Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  For almost a decade, ARCO and all the major oil companies had lobbied hard for the right to drill for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). At twenty million acres, ANWR was one of North America’s last virgin wildlife santuaries. The oil companies wanted permission to drill on just one 2,000-acre site inside the gigantic refuge. Environmentalists argued that this spot was right in the heart of 200,000 strong Porcupine Caribou Herd’s central calving area. The oil industry responded by reminding environmentalists that they said the same thing when they tried to stop development at Prudhoe Bay, which turned out to be the most environmentally sensitive oil operation ever built. Caribou frolic and play by the pipeline, and the herds have thrived.

  Ben Odom and Bill Allen knew that refusal to allow exploration in ANWR would only increase America’s dependence on foreign oil produced with far less concern for environment safety. They also believed development of Alaska’s oil could make their companies lots of money. Both President Ronald Reagan and candidate George Bush felt that refusing to tap the last remaining domestic sources of oil would ultimately weaken the United States, something they promised not to allow.

  Environmentalists like Cindy Lowry argued that the threat to the environment had become too great—even though it was cleaner than it had been in decades. Allowing oil drilling in a National Wildlife Refuge was an obscenity—then again, anything that Cindy didn’t like was an obscenity of one sort or another. Before the Exxon Valdez spill of March 1989, the oil companies bragged about their well-deserved reputation for outstanding environmental management in the Arctic. But that same year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) charged that the oil companies regularly violated many strict federal standards. The EPA claimed that oil and chemicals had spilled over and “ruined” 11,000 acres of tundra. They never bothered to explain what “ruined” actually meant.

  During the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush claimed that caribou “loved the pipeline.” Naturally, he was mocked by the elites, egged on by his detractors in the environmentalist camp, as being environmentally insensitive. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service translated Bush’s malapropism into acceptable, politically Jargon and said that the negative impact on the migrating caribou was far less than originally predicted.

  At the time of the whale stranding, it looked like the oil industry had gained the critical upperhand in the decade-long battle to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Ben Odom, Bill Allen, and the U.S. government hoped some positive coverage of oil companies working to rescue whales might help. Good public relations could sway the few fence-sitting senators whose votes were needed to start drilling.

  Odom didn’t want to take any chances. He offered more than the use of some facilities. He told Cindy that ARCO would be delighted to donate all the fuel the National Guard helicopter would need to tow the 200,000-pound hoverbarge. Based on Pete Leathard’s estimates, Odom figured it would cost ARCO $35,000 to provide the fuel needed to pull the barge out of the ice and tow it on the forty-hour trip to Barrow. For a company that did twenty-five million dollars of business a day in Prudhoe Bay alone, that wasn’t even a rounding figure.

  Odom told Cindy that he would meet with Allen as soon as he got back to Anchorage. If all went well, the hoverbarge could be on its way to Barrow as early as Monday night, October 16. Two days later, the whales would be free.

  Not quite.

  Cindy anxiously wanted to talk to Geoff and Craig. In just a few hours, Barrow was scheduled to hold a special meeting to decide the whales’ fate. The International Whaling Commission granted the local representative, the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) the right to control their own IWC quota. They could continue to hunt as long as they made sure Barrow whalers obeyed the law. If they didn’t, the IWC had the power to impose tough sanctions, including probation, heavy fines, and—most severe of all—reduced quotas in upcoming seasons, a cultural death penalty for a village whose culture many believed was already long extinct.

  The AEWC board included all of Barrow’s top whaling captains. The consensus approach made sure that each captain shared an equal stake in the committee’s decisions. Every so often, the captains met informally over Chinese food. Visits by IWC representatives marked the closest thing to a formal event Barrow ever hosted. Whalers reluctantly stepped out of their heavy native garb to dress uncomfortably into ill-fitting Western clothing that hadn’t been worn since the last time the IWC was in town. No one in Barrow, Inuit or non, were much for Western-style meetings. Only the most unusual situation could get them to participate in one; the stranding of the three California gray whales had become such a situation.

