Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy

by Michael J. Tougias

  • • •

  Once the pilots had repositioned the helicopter, Randy lowered into the water, unhooked, swam to the raft, and stuck his head inside.

  “Who’s next?”

  The survivors stayed quiet.

  Randy looked at one of the female survivors closest to him. “Are you ready?”

  Jessica Black answered yes, and off they went. This time the basket hoist went smoothly.

  Randy used the next couple minutes to catch his breath, and soon the bare hook came down. He clipped the hook to his harness, and as he was about to give the thumbs-up to be lifted, he heard a roar, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a monstrous sea bearing down on him. All he could do was hold his breath before being engulfed in a torrent of white water. The force of the wave was so strong it ripped the mask and snorkel right off Randy’s head.

  Michael retracted cable as fast as he could and lifted Randy out of the swirling foam before the next wave buried him.

  Well, that was some wake-up call, thought Randy. Just got to do the rescue with no mask.

  The ocean wasn’t quite done with him yet. Once he was back at the raft and telling the next survivor, Anna Sprague, to come out the doorway, a wave broke directly on the raft’s canopy. Randy was hurled backward, landing ten feet from the raft. He coughed up a bellyful of water and kicked back to the raft, thinking, This is not good. We gotta hurry, or we’ll never get all these people out before bingo.

  In the cockpit, Steve was thinking the same thing. He knew another helo was on its way, and he had made up his mind he wasn’t going to put the survivors or his crew in danger by extending the bingo time. He also surmised that the survivors were in pretty good shape because each time a new person came into the aircraft, the other survivors let out a cheer. Just stay focused, Steve told himself, we’re not done yet.

  He was so focused on his swimmer in the water and holding the aircraft in as steady a hover as possible, he never saw the second helicopter speed by. But Jane did, and over the headset she confirmed to both her crew and the C-130 that she had a visual on the other helicopter.

  After Anna Sprague was safely in the helicopter, Randy extracted Mark Warner, and he, too, was quickly hoisted into the helicopter without incident. Now we’re going good, thought Randy as he treaded water and waited to be air-taxied back to the life raft and the final three survivors.

  At that same moment Jane said, “Okay, we are at bingo.”

  “Roger,” said Steve. “Michael, we’re at bingo. After we get the swimmer up, we’re going home.”

  Randy didn’t know this, and when he clipped onto the hook, he was expecting to be brought back to the raft. Instead, he found himself being lifted directly up, and he guessed that they were up against their fuel limit.

  Once Randy was inside the helicopter, Michael hollered, “RTB” (return to base).

  “We still got three people down there!” said Randy.

  “It’s okay, there is another helo on scene and a third one coming. We hit bingo.” Michael grabbed the door handle and slid the door shut.

  The five survivors who had been hugging and crying tears of joy all stopped and stared at Michael, not understanding why they were leaving their friends below.

  Randy, who also served as the aircraft’s EMT, started going from survivor to survivor, telling them another aircraft would get their friends and also asking each survivor how he or she was feeling. Only Svendsen was seriously injured, and he was still vomiting from spending so much time being pounded by waves.

  “Door is shut, and everyone is seated and ready to fly,” said Michael over the headset.

  “Roger,” said Steve, then he turned to Jane. “Take us home. You three did a heck of a job.”

  • • •

  Josh Scornavacchi, Matt Sanders, and John Jones spread out as best they could to keep the raft from flipping. The loud roar from the rotors of the helicopter above them grew faint, and then the only sound was from the surging seas. They’re probably just repositioning, thought Josh.

  The three men sat patiently, expecting to hear the welcoming thwack, thwack, thwack of the helicopter’s return at any moment. Josh peeked out the doorway, craning his neck so he could look up toward the sky. Rain and foam whipped at his exposed face, and he was forced to retreat back inside the raft. Then he thought, What if something happened to them? He quickly changed his thinking. Well, they know the three of us are in here. We just got to keep this raft afloat a little longer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CATAPULTED

  The second helicopter that reached the emergency scene faced what seemed like an insurmountable job. Eight potential survivors were in either a second Bounty life raft or drifting in the storm-tossed ocean. Further complicating the situation, the first helicopter crew said they were bumping up against their bingo time and might have to leave before they could extract everyone from the raft they were working on. A third helicopter had not yet launched, and no one knew what Sandy was going to do next.

