the survival suit lift out of the water! We’ve got a person down there.” A shot of adrenaline coursed through Lufkin, and he looked at Haba. They were officially out of search mode and into a rescue.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A SWIRLING VORTEX

  Randy Haba had taken off his helmet with the radio set and exchanged it for a neon-green rescue helmet. Now he was donning his harness, flippers, mask, and snorkel, a determined look on his face. The rescue swimmer wore a dry suit that he knew would make him sweat profusely in the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream, but he was not complaining. Should disaster happen and he couldn’t get back into the helicopter, the extra layer of protection against hypothermia might save his life.

  He slid toward the open doorway. With the illumination from the helicopter’s searchlight, he could see the person’s head and arm sticking out of the ocean. Earlier Randy had used the aircraft’s infared camera, which could help in the search for survivors by showing a person’s body heat as white against a green background on the monitor. The lens of the camera was mounted in the nose of the helicopter, and Randy used a toggle to move it, while zooming in and out, to adjust the focus. He had seen a bit of white coming from the survival suit, figured someone alive was in it, and prepared for deployment. Wanting to do the hoist as quickly as possible, he told Lufkin he thought a direct deployment—in which the swimmer stays on the hook and brings the survivor up with him in a sling—would be the way to go.

  Randy felt excited and tense, the same kind of feeling that builds in an athlete before the start of a big game. He always thought that if the day ever came when he didn’t get that amped-up feeling before a rescue, he should resign as a rescue swimmer. Complacency made for mistakes.

  Haba, at thirty-three, was a powerful, muscular man, standing at six feet one inch and weighing close to two hundred pounds. Like all rescue swimmers he was paid to stay in top shape. His background would not, however, suggest his career path. The first few years of his life were spent on the family farm in Nebraska, then later he lived in the farming town of Stratton, Colorado. He loved sports, especially football, and his high school team won numerous state titles. But he was not on the swim team, nor was he an especially strong swimmer.

  Besides football, Randy’s other passion was the outdoors—fishing, hiking, skiing, hunting, and anything else that took him into the mountains. A high school science teacher introduced him to the possibility of a career in the outdoors, particularly sear
ch and rescue. In college, Randy tried to get into a mountain search-and-rescue program at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. During his freshman year, however, his classes were the general required courses, and he grew disinterested and a bit financially strapped because he was paying for college himself without the aid of a scholarship. When he learned that one of the missions of the coast guard was search and rescue, he talked to a recruiter at the end of his freshman year. The recruiter showed him a helicopter rescue-swimmer video, and Randy was hooked—despite having never seen an ocean.

  During coast guard boot camp Randy became up close and personal with the ocean when his company commander marched his squad into it. After he survived boot camp, his first assignment, like that of most who join the coast guard, was on a cutter, in Randy’s case the 378-foot Midgett. One of his more memorable deployments was to the Persian Gulf as part of the US Navy Constellation battle group. His next base was in New Orleans, where, in 1999, he began training to become an aviation survival technician (AST) (rescue swimmer) and “doggy-paddled” his first five-hundred-yard swim. Despite not being as quick a swimmer as some of the other candidates, he was determined and completed the four-month program. Then it was on to Air Station Elizabeth City for the more grueling AST “A” School, where he quickly became a stronger swimmer. About half the trainees washed out of the program, but the football player in Randy wouldn’t consider quitting, and he pushed himself both physically and mentally in ways he never had before. Instructors pressed the recruits to their limits and beyond, knowing that it was safer for a recruit to crack under stress in a pool than alone in the open ocean. Randy rose to the challenge.