Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (18 page)

The starboard generator—the only one operational by midafternoon—was surging, and the electrical current throughout the boat was uneven. Walbridge ordered all nonessential electrical circuits turned off.

Meanwhile, the fuel filters on all of the engines needed to be changed, and the crew discovered that the filters supplied back in New London would restrict the fuel flow too much or did not fit in the ship’s engines.

Cleveland brought
Bounty
around into the wind, instructing his watch to set the remaining sail so that the wind would blow the bow in one direction while the helm was turned to steer in the opposite direction. When the maneuver was completed,
Bounty
settled in this attitude and, now on a somewhat more even keel but rocking in the big waves, began slowly drifting with the still-violent wind and seas.

Sometime after the B-Watch had been relieved by the C-Watch, Matt Sanders went into the engine room to see what he could do. He found Svendsen and Walbridge there. The captain, seriously injured several hours earlier, nevertheless worked with the pumping systems, attempting to keep the bilge water below the sole boards, which it had already reached. Sanders had never seen that much water in the bilge. He made up his mind to remain in the engine room as long as it took to dry out the boat.

An hour later, Sanders found debris in the screen of the hydraulic pump, which was struggling to get water out of the engine room. He cleaned it, removing some old line that was wrapped around the pump’s impeller—the paddle wheel that moved water through the pump. Twenty minutes later, he had to clear the pump again. Sanders was also opening and closing valves on the electric-pump manifold and finding that when the boat rocked, which it did regularly in these seas, the pump lost its prime.

Oh, the water. It continued to accumulate, and Chief Mate Svendsen was more than concerned. He went to Walbridge and suggested that it was time to let the coast guard know about
Bounty
’s condition. Walbridge told him he felt it was more important to focus their efforts on getting the machinery running.

Svendsen went on deck with the ship’s satellite telephone and attempted to call home base on Long Island. He seemed to have a connection. He thought maybe he was talking with Robert Hansen. But the wind roared and he could not be certain. So he shouted out
Bounty
’s coordinates several times. Then he called some telephone numbers that the ship had for the coast guard. Svendsen knew
Bounty
was in distress. He hadn’t been able to convince Walbridge. He didn’t know whether he had reached anyone on the telephone. He hoped for the best.

The call had gone through. Tracie Simonin had heard John Svendsen’s voice, had recorded
Bounty
’s coordinates, and by eight thirty, she had called a coast guard number and relayed the message.

The ship was ninety miles off Hatteras, floating in an eddy of cold water on the southeast side of the Gulf Stream.

No one ashore knew the exact nature of the ship’s distress. In fact, few aboard
Bounty
knew everything that was happening on
Bounty
’s various decks. The string of small events that had been accumulating all day was growing into a tangled ball as darkness overcame the ship on Sunday night.

Simonin and
Bounty
still had email contact. The coast guard told the office manager to tell the crew to activate their EPIRB, and she followed those instructions. Soon an electronic signal was radiating from the ship, triggering a passing satellite, which relayed the ship’s position to antennas ashore. Now the coast guard had a live indication where
Bounty
was—and that she was still floating.

At nine o’clock Sunday evening, Robin Walbridge finally sent an email acknowledging problems aboard
Bounty
.

“We are taking on water. Will probably need assistance in the morning. Sat phone is not working very good. We have activated the EPIRB. We are not in danger tonight, but if conditions don’t improve on the boat we will be in danger tomorrow. We can only run the generator for a short time. I just found out the fuel oil filters you got were the wrong filters. Let me know when you have contacted the USCG [coast guard] so we can shut the EPIRB off. The boat is doing great but we can’t dewater.”

Tracie Simonin got that message and again called the coast guard. Just a few minutes later
Bounty
’s electronics started to fail—like everything else on the ship—and communication was sporadic. The only way to reliably communicate with the vessel would be through its battery-operated, handheld radio, whose range was limited to just a few miles.