  Luckily, three of the four aircrew members in the second helo were quite experienced. In fact, aircraft commander Steve Bonn, age forty-four, was the pilot who had helped rescue Steve Cerveny when his helicopter crashed in the Rocky Mountains. Bonn had flown Black Hawks in the army for nine years, then joined the coast guard in 2000, where he flew Jayhawk helicopters, including a four-year stint at Air Station Kodiak, Alaska, performing rescues in dangerous weather. In 2008 he flew to the Mayday call from the Alaska Ranger in the Bering Sea, which developed into one of the largest and most difficult rescues ever conducted by the coast guard. The Alaska Ranger, a fishing-factory ship, had forty-seven crew members on board when it sank, and all but five were eventually rescued. Steve Bonn was in the air for eight and a half hours that night, in high winds and fighting snow squalls. That experience, along with a couple hundred other lesser SAR cases, would go a long way in the rescue of the Bounty.

  Flying with Steve to the Bounty was flight mechanic Gregory “Neil” Moulder, rescue swimmer Dan Todd, and copilot Jenny Fields. Neil had over fourteen years’ experience hoisting rescue swimmers and survivors, and Dan had been a rescue swimmer for five years. Jenny, a graduate of the Coast Guard Academy, was the newest of the crew, having been qualified to fly Jayhawks in 2011.

  All four had been called at home by Todd Farrell at the Operations Desk and told to report to the air station for a first-light flight to a tall ship taking on water. Dan recalled getting the phone and asking, “What’s a tall ship?”

  “It looks like a pirate ship,” responded Todd.

  “This better not be a bad joke.”

  “No joke. It’s real all right, and you gotta come in right away.”

  Jenny Fields got the same call about launching at first light, but then “I got a second phone call,” recalled Jenny, “just as I was leaving my driveway. It was Todd Farrell at the Operations Desk, and he told me that he needed me at the station immediately, that the sailors were abandoning ship that very moment. That’s when my heart rate and adrenaline began pumping.”

  On the flight out, pushed by a strong tailwind to 170 knots, Steve Bonn said, “So who here has been to AHRS?” (Advanced Helicopter Rescue School, where crews practice over and in the towering surf at the Columbia Bar in Oregon). Dan and Neil had gone through the training, but not Jenny, so Steve gave her a quick overview of the additional duties of a copilot during extreme conditions.

  “Watch the waves,” said Steve, who was sitting in the right seat, “and learn their timings, and give advisories as best you can. Be a vigilant safety pilot on the controls and instruments, but more specifically be watching outside. I’m going to be mostly looking down and to the right during the hoists, so I need you to be looking everywhere else and paint us a picture of what’s out there.”

  Then the four-person crew discussed what they would do when they located survivors, and all agreed that the swimmer would be put down in a sling deployment, followed by basket recoveries. Dan got the
usual butterflies in his stomach thinking through the steps he would take when he got in the water. The shot of adrenaline was still kicking as he remembered that Randy Haba had once told him: “Big cases don’t come along very often, and for some of us it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Everything you ever learned and practiced in training is going to be called upon.”

  When the crew arrived on the emergency scene, they were well prepared for what awaited them from listening to the conversations between the first helicopter and the orbiting C-130. They had enough light to see without using their NVGs, but depth perception was difficult. The only colors were shades of gray and white: gray water with whitecaps and variations of gray clouds all blurred by driving, horizontal rain. Wind tore the tops off the waves, sending bits of white foam and spray, like giant snowflakes, up in the air.

  Peyton Russell, on the orbiting C-130, directed the helicopter toward the second Bounty life raft.

