Coast Guard in Alaska

[Tamaroa]

Coasting Kodiak style


A Coast Guard rescue in Alaska is like calling an ambulance in L.A. for an emergency in Seattle

By Oakley Cochran


On Halloween, a muddled call came to the U.S. Coast Guard in Alaska. The voice belonged to the foreign captain of the container ship PacRose. He needed the Coast Guard to save an ailing crewmember.

Somewhere on the Bering Sea, a Ukrainian man was bedridden in the dark bowels of the giant ship, suffering from intense stomach pains. Nobody on the ship knew why he was so sick, but it appeared that if he didn't get help soon, the man could die.

Flagged in Bohemia with a Russian crew, the PacRose was nine hundred miles off Attu, an island in Alaska's Aleutians. It was closer to Magadan, Russia, or Hokkaido, Japan, than to Kodiak, Alaska, where the Coast Guard was preparing for the rescue.

Activating a Coast Guard rescue in Alaska is often compared to calling an ambulance in Los Angeles for an emergency in Seattle. But it's actually worse. Rescues here can mean flying helicopters in ?zero-zero? visibility or crabbing sideways into nuking winds above rolling waters. That can mean coping with ice freezing inside the helicopter, or peering through night vision goggles at blinding snowstorms, praying no mountains suddenly appear.

Doug Watson, a Kodiak Coast Guard helicopter pilot, confronted the distressed PacRose near Adak, another far-flung island in the Aleutians. Manning the controls of a HH-60 Jayhawk, a rumbling red and white chopper, Watson hovered over the ship. He and his fellow rescuers now had to decide how to get the sick man off it.

For Watson, the PacRose was a pain in the neck. Five hundred feet long, she had a five-story pilothouse and four yellow cranes just as big running down her middle. The heaving seas pushed her, but it was those cranes that made things complicated.

The ship's captain wanted the hoist to happen at a cargo hatch in front of the pilothouse and behind the cranes. It was the only suitable landing area for a man to descend from the sky. But Watson and his helicopter crew wondered whether it'd be better to hoist from the stern or the bow.

?We're just going to take a few minutes to orbit around your vessel,? the Coasties told the ship captain over the radio.

It was near sunset, just before the crew turned the lights on the ship's bow. It was blowing up to thirty knots out of the southwest. The waves were macking thirty feet.

The small stern rose and dropped like a roller coaster. The bow had a thirty-foot pole sticking up, blocking access. Trying to hoist from either of these positions would be hard.

The helicopter crew circled the boat, debating what to do next.



When the Coast Guard launches a rescue, it takes no more than thirty minutes for a crew to be airborne. But a rapid deployment doesn't always help in Alaska, where rescuers sometimes must fly hundreds of miles. It can take days for a crew to just to reach the rescue site. Meantime, patients die.

That's because the Coast Guard Base Kodiak oversees four million square miles, from the Bering Sea to the Gulf of Alaska, almost half the size of the continental United States. Guard bases in the Lower 48 cover areas a fifth as large.

With its hard weather and huge distances, Alaska is the land of extreme emergencies, heaven for the right mindset. The state lures Coasties like Doug Watson, the helicopter pilot who helped rescue the man from the PacRose seven weeks ago.

In 1996, Watson was still putting around Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in his failing electric-guitar-blue Dodge Daytona, fearing downturns in the economy and commercial aviation might scratch his pilot career. One day at the airport where he worked, a Coast Guard helicopter rolled down the runway.

A few months later, he had enrolled in Coast Guard training. He still can't believe his good fortune.

Watson first came to the Coast Guard's Kodiak base in 1998 during officer's candidate school. After he graduated, he became an aircraft commander at bases in the Lower 48.

Watson, thirty-one, wanted to return to Kodiak, despite that unlike any other Coast Guard base in the country, aircraft commanders are demoted to co-pilot for their first year in Kodiak.

Since arriving last June, he's been learning Alaska's weather, geography and heavy seas. He's learning to windsurf in Woman's Bay at Kodiak Island, he gives preschoolers base tours and he's stoked on everything Alaskan.

?Kodiak is the pinnacle of Coast Guard aviation,? he said. ?It's one of the most challenging and exciting bases.?



