Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  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 The C-130J was a newer version of the C-130, but most aviation professionals referred to it as the C-130.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.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PROBLEMS EVERYWHERE

  The entire crew on Bounty were diligently working—some individuals focusing on a single problem, others freelancing from one emergency to another as their effort was needed. There was now no orderly watch system, no organized work party, no sense of command except that within each member of the crew; their motivation was to save Bounty, to save themselves.

  At nine o’clock at night, the second mate, Matt Sanders, had been in the heat and noise of the engine room since his last watch ended at four o’clock. He had gone there to keep the bilge pumps running, but instead of bringing the flooding under control, he was wrestling with various mechanical problems even as the level of the water rose.

  When the starboard generator began surging and its power output fell—the port generator had stopped working long ago—it was decided that the fuel filters needed to be changed. Sanders, a tall, athletically built man, took on the job.

  The filter on the starboard generator’s diesel engine was on the back side. To get to it, Sanders had to wedge himself behind the hot engine and get in a position where he could twist the filter free.

  But first, the generator had to be shut down. This meant the ship had no electrical current, and except for flashlights Bounty went dark.

  The starboard propulsion engine was running well, still driving Bounty forward enough to hold it in place, hove to. That meant the portable hydraulic pump, which ran off the power takeoff shaft of that engine, could be operated, although it was only taking water from the engine room. In all the other bilge compartments, water was accumulating unchecked.

  Sanders got into position and removed the old filter. Then Chief Mate Svendsen handed him a replacement filter. It took a while for Sanders to get the new filter seated properly. He had never replaced this filter in his time aboard Bounty, so the whole process may have taken up to forty minutes. Sanders lost track of time. Nor did he pay attention to the water that rose up the planking and soaked him when Bounty rolled to starboard. He was focused on his work.

  With the new filter in place, Sanders was able to get the generator running. It started right up. Finally, something mechanical had responded the way it was supposed to.

  But in the time it had taken to replace one filter, the water had risen to two feet above the engine-room floorboards, within a foot of the elevated generator.

  His success restarting the generator freed Sanders to return to work on the bilge pump manifold. He was not alone. A parade of crew members—Svendsen, Jones, Salapatek, Faunt—came and went, performing other work in the engine room and along the lower deck. Occasionally, Robin Walbridge visited the engine room, too.

  And the water rose, inch by inch, until it was thigh to waist deep on the starboard side and shorted out the starboard generator. Sanders went to the tween deck, where he found Walbridge. The diesel was still running, but a dangerous electrical current was in the water. Sanders asked permission to shut down the generator.

  Permission granted, Sanders returned to the engine room and cut the fuel supply, stopping the engine and its generator.

  Once again the ship was dark. The only hope was to get the port generator back in action. Sanders now changed the fuel filter on the port generator, bled the air out of the fuel system, cleaned the fuel injectors, and tried to restart the engine.

  Nothing. The engine turned over but wouldn’t ignite.

  After consulting with Walbridge, Sanders went to the engine control panel and disabled an electrical switch, and this time, when he tried to start the engine, it fired up. T
he lights went on inside Bounty for the first time in more than an hour.

  Sanders had been in the engine room for more than six hours now. He began transferring fuel to the port day tank—the one with the broken sight glass—and still the water rose. By now, it had reached the computer module for a mechanism that turned salt water into fresh, and blue arcs of electricity were visible. Moreover, the engine-room sole boards were floating and slamming from side to side as Bounty rolled. The water was waist to chest deep on Sanders, who felt the atmosphere was unsafe. He left the engine room.

  • • •

  Looking for a place to be useful, Joshua Scornavacchi had descended to the engine room in the early evening. Walbridge, Barksdale, Faunt, and Sanders were working on the starboard generator. The bilge water was at Scornavacchi’s shins, and the bilge alarm was sounding, its warning rising above all the other thumps and groans and screeching inside Bounty’s hull. In the engine room, he dove into the work of removing debris that was floating on the surface below his knees. He worked for an hour, and the water rose six inches.

  Scornavacchi knew the source of the water. He saw it coming through the ceiling planks. Every time Bounty rolled, water flowed in sheets down the starboard side. The farther the ship rolled, the more water came in. The starboard topsides were underwater. The dry planking was not sufficiently swollen to keep the water out.

  Adam Prokosh was in the engine room as well, using a colander from the galley to scoop debris. He gave the colander to Scornavacchi and climbed the engine-room ladder, heading for the galley to get another colander.

  Shortly, there was a call for help on the weather deck. The Zodiac inflatable dinghy had broken loose. Scornavacchi scrambled up the engine-room ladder and dashed up the two flights of stairs through the Nav Shack, where he met Salapatek, Anna Sprague, and Third Mate Cleveland.

  Leaving Sprague in the Nav Shack companionway to keep watch over them, the three men stepped onto the weather deck in winds reaching ninety knots and saw the problem. The Zodiac was flattened bottom-first against the starboard shrouds.

  Crouching and waiting for the best moment, Cleveland and Salapatek made their way to the starboard side, grabbing the nearest fixed object to hold themselves in place. Scornavacchi crawled on hands and knees up the steep deck to the port side and waited to make his way forward to a railing at the mainmast where a line had been stored.

  Wait, move, grab, then wait for the roll of the ship and the next opportunity. Slowly, they crept forward until Scornavacchi was high on the deck, above the dinghy and his crewmates. Then Scornavacchi tossed the line toward his mates, who tied it to the dinghy.

  It was dark and dangerous, but all three hands were calm, focusing on the job at hand. The two men climbed the deck to join Scornavacchi, then all three pulled the dinghy back to its place on deck and secured it.