  Steve Bonn, who had the controls, edged the helicopter ever closer to the top of the waves. Suddenly they could see the orange canopy of the life raft bouncing up and down in the seas like a cork in a raging river. Then a big wave rolled toward it and the raft disappeared behind the wall of water. The commander felt a building tension as he slowed the helicopter and got ready for the hoists—if there were hoists. No one knew for sure if the second Bounty life raft had survivors in it. Steve, however, was certain of one thing: if the sailors were not in the life raft, he would have to spend precious time and fuel investigating promising strobe lights, and the chances of hoisting all the potential survivors before bingo would be next to impossible. Jenny had calculated bingo at twenty-two hundred pounds of fuel to return to Elizabeth City, and she had also calculated lesser amounts if they went to Marine Station Cherry Point or had to set down on the nearest point of land, which was the beach at Cape Hatteras.

  Looking down through the chin bubble of the aircraft, Jenny could clearly see the raft in the crashing chaos of foam and water. Come on, come on, someone show yourself. There’s got to be people in there, she thought. She focused on two access door flaps, but no heads stuck out. The helicopter was now just fifty feet above the raft and was buffeted by strong crosswinds. Where are they? Suddenly she saw the canopy door open and three faces in red Gumby suits looked directly up at her. Yes! Then the survivors started waving their arms back and forth, and Jenny could almost feel their relief at knowing they were not alone.

  Steve positioned the aircraft in a hover, nose into the wind, about twenty-five feet above the tallest wave tops, with the raft off to the two o’clock position. Jenny set the radar altimeter at twenty feet: if a wave came closer than twenty feet to the aircraft, an audible advisory would warn them that they were dangerously close to the crest. Between the radar altimeter and Jenny’s scanning the seas, Steve could focus on flying while also keeping an eye on the rescue swimmer.

  After the team went through the final checklist, Dan positioned himself at the door and then Neil lowered him toward the water. As soon as the swimmer’s flippers touched the ocean, he straightened his arms and plunged out of the sling. It was a fifty-yard sprint to the raft, and Dan felt he had never swum so fast in his life. All that adrenaline could finally be used. At the raft, he pulled himself completely inside the doorway, sat down and faced the survivors, then yanked out his snorkel and raised his mask. He composed himself, took a couple breaths, and said, “Hey, I’m Dan. I hear you guys need a ride.”

  Unlike those on the first raft, this group of survivors were animated, with a couple yelling, “Way to go! You guys are awesome!”

  Dan was hoping his casual greeting would give the survivors a feeling of confidence, as if swimming through thirty-foot breaking seas in a hurricane were an everyday occurrence for him.

  “How many people in here?” asked Dan.

  “Six.”

  “Nobody has fallen out?”

  “No.”

  Dan pulled a small, waterproof radio transmitter from his vest, turned it on, and contacted Jenny. “There are six people in the raft.” Then he put the radio away and turned back to the survivors, asking, “Does anyone have any injuries?”

  The survivors pointed to Adam.

  “Okay, he will go first. This is how I need you all to do this for me. When I get you to the basket, you’re to sit inside and keep your hands and feet inside. The quicker you do that, the quicker you will go into the helicopter.”

  Just then a giant wave slammed into the raft, first hitting the spot where Dan was perched, catapulting him into the air. He flew toward the other side of the raft, accidently clotheslining two people on the way, and landed in a heap on a survivor. Water roared in after him, as if someone with a fire hose were aiming it through the doorway.

  “Is anyone hurt?” shouted Dan, crawling back toward the door.

  “We’re okay!”

  Dan wasted no time exiting the raft—he couldn’t risk having another wave hit and becoming injured. If that happened, the survivors would be at the mercy of the seas until the next helicopter arrived. Dan wanted to get Adam out of the raft and into the basket immediately. He was trained to always take the injured survivors first, when the rescue swimmer had maximum energy. Should the survivor be torn from his grip by a wave, Dan would want to get that person fast because the survivor might not be able to stay afloat in the pounding seas for more than a minute or two.

  Dan looked at Adam and shouted, “Can you get out of the raft?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” said Adam. “I got in the raft somehow and I can get out.”

