The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  The first airman they spot is Graham Buschor, swimming alone and relatively unencumbered a half mile from the other three. He’s in a Mustang survival suit and has a pen-gun flare and the only functional radio beacon of the entire crew. Brudnicki orders the operations officer, Lieutenant Kristopher Furtney, to maneuver the Tamaroa upsea of Buschor and then drift down on him. Large objects drift faster than small ones, and if the ship is upwind of Buschor, the waves won’t smash him against the hull. The gunner’s mate starts firing flares off from cannons on the flying bridge, and a detail of seamen crouch in the bow with throwing ropes, waiting for their chance. They can hardly keep their feet in the wind.

  The engines come to a full stop and the Tamaroa wallows beam-to in the huge seas. It’s a dangerous position to be in; the Tamaroa loses her righting arm at seventy-two degrees, and she’s already heeling to fifty-five. Drifting down on swimmers is standard rescue procedure, but the seas are so violent that Buschor keeps getting flung out of reach. There are times when he’s thirty feet higher than the men trying to rescue him. The crew in the bow can’t get a throwing rope anywhere near him, and Brudnicki won’t order his rescue swimmer overboard because he’s afraid he won’t get him back. The men on deck finally realize that if the boat’s not going to Buschor, Buschor’s going to have to go to it. SWIM! they scream over the rail. SWIM! Buschor rips off his gloves and hood and starts swimming for his life.

  He swims as hard as he can; he swims until his arms give out. He claws his way up to the ship, gets swept around the bow, struggles back within reach of it again, and finally catches hold of a cargo net that the crew have dropped over the side. The net looks like a huge rope ladder and is held by six or seven men at the rail. Buschor twists his hands into the mesh and slowly gets hauled up the hull. One good wave at the wrong moment could take them all out. The deck crewmen land Buschor like a big fish and carry him into the deckhouse. He’s dry-heaving seawater and can barely stand; his core temperature has dropped to ninety-four degrees. He’s been in the water four hours and twenty-five minutes. Another few hours and he may not have been able to cling to the net.

  It’s taken half an hour to get one man on board, and they have four more to go, one of whom hasn’t even been sighted yet. It’s not looking good. Brudnicki is also starting to have misgivings about putting his men on deck. The larger waves are sweeping the bow and completely burying the crew; they keep having to do head counts to make sure no one has been swept overboard. “It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, to put my people out there and rescue that crew,” Brudnicki says. “Because I knew there was a chance I could lose some of my men. If I’d decided not to do the rescue, no one back home would’ve said a thing—they knew it was almost impossible. But can you really make a conscious decision to say, ‘I’m just going to watch those people in the water die?’”

  Brudnicki decides to continue the rescue; twenty minutes later he has the Tamaroa in a beam sea a hundred yards upwind of the three Guardsmen. Crew members are lighting off flares and aiming searchlights, and the chief quartermaster is on the flying bridge radioing Furtney when to fire the ship’s engine. Not only do they have to maneuver the drift, but they have to time the roll of the ship so the gunwale rides down toward the waterline while the men in the water grab for the net. As it is, the gunwales are riding from water level to twenty feet in the air virtually every wave. Spillane is injured, Mioli is incoherent, and Ruvola is helping to support them both. There’s no way they’ll be able to swim like Buschor.

  Spillane watches the ship heaving through the breaking seas and for the life of him can’t imagine how they’re going to do this. As far as he’s concerned, a perfectly likely outcome is for all three of them to drown within sight of the ship because a pickup is impossible. “My muscles were getting rigid, I was in great pain,” he says. “The Tarn pulled up in front of us and turned broadside to the waves and I couldn’t believe they did that—they were putting themselves in terrible risk. We could hear them all screaming on the deck and we could see the chemical lights coming at us, tied to the ends of the ropes.”

  The ropes are difficult to catch, so the deck crew throw the cargo net over the side. Lieutenant Furtney again tries to ease his ship over to the swimmers, but the vessel is 1,600 tons and almost impossible to control. Finally, on the third attempt, they snag the net. Their muscles are cramping with cold and Jim Mioli is about to start a final slide into hypothermia. The men on deck give a terrific heave—they’re pulling up 600 pounds dead-weight—and at the same time a large wave drops out from underneath the swimmers. They’re exhausted and desperate and the net is wrenched out of their hands.