  Nuiqsut whalers wanted the three animals harvested, and offered Barrow whalers the chance to make some money in the process. The quota and IWC regulations allowed it; state law allowed it; so did tradition. But the whales were quickly becoming a national media story How would the whalers appear to Outsiders if they killed animals the world wanted saved, and all for a just few thousand dollars? The leaders of the whaling crews knew they possessed the power to decide whether they would harvest the trapped grays or let them die and become part of the normal food chain. But what they did not know was that they also had the power to create or abort one of greatest media nonevents of all time.

  To Alaska Wildlife Management professionals, harvesting the struggling creatures seemed the proper thing. Most Barrow lay people agreed. Conventional wisdom convinced them that an extensive rescue would doom the whales to prolonged suffering and the taxpayer to wasted expense. Geoff and Craig knew little chance existed that the whales would survive. Cindy also was not convinced that the whales could be rescued. But she had to try. She was afraid the whaling captains wouldn’t give her the chance. She did not want them to change their lives or ways. All she sought was a little time to learn whether a successful rescue could be mounted.

  Dr. Tom Albert, the North Slope Borough Wildlife Management Director, asked Cindy for a progress report. Were the prospects for rescue real? His job was to work with the Eskimos—if they wanted to harvest the whales. Albert didn’t want his men, Geoff and Craig, preventing a harvest if the chances of a rescue were slim. Provocation without cause could only sour relations with his Eskimo employers.

  When Cindy told Albert about the plan to break the ice with VECO’s hoverbarge, she said enough to convince him to side with her attempt to save the whales. He knew that Geoff and Craig would have to take on a new, broader mission. Research was still important, but their task was no longer aloof observation. Now Geoff and Craig had to do whatever they could to keep the whales alive. For the first time since the animals were discovered ten days before, man was about to take his first active step toward freeing them.

  Although Cindy had the rough outline of a rescue, it still had to be implemented. Lowry had to follow up on the promises of support to ensure they were delivered. Even though the efforts of the rescuers could be rendered moot by an Eskimo decision to use their remaining quota of strikes to kill the whales, it was time for everyone on her side to get to work.

  The organization that was born on Saturday morning, October 15, 1988, needed a leader and a name. Kent Burton of the Commerce Department provided both. The U.S. government would lead the rescue and it would be called Operation Breakout, a name that would be changed to Operation Breakthrough on the eve of the whales’ eventual rescue.

  As undersecretary for Oceans and Atmospheres, Burton oversaw the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, NOAA was the final legal authority on any matter concerning all marine mammals, including whales. Burton wanted a NOAA representative on the ground to coordinate the government operation. He needed someone competent enough to manage NOAA’s role as rescue coordinator.

  Tom Albert told Burton he had already spoken with someone from NOAA Fisheries’ Anchorage office named Ron Morris. Albert solicited Morris’s help at that evening’s Barrow whaling captains’ meeting. Morris thought th
e overnight trip to Barrow would be pleasant diversion. He packed a few things and drove down Minnesota Drive to Anchorage International in time for MarkAir’s noon flight to Barrow.

  Bill Allen’s plane landed in Anchorage two hours after Morris’s left. Pete Leathard met Allen at the gate. The National Guard was busy putting together a team, Pete told Allen. NOAA assumed a federal role and already had a man on the way to Barrow, and ARCO promised to supply the fuel for the whole operation. On the way in from the airport, Allen nodded his head and pointed the rough-edged tip of his Tony Lama cowboy boot resting on Pete Leathard’s dashboard in the direction of Alaska’s tallest building. It was Allen’s way of saying he wanted to see Ben Odom. Odom was in that Saturday afternoon, busy at work on his company’s role in the rescue. The three of them began mapping out the operation.