  Time had passed. No one could be certain how much time. Time, events, were surreal. Scornavacchi headed back toward the engine room, and passing through the tween deck.

  The water was too high in the engine room now, though—maybe five feet deep. The sole boards were slamming around down there, and Scornavacchi saw that the place had been abandoned.

  So Scornavacchi went to his cabin in the aft crew quarters—down that solitary ladder from the center of the tween deck—to grab some tools and flashlights, things that might be needed later. In passing, he saw that Walbridge, Sanders, and Barksdale had a small gasoline pump—the crew called it a trash pump and it had never been used but was stored wrapped in plastic for an emergency. They had placed a hose from the pump running aft thirty feet to a Great Cabin window. Another hose went from the tween deck down into the engine room.

  But the trash pump wasn’t working yet, despite the efforts of the three officers.

  • • •

  Earlier, when the spanker gaff had been brought under control, Adam Prokosh was feeling pretty confident. But then the power went out and the lights went off and he was saying to himself, What the hell is going on?

  He went to the engine room, where he found Walbridge, Sanders, and Barksdale—what he considered the entirety of the ship’s engineering skills. It crossed Prokosh’s mind that the high bilge water was finding all the nooks and crannies in the bilge, and that this flooding would flush out any leftover yard debris, disgusting muck. If the guys in the engine room were successful, then the strainers in the pump system would need to be kept clean. He went to the galley and asked to borrow a colander from Jessica Black. Back in the bilge, he began scooping.

  Then Scornavacchi joined him in the bilge and asked how he could help.

  “You can take over this job and take this colander and I’ll grab another,” Prokosh replied. He climbed back to the tween deck and asked the cook if he could borrow another colander.

  “Use whatever you need,” Black said.

  Now Prokosh followed Black out of the galley, heading aft in the vast, open saloon, toward the engine-room ladder. The cook—only four days into her tall ship career—was holding on to the long jack line that had earlier been strung the length of the cabin. Prokosh, one step behind and talking with Black, had the colander in one hand but wasn’t holding the jack line with his free hand when a huge wave slammed into the side of Bounty and the ship rocked violently to starboard.

  Prokosh was airborne. An unguided missile, his body flew toward the low, starboard side, where his head and back smashed into an arms chest bolted to the floor. He collapsed in a heap where he landed. Black thought concussion, and she raced to find the chief mate.

  Other crew members found a mattress, and Prokosh rolled onto it, still on the low side.

  The damage was extensive. Prokosh had suffered a compression fracture in a vertebra, three broken ribs, a separated shoulder, and head trauma. He would be of no further use in the effort to save Bounty.

  • • •

  Jessica Black had no duties other than to keep the crew fed. From time to time, she got reports from crew members about the breakdowns, the flooding, the injuries, even before she heard Adam Prokosh behind her slamming into the furniture. Much of her information came from Claudene Christian, who visited the galley frequently to keep Black in the loop. Scornavacchi called Christian the crew’s “spy” because all season long she had been spreading news, listening in to conversations among the officers in particular, and delivering their private thoughts to her crewmates.

  Black was focused on getting meals out, though. Gossip was fine, but she had to prepare dinner early Sunday evening. Once again, due to the instability of the boat, the food had to be something that could be served in a bowl. Mac and cheese was her choice for a second time. But she wanted there to be a vegetable, and she chose frozen peas. They could be heated in the microwave, a good thing since the boat was on a constant heel of twenty-five to thirty degrees. The glass-topped stove wouldn’t work.

  The microwave was on the port—or high—side of the galley, which was in the bow. The bow was still pounding up and down, even when the boat was hove to. And the microwave door opened to the lower, starboard side.

  Black warned the crew: Don’t open the microwave. If they did, the peas would go flying. Then she turned on the microwave.

  Sparks shot out. There was smoke. Black had her own small disaster right there in the galley. There was an arc, like lightning, but no fire. Doug Faunt was summoned, and he solved the problem and dinner preparations continued.

  Normally, there were three shifts for meals, one from each watch. But on Sunday night, there were few diners. Someone told Black that there were so many problems that people didn’t have time to eat on schedule.

  She had seen some of the action herself before she began cooking. She went on deck to see the excitement of furling the torn sail and corralling the flailing spanker gaff. Faunt was on the helm then, and she asked him whether it would be appropriate for her to film the action. The masts were going from port to starboard to port as the ship rocked, looking as if they would touch the water on eit
her side.

  Faunt said it would be terrific if Black recorded the action, so she began making a video. That was much earlier, and all had ended with success.

  Now, though, it was different. A few crew members came for dinner. A lot didn’t. So Black made up bundles of bottled water and snacks and began delivering them to crew members immersed in their work.

  As she circulated, Black saw little of the bane of a ship’s cook—seasickness. Only Chris Barksdale, the engineer, was afflicted. She found him struggling with the trash pump at the top of the engine-room ladder.

  With her work for the day completed, Black stopped to help the ship’s engineer, holding the trash pump for well over an hour while Barksdale tried to get it started.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  UNSEEN PUNCHES

  After half an hour of flying in turbulence, the crew of the C-130 became uncomfortable. Buffeting winds caused the plane to suddenly drop ten to twenty feet, leaving everyone feeling as if their stomachs were somewhere north of their eyeballs. No one talked, and several crew members tried to fight off nausea.

  After another twenty minutes of flying, Wes tried to raise Bounty on the radio.

  “HMS Bounty, this is coast guard C-130 on Channel Sixteen. How copy? Over.”