  The next thing Spillane knows, he’s underwater. He fights his way to the surface just as the boat rolls inward toward them and he grabs the net again. This is it; if he can’t do it now, he dies. The deck crew heaves again, and Spillane feels himself getting pulled up the steel hull. He climbs up a little higher, feels hands grabbing him, and the next thing he knows he’s being pulled over the gunwale onto the deck. He’s in such pain he cannot stand. The men pin him against the bulkhead, cut off his survival suit, and then carry him inside, staggering with the roll of the ship. Spillane can’t see Ruvola and Mioli. They haven’t managed to get back onto the net.

  The waves wash the two men down the hull toward the ship’s stern, where the twelve-foot screw is digging out a cauldron of boiling water. Furtney shuts the engines down and the two men get carried around the stern and then up the port side of the ship. Ruvola catches the net for the second time and gets one hand into the mesh. He clamps the other one around Mioli and screams into his face, You got to do this, Jim! There aren’t too many second chances in life! This is gonna take everything you got!

  Mioli nods and wraps his hands into the mesh. Ruvola gets a foothold as well as a handhold and grips with all the strength in his cramping muscles. The two men get dragged upward, penduluming in and out with the roll of the ship, until the deck crew at the rail can reach them. They grab Ruvola and Mioli by the hair, the Mustang suit, the combat vest, anything they can get their hands on, and pull them over the steel rail. Like Spillane they’re retching seawater and can barely stand. Jim Mioli has been in sixty-degree water for over five hours and is severely hypothermic. His core temperature is 90.4, eight degrees below normal; another couple of hours and he’d be dead.

  The two airmen are carried inside, their clothing is cut off, and they’re laid in bunks. Spillane is taken to the executive officer’s quarters and given an IV and catheter and examined by the ship’s paramedic. His blood pressure is 140/90, his pulse is a hundred, and he’s running a slight fever. Eyes PERLA, abdomen and chest tenderness, pain to quadricep, the paramedic radios SAR OPS [Search-and-Rescue Operations] Boston. Fractured wrist, possibly ribs, suspect internal injury. Taking Tylenol-3 and seasick patch. Boston relays the information to an Air National Guard flight surgeon, who says he’s worried about internal bleeding and tells them to watch the abdomen carefully. If it gets more and more tender to the touch, he’s bleeding inside and has to be evacuated by helicopter. Spillane thinks about dangling in a rescue litter over the ocean and says he’d rather not. At daybreak the executive officer comes in to shave and change his clothes, and Spillane apologizes for bleeding and vomiting all over his bed. Hey, whatever it takes, the officer says. He opens the porthole hatch, and Spillane looks out at the howling grey sky and the ravaged ocean. Ah, could you close that? he says. I can’t take it.

  The crew, unshaven and exhausted after thirty-six hours on deck, are staggering around the ship like drunks. And the mission’s far from over: Rick Smith is still out there. He’s one of the most highly trained pararescue jumpers in the country, and there’s no question in anyone’s mind that he’s alive. They just have to find him. PJ wearing black 1/4” wetsuit, went out door with one-man life-raft and spray sheet, two 12-oz. cans of water, mirror, flare kit, granola bar, and whistle, the Coast Guard dispatcher in Boston records. Man is in great sh
ape—can last quite a while, five to seven days.

  A total of nine aircraft are slated for the search, including an E2 surveillance plane to coordinate the air traffic on-scene. Jim Dougherty, a PJ who went through training with Smith and Spillane, throws a tin of Skoal chewing tobacco in his gear to give Smith when they find him. This guy’s so good, Guardsmen are saying, he’s just gonna come through the front door at Suffolk Airbase wondering where the hell we all were.

  THE DREAMS OF THE DEAD

  All collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had five thousand years ago.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick

  BY the time word has spread throughout Gloucester that the fleet’s in trouble, the storm has retrograded to within 350 miles of Cape Cod and developed such a steep pressure gradient that an eye starts to form. Satellite photos show a cyclonic swirl two thousand miles wide off the East Coast; the southern edge reaches Jamaica and the northern edge reaches the coast of Labrador. In all, three quarters of a million square miles of ocean are experiencing gale-force conditions, and an area three or four times that is indirectly involved in the storm. On the satellite photos, moist air flowing into the low looks like a swirl of cream in a cup of black coffee. Thick strands of white cloud-cover and dark Arctic air circle one-and-a-half times around the low before making it into the center. The low grinds steadily toward the coast, intensifying as it goes, and by the morning of October 30th it has stalled two hundred miles south of Montauk, Long Island. The worst winds, in the northeast quadrant, are getting dragged straight across Gloucester Harbor and Massachusetts Bay.