  Odom asked how much labor would be needed to break the barge free of ice and how much it would cost. Leathard reminded them that at fifty dollars an hour, labor alone could soon cost VECO tens of thousands of dollars. Earlier that day, Allen committed himself and his companies to help and that is exactly what he intended to do. The three men called General Schaeffer, who told them he was having trouble assembling a logistics command to run the operation from Prudhoe Bay.

  General Schaeffer wanted a sharp forty-year-old colonel named Tom Carroll to head the operation. Carroll was the best field commander in the state. However, he had taken the weekend off and wasn’t scheduled to report to HQ until 0800 Monday morning. General Schaeffer wasn’t going ahead with the operation until he could account for his man.

  8

  A Great Eskimo Hunter Saves the Whales

  There was nothing Tom Carroll loved more than the smell of fresh-cut wood. When he wasn’t covered in military fatigues, he was usually covered in sawdust. At headquarters, they joked that the only way to keep Colonel Carroll clean was to keep him green. Saturday morning, October 15, was no exception. The boyish-looking colonel’s glasses were covered with a layer of dust so thick he had to use his hands to “see” along the edge of the cabinet door he had just put through the lathe in his Anchorage garage. Carroll, his glasses opaque, knocked over nearly everything between him and the ringing phone.

  It was General John Schaeffer calling to tell him the National Guard had been asked to help save those stranded whales everybody was talking about. “They’re calling it Operation Breakout,” the general said. “Are you interested?” Carroll knew the question was rhetorical. When your superior suggests an assignment, the well-trained officer accepts. But he was happy to. Carroll loved field operations—it was why he remained in the military after he returned from his decorated tour in Vietnam as an infantry commander. He welcomed any opportunity to leave his cloistered desk in the Anchorage’s Frontier Building. The General told Carroll to report to headquarters.

  Carroll hung up the phone, showered, donned his standard issue Alaskan National Guard Colonel’s fatigues, and headed out the door. Colonel Tom Carroll was an unflappable professional. His father was a military man, a legacy passed onto Tom. The colonel evoked Alaska and the military’s can-do spirit. Adventure, risk, and daring were nothing new to the colonel. Neither was loss. He first learned what loss meant the hard way and at a young age.

  On the morning of March 27, 1964, when Carroll was a fifteen-year-old boy, Prince William Sound erupted as the epicenter of the most powerful earthquake ever to strike North America. Its 9.2 reading was the highest ever recorded by the Richter scale, eighty times more powerful than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It made history for moving the earth farther and faster than any other one on record. Its force was so devastating that it killed people seven hundred miles apart. The Good Friday earthquake was Alaska’s greatest modern tragedy. From Port Ashton to Nellie and Anchorage to Seward, 131 people died that morning. Tom Carroll’s father was one of them.

  Carroll was one of the few people in the Last Frontier of the late 1980s who was actually born and raised in Alaska. He was called a sourdough. Alaska’s earliest white pioneers used to cherish this hardy yeast and carry it with them to make bread and biscuits. Since the dough would replenish itself after each use, it stayed fresh indefinitely, just like those early pioneers who settled and remained in Alaska. It became the state’s namesake. Becoming a sourdough required a rite of passage no other state could match. Other than birth, sourdough status could only be conferred to those who had survived at least twenty-five Alaskan winters.

  Colonel Carroll drove down C Street through one of Anchorage’s many strip malls built in the oil-boom days of the early 1980s. He thought about the strong images of the whales he saw on Todd Pottinger’s newscast the night before. Carroll was no environmentalist, but like almost everybody in Alaska, he wished the creatures well. But he wondered why the National Guard had joined the rescue.

  Civilian passersby didn’t stare at Tom Carroll as he dashed through the lobby of one of Alaska’s modern office buildings dressed in jungle combat fatigues. Alaska had one of the highest military-to-civilian ratios of any state in the country.

  When the colonel walked into his office he was surprised to see General John Schaeffer sitting in his chair, using his phone. Senator Stevens was on the line from Washington. Like an unexpected visitor, Carroll offered an apologetic salute to his superior and gingerly backed out of his own office.

