Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes - Softcover

Helvarg, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312628145 ISBN 13: 9780312628147

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010

Synopsis

The Extraordinary Story Of The U.S. Coast Guard

Since its inception more than 200 years ago, the United States Coast Guard has rescued over 1.1 million people. Yet, despite having more than fifty thousand active and reserve members, most of us know very little about this often neglected but crucial branch of the U.S. military.

Filled with altruism and adrenaline, Rescue Warriors brings us into the daily lives of "Coasties" as well as dozens of death-defying rescues at sea and on hurricane-ravaged shores. A masterpiece of adventure reporting, Rescue Warriors is the definitive book on America's Coast Guard.

About this title

About the Author:

DAVID HELVARG is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign and author of Saved by the Sea, The War Against the Greens, Blue Frontier, and 50 Ways to Save the Ocean. He has produced more than forty broadcast documentaries for PBS, The Discovery Channel, and others, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, Popular Science, Sierra, and The Nation. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

New Orleans Saints

Friday, August 26, 2005

The crew of the fishing boat Mary Lynn pitched and rolled in raging forty-foot seas, eighty-five miles west of Key West. With their controls gone and their vessel threatening to break up, they activated an EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio beacon) buoy and hoped someone would hear its signal. They tried to launch a life raft, but the storm winds capsized it and dragged it away. All they could do now was hang on and pray for help.

At Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater, 210 miles away, their signal was received and an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter launched in forty-knot winds around 10:00 p.m. Soon the big chopper was flying along the leading edge of the storm, blinded by heavy rains, clouds, and darkness, its crew unable to see the ocean rising and falling below them. It would take three hours of manhandling their aircraft through buffeting winds and ballistic rain before they finally arrived on scene. A big four-engine C-130 Hercules from Clearwater was already circling overhead.

Unfortunately, the rough trek had depleted the helicopter’s fuel supply, leaving them only fifteen minutes on scene. Below they could see the Mary Lynn being tossed around in the rolling seas as the crew clung to the stern. Rather than try to rush things and risk someone being swept away, they decided to head to Key West to refuel. Battling 75 mph headwinds, the trip, which should have taken forty-five minutes, took two hours. They landed at 3:00 a.m., refueled, and were back over the Mary Lynn at daybreak. If anything, the storm had worsened in their absence. Pilot Craig Massello told Rescue Swimmer Kenyon Bolton that he was not to come off the rescue cable for any reason. This meant the boat crew would have to get in the water to meet him.

"The first hoist wasn’t pretty,"flight mechanic and hoist operator Robert Cain noted dryly. First they swung Bolton into the stern of the fishing boat, and then, as he came free, dangling like bait on a line, he was hit head-on by a monster wave. Still he managed to get in the water and swim to crewmember Anita Miller. He got a quick strop harness around her, but then the cable jerked them, dropping the strop’s V-rings and jamming his hook open. He replaced the rings and made sure he had a tight grip on her, then got them lifted back aboard the helicopter and determined that his cable hook, though damaged, was still operable. He went back down for his second hoist. This time a lifeline from the foundering boat to the second crewmember in the water got entangled with the hoist cable. This was even less pretty. Were the boat to sink at this point, it could drag the survivor, the rescue swimmer, even the helicopter down with it. While Bolton and the fisherman remaining on the Mary Lynn worked to free the line, a shark two or three feet long swam through Bolton’s legs. "I was surprised it was so close to the surface....It made me think twice about what was out of sight,"he later told Coast Guard magazine.

With the lines cleared, he was able to make the second hoist. The third hoist went without a hitch (or much of a functioning hook). The entire rescue took around thirty minutes. Rather than fight the winds to Key West, they headed toward Clearwater. With cyclonic tailwinds, they made around two hundred knots ground speed, "ridiculous for a helicopter,"grinned copilot Dave Sheppard who, like the rest of the crew, was now riding an adrenaline high.

The storm, which had already battered Florida, leaving six dead, would continue to pick up strength as it crossed the unusually warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The survivors of the Mary Lynn—Mark Gutek, Anita Miller, and Charles White—would be the first three of over thirty-three thousand people to be rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard in the coming days as Hurricane Katrina continued on toward the Mississippi Gulf Coast, New Orleans, and the history books.

More than two years earlier, on February 25, 2003, the Coast Guard had transferred from the Department of Transportation to the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as part of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 "War on Terror."The administration had initially opposed the creation of what would quickly grow into a 22-agency, $40 billion, 180,000-employee color-coding bureaucracy. It was only when (then) Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut introduced a bill for its creation that the White House, fearing it was being politically outflanked on national security, did an about-face and came up with an improvised plan for the new department.

When it was announced that the Coast Guard would be a part of DHS, its friends in Congress, including Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, got a provision attached to the Homeland Security Act, section 888, preventing the new department from interfering with the Coast Guard’s maritime missions. Admiral Allen, who would take over Hurricane Katrina response before becoming head of the service, jokingly told Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald that the Coast Guard’s leadership had "888"tattooed on their arms.

Unfortunately, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had no such immunity. It was demoted within the new department and had billions of dollars of preparedness funding stripped away, along with a national disaster response plan. At the same time, a system of political cronyism had grown within the demoralized agency, with five of its top eight managers, including director Michael Brown (a former commissioner with the International Arabian Horse Association), having no previous disaster response experience.

The Coast Guard, by contrast, spends every day saving people in trouble in the water. As both a law enforcement and military organization tasked to do search and rescue, environmental response, and maritime commerce support, it didn’t have to wait for an official disaster decree or federal letter of permit to do its job.

Nor, unlike President George W. Bush and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, did any Coast Guard officer claim the failure of New Orleans’s levees could not have been predicted or a disaster of this scale foreseen. The Coast Guard had spent much of 2004 responding to a series of major hurricanes in Florida and along the Gulf and was keenly aware from its oversight of ports and shipping along the lower Mississippi of just how vulnerable the below-sea-level city of New Orleans was. If there were any doubt left, FEMA had staged a major interagency exercise to practice for just this type of disaster, dubbed "Hurricane Pam,"a year before Katrina struck.

On the day of the Mary Lynn rescue, Friday, August 26, 2005, the National Hurricane Center announced Katrina had regained hurricane strength and shifted its track from a predicted landfall on the Florida panhandle to the Mississippi-Louisiana coastline.

That afternoon, Chief Warrant Officer David Lewald got a call at his home in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, from his Coast Guard boss in New Orleans. Rebuilding of navigational buoys damaged by Hurricanes Cindy and Dennis had just been completed, and in 2004 there had been Hurricane Ivan. "I remember after Ivan thinking, ‘Wow! If I lived through that I can do anything,’ not realizing it was just a dress rehearsal,"Lewald recalls.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0312628145
• ISBN 13: 9780312628147
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384