  So sudden and violent are the storm’s first caresses of the coast that a tinge of hysteria creeps into the local weather bulletins: UNCONFIRMED REPORTS OF TWO HOUSES COLLAPSING HAVE BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE GLOUCESTER AREA … OTHER MASSACHUSETTS LOCATIONS UNDER THE GUN … SEAS OF 25 TO 45 FEET HAVE OCCURRED TODAY FROM GEORGES BANK EAST … THE DANGEROUS STORM ASSOCIATED WITH HIGH SEAS IS MOVING CLOSER TO NEW ENGLAND.

  The first coastal flood warnings are issued at 3:15 AM on the 29th, based mainly on reports from Nantucket of sustained winds up to forty-five knots. Predictions from the Weather Service’s computers are systematically exceeding almost all atmospheric models for the area, and high tides are predicted to be two to three feet above normal. (These predictions, as it turns out, will be way too low.) The warnings go out via satellite uplink along something called the NOAA Weather Wire, which feeds into local media and emergency services. By dawn, radio and television announcers are informing the public about the oncoming storm, and the state Emergency Management Agency is contacting local authorities along the coast to make sure they take precautions. The EMA is based in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and has direct lines to Governor Weld’s Office, the National Guard, the State Police barracks, and the National Weather Service. Any threat to the public health is routed through the EMA. If local communities don’t have the resources to cope, state agencies step in; if state agencies can’t handle it, the federal government gets called. The EMA is set up to handle everything from severe thunderstorms to nuclear war.

  October 30th, on shore, starts deceptively calm and mild; oak leaves skitter down the street and the midday sun has a thin warmth to it that people won’t feel again until spring. The only sign that something is amiss is along the coast, where huge grey swells start to roll in that can be heard miles inland. Swells are the outriders of sea weather, and if they keep getting bigger, the weather is approaching. The Gloucester Police Department blocks access to the shore but people go anyway, parking their cars half a mile away and walking through the rising wind and rain to hilltops where they can look out to sea. They are greeted by an ocean that has been wholly transformed. Swells march shoreward from the horizon in great, even bands, their white crests streaming sideways in the wind and their ranks breaking, reforming, and breaking again as they close in on Cape Ann. In the shallows they draw themselves up, hesitate, and then implode against the rocks with a force that seems to shake the entire peninsula. Air trapped inside their grey barrels gets blown out the back walls in geysers higher than the waves themselves. Thirty-foot seas are rolling in from the North Atlantic and attacking the town of Gloucester with a cold, heavy rage.

  By midafternoon the wind is hitting hurricane force and people are having a hard time walking, standing up, being heard. Moans emanate from the electric lines that only offshore fishermen have ever heard before. Waves inundate Good Harbor Beach and the parking lot in front of the Stop-n-Shop. They rip up entire sections of Atlantic Road. They deposit a fifteen-foot-high tangle of lobster traps and sea muck at the end of Grapevine Road. They fill the swimming pool of a Back Shore mansion with ocean-bottom rubble. They suck beach cobbles up their huge faces and sling them inland, smashing windows, peppering lawns. They overrun the sea wall at Brace Cove, spill into Niles Pond, and continue into the woods beyond. For a brief while it’s possible to surf across people’s lawns. So much salt water gets pumped into Niles Pond that it overflows and cuts Eastern Point in half. Eastern Point is where the rich live, and by nightfall the ocean is two feet deep in some of the nicest living rooms in the state.

  In several places around the state, houses float off their foundations and out to sea. Waves break through a thirty-foot sand dune at Ballston Beach in Truro and flood the headwaters of the Pamet River. Six-thousand-pound boat moorings drag inside Chatham Harbor. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth shuts down because seaweed clogs the condenser intakes. A Delta Airlines pilot at Logan is surprised to see spray from breaking waves top the 200-foot cranes on Deer Island; just sitting on the runway, his airspeed indicator clocks eighty miles an hour. Houses are washed out to sea in Gloucester, Swampscott, and on Cape Cod. Rising waters inundate half of the town of Nantucket. A man is swept off the rocks in Point Judith, Rhode Island, and is never seen again, and a surfer dies trying to ride twenty-foot shorebreak in Massachusetts. Plum Island is cut in half by the waves, as is Hough’s Neck and Squantum, in Quincy. Over one hundred houses are destroyed in the town of Scituate, and the National Guard has to be called out to help the inhabitants evacuate. One elderly woman is taken from her house by a backhoe while surf breaks down her front door.