  Eight days after the whales were first discovered trapped in the ice, General Schaeffer joined Colonel Carroll, a contracting officer, two Arctic logistics specialists, and a press aide in the conference room down the hall from his office. He explained to the hastily assembled group that the purpose of their mission was to tow a 185-ton hoverbarge from Prudhoe Bay to Barrow. Tom Carroll, whom Schaeffer had put in charge, had to decide what equipment was best suited for the massive tow. Carroll knew that pulling 185 tons over nearly three hundred miles of jagged ice could prove to be quite a tricky operation. Privately, he wondered whether it was even possible. But Colonel Carroll was paid to do, not to doubt.

  Pete Leathard assured General Schaeffer that the most difficult part of the task would be digging the barge out of the frozen tundra where it idly sat for the last four years. Once free, the barge could easily be towed across the ocean’s solidly frozen surface … or so everyone thought. Carroll checked with all the armories across Alaska to determine what equipment was available and best suited for the job. In calligraphic script, Colonel Carroll listed the options on a yellow legal pad christened for his new assignment. The colonel weighed his options and, like all good commanders, sided with caution. He chose the Sikorsky CH-54 Skycrane helicopter. The Skycrane was capable of lifting more weight than any other helicopter. If it couldn’t do the job, nothing could.

  Carroll wanted to make sure that the necessary fuel, the Skycrane’s biggest requirement, would be available. It guzzled a staggering 650 gallons an hour. That meant it would take at least 30,000 gallons to get the barge out of the frozen earth and across the ice to Barrow. Before he ordered the helicopter, Carroll checked with Schaeffer to see whether he was authorized to use that much fuel. The general told Colonel Carroll to guzzle away: ARCO was donating all the fuel he would need.

  When Ben Odom learned his offer was being taken seriously, it was too late to turn back. By the time the rescue was over, ARCO would become by far Operation Breakout’s largest private cash contributor, donating more than at least half a million dollars’ worth of fuel alone to help save the three whales.

  Next on Colonel Carroll’s checklist was office support. Between the pilots, public affairs, and ground personnel, Carroll would need a command post and living quarters for nearly a dozen people. After checking with Ben Odom, Carroll learned that ARCO would also provide office space, telephones and rooms for the National Guard and VECO in the company’s ultramodern Prudhoe Bay installation 1,700 miles from the North Pole.

  ARCO spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a superb habitat for their workers on the North Slope. To keep up morale, the heartless oil b
arons made sure their hard-working employees were extremely well paid and provided with every conceivable comfort while on the job—movie theaters, maid and room service, bowling alleys, and cafeterias that served the finest steaks and lobster flown in fresh from Anchorage. Until the Eskimos in Barrow spent $15 million to build a swimming pool in 1986, Prudhoe Bay had the only one above the Arctic Circle.

  It took several hours for Colonel Carroll and his men to arrange for the aircraft and personnel to support the Skycranes. When they finished, the colonel told his men to go home. “Don’t forget to get some sleep,” he reminded them. “You’re all due back here at 0500 hours.” He wanted to get an early start. “Wheels up at 6:00 A.M.” Tom Carroll had asserted his command. Carroll wanted to check the ice conditions around Barrow himself before making a final decision to okay the hoverbarge tow. For all the talk about how smooth and solid the Beaufort Sea ice was between Prudhoe and Barrow, no one had actually examined it. Carroll was a man focused on details. Details make or break missions.

  Pete Leathard promised that the barge could break ice up to two feet thick. Any ice thicker than that would have to be cut by something else. He didn’t have to elaborate. There was nothing else available capable of cutting ice more than two feet thick. Tom Carroll was not about to risk his men, equipment, and his own rank on an operation that didn’t have an excellent chance of success. If he ever thought the deck was stacked against him, Operation Breakout would end.