•  •  •  

Commander Billy Mitchell, the Response Department head for Sector North Carolina, faced his first big decision. He thought:
We’ve got a vessel out in a hurricane, taking on water with no power, and that is about all we know. We need to get direct, reliable communications with the vessel to find out just how bad the situation is. But to do this we need to be on scene, and the safest and quickest way would be to send out a C-130.
Mitchell didn’t like his choices. To send out the C-130—the coast guard’s fixed-wing aircraft used for searching—would be dangerous, but to wait for improvements in the weather might be too late for the
Bounty
.
If only we knew exactly what was happening on the ship. Why does the captain think they can make it to morning if they are taking on water in the middle of a hurricane? Is he underestimating the seriousness of their situation?

Mitchell and his team teleconferenced with the officers at the Fifth District and at Air Station Elizabeth City. They immediately activated the AMVER (Automated Mutual Assistance Vessel Rescue) program, which allowed them to locate and identify any ships registered in the system that might be near
Bounty
and could offer assistance. The program originated after the sinking of the
Titanic
, when the need for a coordinated effort by ships to help one another became clear. AMVER has been incredibly successful, saving thousands of lives, particularly when an emergency occurs far from coast guard resources. But in a hurricane as well forecasted as Sandy, most large ships were far from the storm. Just one ship, a thirty-thousand-ton Danish oil tanker, the
Torm Rosetta
, was anywhere near
Bounty
, and it responded that the seas were so bad it would be unable to assist in the rescue.

No coast guard cutters were at sea in the area, and sending one to
Bounty
would take many hours. Besides, with conditions the way they were, the cutter itself could become a casualty of the storm. After much discussion among SAR officials regarding the risks versus the gains of launching a C-130, the decision was made. They would launch the aircraft and let the pilot judge the winds firsthand and see how close he or she could fly to
Bounty
and try for direct communications.

•  •  •  

C-130 commander Frank “Wes” McIntosh was sprawled on the bed in his hotel room watching Sunday-night football. His aircraft had been prepositioned at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, where potential crosswinds would be less troublesome than at Elizabeth City. He and his crew of six were staying at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel adjacent to the airport so they could get to the plane quickly. But the thirty-three-year-old pilot with the mild Southern accent thought it might be a quiet night. With the hurricane dominating the news for the last three days, he surmised all vessels would either be in port or far away from the swirling storm.

When his phone rang at 9:15 p.m., Wes realized he was dead wrong. On the line was the Elizabeth City operations duty officer, Todd Farrell.

“Hey, Wes,” said Todd, “we got a case for you. The HMS
Bounty
, a one-hundred-and-eighty-foot-tall ship, is reportedly taking on water and having generator problems about ninety miles southeast of Cape Hatteras. Communication with the vessel has been lost, and we’re probably going to need you to fly out and establish comms with them. So start mobilizing.”

“Okay, we’ll get ready.”

•  •  •  

Wes McIntosh seemed destined to be a pilot. Growing up in Beaufort, South Carolina, he watched F-18 military jets fly to and from the nearby Marine Corps Air Station, wondering what it would be like to be in one of those planes. His family also attended Blue Angels air shows, and he pictured himself in a cockpit, guiding a streaking aircraft across a cloudless sky. So it was no surprise when, a few years later, after graduating from Georgia Tech on an ROTC scholarship program, he accepted a commission in the navy and immediately started flight school. Once he earned his wings and graduated, he started flying E-6Bs—modified Boeing 707s whose primary mission was to function as a communications platform in case of a ballistic missile attack on the United States. After three years of flying E-6Bs, Wes went on to be a flight instructor in military training aircraft, logging fifteen hundred hours of training sorties in three and a half years. At the end of that tour he had a choice: stay with the navy in a series of nonflying roles of increasing management responsibility or transition to the coast guard, where he could continue flying. The decision was easy—he wanted to stay in the sky, and in 2010 Wes joined the coast guard as a pilot of C-130s.