  The winds have set so much water in motion that the ocean gets piled up against the continent and starts blocking the rivers. The Hudson backs up one hundred miles to Albany and causes flooding, and the Potomac does the same. Tides are five feet above normal in Boston Harbor, within one inch of an all-time Boston record. Had the storm occurred a week earlier, during the highest tides of the month, water levels would be a foot and a half higher, flooding downtown Boston. Storm surge and huge seas extinguish Isle of Shoals and Boone’s Island lighthouses off the coast of Maine. Some Democrats are cheered to see waves obliterate the front of President Bush’s summer mansion in Kennebunkport. Damage along the East Coast surpasses one and a half billion dollars, including millions of dollars in lobster pots and other fixed fishing gear.

  “The only light I can shed on the severity of the storm is that until then, we had never—ever—had a lobster trap move offshore,” says Bob Brown. “Some were moved thirteen miles to the west. It was the worst storm I have ever heard of, or experienced.”

  * * *

  BY nightfall on the 30th—with wave heights at their peak and the East Coast bearing the full brunt of the storm—the Coast Guard finds itself with two major search-and-rescue operations on its hands. In Boston, a Coast Guardsman starts telephoning every harbormaster in New England, asking if the Andrea Gail is in port. If the town is too small to have a harbormaster, they ask a town selectman to walk down to the waterfront and take a look. Coast Guard cutters also poke their way along the coast checking every harbor and cove they can find. In Maine’s Jonesport area a cutter checks Sawyers Cove, Roque Harbor, Black Cove, Moose Peak Light, Chandler and Englishman Bay, Little Machias Bay, Machias Bay East Side, Machias Bay West Side, and Mistaken Harbor, all without success. The entire co
ast from Lubec, Maine, to eastern Long Island is scrutinized without turning up any sign of the Andrea Gail

  The search for Rick Smith is in some ways simpler than for the Andrea Gail because the pilots know exactly where he went down, but a single human being—even with a strobe light—is extremely hard to spot in such conditions. (One pilot missed a five-hundred-foot freighter because it was obscured by waves during one leg of his search.) As a result, the combined assets of half a dozen East Coast airbases are thrown into the search. Smith has a wife and three daughters at home and he knows, personally, a significant proportion of the people who are looking for him. He’s one of the most highly trained survival swimmers in the world and if he hits the water alive, he’ll probably stay that way. He might eventually die of thirst, but he’s not going to drown.

  The first thing the Coast Guard does is drop a radio marker buoy where the other Guardsmen were picked up; the buoy drifts the way a person would, and the search area shifts continuously southwestward. Planes fly thirty-mile trackline searches five hundred feet above the water, but in these conditions the chances of spotting a man are only one in three, so some areas get flown over and over again. There are so many planes in the air, and the search area is so limited, that it’s a virtual certainty they’ll find him. And indeed, they find almost everything. They find the nine-man life raft pushed out of the helicopter by Jim Mioli. A Guard diver is dropped from a helicopter to knife it so it won’t throw off other searchers. They find the Avon raft abandoned by the Tamaroa, and rafts from other boats they didn’t even know about. And then, just before dusk on the 31st, a Coast Guard plane spots a stain of Day-Glo green dye in the water.

  PJs are known to carry dye for just such emergencies, and this undoubtedly comes from Rick Smith. The pilot circles lower and sees a dark shape at the center—probably Rick Smith himself. The search plane crew drop a marker buoy, life raft, and flare kit, and the pilot radios the coordinates in to Boston. A helicopter is diverted to the scene and the cutter Tamaroa, two and a half hours away, changes course and starts heading for the spot. An H-60 launches from Elizabeth City, escorted by a tanker plane, and a Navy jet equipped with forward-looking infrared is readied for takeoff. If the rescuers can’t get Smith by helicopter, they’ll get him by ship; if they can’t get him by ship, they’ll drop a life raft; if he’s too weak to get into the life raft, they’ll drop a rescue swimmer. Smith is one of their own, and they’re going to get him one way or another.