  Dan motioned for him to come out of the raft. Adam clawed his way to the door, first sticking his head out and then struggling to lift one leg higher than the tubing that encircled the raft and eventually getting that leg into the ocean. Then with a push he dropped into the water and rolled onto his back. Dan wrapped his right arm around Adam’s chest and began putting distance between them and the raft. With such high winds the swimmer wanted to get the survivor at least forty feet from the raft so that the helicopter could stay downwind of the raft. If the aircraft was over the raft, its rotor wash might flip it.

  Steve Bonn, with a bird’s-eye view of the raft at the two o’clock position, got a good reminder of what the other helicopter crew had warned him about—that the wind and the current would make the hoists more difficult than anything they’d ever before experienced. The commander watched Dan and the survivor be taken by the current and pushed upwind from the raft, meaning that Steve would have to move in that direction, passing directly over the raft. Without any other choice he moved the aircraft forward so he could keep the swimmer in view, and he held his breath. The raft stayed upright, and Steve awaited communication from Neil. It was impossible to hold the aircraft in one position with wind gusts sending it lurching forward, backward, or side to side. There would be no gently sliding the helicopter a couple feet at a time, for the wind had the upper hand and despite Steve’s best efforts, any movement on the control levers, no matter how subtle, would send the aircraft rocketing ten feet or more.

  “Big wave coming from the left,” said Jenny in as calm a voice as possible.

  Steve increased altitude another ten feet, letting the wave slide beneath them. Then he descended again, knowing the closer he was to the water the easier the hoist would be for Neil.

  Neil had the basket ready at the doorway and shoved it out. With the pendant in his right hand and the cable in his gloved left hand, he started letting out cable. The wind shot the basket aft of the aircraft, and Neil told Steve to move forward twenty feet. Then, when the basket was halfway down, a crosswind caught it, shooting it forward and to the right. Neil was on his stomach now, trying to steady the cable, telling the pilots what was happening. He glanced ahead to where Dan held the survivor and couldn’t believe how quickly the current was moving them.

  Just as Neil was about to tell Steve to move to a new position, the wind changed and blew the basket backward and left. Neil let out cable as fas
t as he could and saw the basket hit the water.

  “Hold right there! Hold!” barked Neil over the headset. The basket was only a few feet from the swimmer and the survivor, and Neil could see they would reach it without too much trouble. On the headset Neil could hear the automated voice from the radar altimeter saying, “Altitude, altitude.” He knew a particularly large wave had come within their comfort zone, but he tried to ignore the warning—that was the pilot’s worry. Neil had to keep his eye on the basket and the survivor.

  Neil watched as the survivor was put in the basket, and as soon as Dan gave the thumbs-up, Neil started retracting cable as fast as he could. The basket, heavy with the survivor’s weight, swung like a pendulum, and Neil, now on his knees, struggled to stabilize it. “Basket is coming up,” said Neil. Then five seconds later, out of breath, he gasped, “Basket at the door.” Then grunting: “Bringing basket inside the cabin.”

  While Neil used all his strength to lift the survivor—including the fifty pounds of water in the survival suit—out of the basket, Jenny said, watching the waves, “Couple really big ones coming.”

  Steve dared to take his eyes off the swimmer drifting up and over the waves and saw two mountains of water approaching, their crests a snarling mess of white water.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  FLIPPED LIKE A PANCAKE

  While Steve powered the helicopter up and out of reach of the big waves, Dan, down in the ocean, wasn’t so lucky. He saw the first comber out of the corner of his eye and took a big breath and dove downward into it, the same as a person might do at the seashore when he fears a breaking wave is going to knock him over. Holding his breath, Dan could feel himself get tumbled, but he knew he was much safer under the water than in the maw of the wave on the surface. He let the moving mountain slide past, then fought to the surface. Blowing water out of his snorkel, he was preparing to take in a deep lungful of air when the second wave caught him, driving him deep. Dan’s entire body screamed for oxygen, and he kicked and stroked toward the light, toward the surface. When his head popped out of the foam, he coughed up green water, trying to clear his lungs.