Now, with orders to mobilize his crew for a night flight to
Bounty
, Wes was glad he had already flown on several coast guard search-and-rescue missions. None of them, however, involved flying into a hurricane.

Once at the airport, the crew began getting the aircraft ready, while Wes went to the Flight Planning Room for one last conversation with SAR officers and his command at Elizabeth City. His final instructions were to proceed, but to stay away from the worst part of the storm, and to try to communicate with
Bounty
without putting the plane and his crew in extreme danger. It was up to Wes to determine just how far into the storm he could fly before the hurricane winds overwhelmed both aircraft and crew.

Fortunately for the crew of the aircraft and of
Bounty
, the Lockheed C-130J Super Hercules is one tough aircraft. The C-130J was a newer version of the C-130, but most aviation professionals referred to it as the C-130. First manufactured over fifty years ago, the four-engine turboprop was originally designed and used as a transport. With a wingspan of 132 feet, a length of 97 feet, and a weight of seventy-six thousand pounds, the C-130 looks almost too large to fly in extreme weather. But the coast guard has found the aircraft to be extremely durable and reliable, and the C-130 has became the primary fixed-winged aircraft used for search and rescue, as well as reconnaissance and patrol.

On the flight to
Bounty
, Wes McIntosh would be the aircraft commander, and Mike Myers his copilot. They were supported by five other crew members: flight mechanic Hector Rios, mission system operators (MSOs) Joshua Adams and Joshua Vargo, drop master Jesse Embert, and basic aircrewman Eric Laster. The flight mechanic sat directly behind the pilots, and the mission system operators, who work with a variety of electronics such as navigation and radio systems, were stationed just aft of the cockpit. The drop master and basic aircrewman occupied the spacious cargo compartment and, during the search, scanned the ocean from their perches at two side windows. If Embert or Laster were fortunate enough to make visual contact with
Bounty
, their responsibility was to deploy any needed equipment, such as rafts, dewatering pumps, survival suits, radios, or flares, all housed in floating, watertight containers. The two men would do so by opening the ramp door at the rear of the aircraft, where they could push the equipment out. In light winds they would attach parachutes, but Embert and Laster knew that in the hurricane the gear went without parachutes to avoid its sailing hundreds of yards from the intended target. Should they need to deploy a data-marker buoy, which measured drift rates and gave location fixes, this could be done through smaller side doors. Dropping any equipment, however, would not be easy, because to do so required both men to be on their feet as the plane passed through turbulence.

By 10:00 p.m. the crew were on board the idling aircraft, anxiously wondering just how bad the winds would become once they entered the enormous reach of Sandy. Prior to launch, a warning light blinked, alerting them that the anti-icing element on the propellers had failed. Wes thought:
Well, this isn’t the ideal way to begin a flight into a hurricane.

The pilots conferred, and Wes announced over the internal communications system that they would fly out toward
Bounty
at seven thousand feet but no higher, to avoid icing.

As they barreled down the runway and the aircraft climbed into the black sky, a bit of rain splattered on the windshield. Wes and Mike Myers, both wearing night-vision goggles (NVGs), guided the plane to the southeast. Usually a bit of chatter could be heard on the radio, but that night was eerily quiet.

Then an air traffic controller from Raleigh-Durham broke the silence, asking, “Hey, are you guys heading into Sandy?”

Wes responded in the affirmative.

“Well, good luck to you.”

The commander thought about how theirs was the only aircraft heading in that direction—everyone else was either sitting on the tarmac or flying the opposite way. Another system malfunction abruptly interrupted Wes’s rumination, this time the weather radar. He immediately tried to get a screen shot in the ground-mapping mode on the system, but it came up blank, causing the commander to curse to himself. Then he informed the mission system operators sitting behind him that he would be relying on them to use a different system—one Wes and Mike could not see—to assist them during flight.

They continued cruising, now over the open ocean, and Wes thought,
Well, at least the malfunctions aren’t serious enough for us to abort, but there better not be any more. Not tonight.