The decision to save sick people, like the Ukrainian on the PacRose, often comes from flight surgeons. They don't have final say; Juneau headquarters must sign off.

?But if I tell them, 'This person needs to be evacuated,' then guess what?? said Doc Ken Harman, fifty-one, the surgeon called to the PacRose. ?Unless the aircraft has one wing and half a pilot, we're going.?

Making the call to save - or in other cases, not save - is Harman's biggest stress. He makes the decision without ever seeing the patient.

?It's like riding a bike without handlebars,? he said in a recent interview, ?or being a doctor with your hands tied behind your back.? But that's one reason why he likes his job: It's a challenge.

After eleven years in the Navy, followed by fourteen years in a lucrative private practice, Harman got a job offer from Coast Guard headquarters, on April Fools Day 2002. He was sure it was a prank. When he realized the offer was serious, his decision was easy, despite the cut in pay.

Harman (the first in his family to go to college, the son of an Alabama secretary and a factory worker he never knew) went to flight surgeon school at age fifty.

He passed ?dunker tests,? getting strapped into a mock helicopter suspended over a deep pool. When the helicopter flipped, he fought with his seatbelt and swam out, blindfolded.

During his cold weather survival course, his only gear for a three-night campout was a quart-size Ziplock containing a lighter, fire starter stick, foldout poncho, Leatherman tool and Jolly Ranchers. He passed that test, too, and never got hungry enough to eat seaweed.

The training will help him if anything ever goes wrong during a rescue - if, for instance, the helicopter goes down with survivors.

During the PacRose rescue, Harman was on board a C-130 airplane flying two thousand feet above the Ukrainian. He was there to relay updates to Kodiak caregivers and to give instructions to the helicopter crew via radio once they had hoisted the patient aboard the Jayhawk.



Also circling over the ship was Watson, the helicopter pilot. His crew had decided how to get the man off the boat - hoist him from the cargo hatch.

Watson nosed the Jayhawk into the wind, using the air to keep aloft and reserve power in case of a sudden downdraft. He flew backward as the ship moved forward. Usually hoists go better if the ship is running into the wind, but on this day the waves were so big - even for the five-hundred-foot vessel- that the PacRose surfed them.

Once Watson had a good view of the ship, he tried to hover between one of its cranes and the pilothouse. The wind was strong enough that pressing the Jayhawk's radar-altimeter-hold didn't help, so Watson hovered the chopper manually, adjusting to movements of the ship in the swells below. It was like trying to hover between buildings in downtown Anchorage, except that the buildings were moving.

When he felt the hover was relatively stable, Watson asked rescue swimmer Dave Southwick to get ready.



?Slug in the water.? That's what Dave Southwick calls himself. Everyone else calls him AST or Aviation Survival Technician or Aviation Survivalman or rescue swimmer, or simply swimmer. Which some days means aircraft mechanic, fluids checker, gas maxer, cargo-parachute sewer, helicopter float bag repairer, flare servicer and oxygen system evaluator, but never slug.

Southwick, thirty-nine, doesn't read books about rescue swimmers. He's not a rescue fanatic. For him, jumping twenty feet from a helicopter - swim fins on, toes pointed up, heels down - to save someone is a ?job perk.? It's one he's never turned down, regardless of the weather.

The Coast Guard first dispatched a helicopter on a rescue in 1944, flying blood from New York City to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to help survivors of an explosion on a Navy destroyer. It was the first recorded use of a true ?flying ambulance,? according to the San Francisco Public Health Department, which chronicles the history of the emergency rescue field on its websites.

More than forty years later, the Coast Guard developed its Helicopter Rescue Swimmer Program, which trains swimmers not only to save near-drowning victims but also as emergency medical technicians and jacks-of-all-trades. Between 1992 and 2001, Coast Guard rescue swimmers saved more than four thousand people.

?Our job,? as Southwick puts it, ?is to get people from outside the helicopter to inside the helicopter.?

Thirteen years ago during his Helicopter Rescue Swimmer training, Tuesdays and Thursdays were Southwick's pool days. During those days of pain, a dwindling number of students - four or five at the start, down to Southwick and another at the end - endured ?multies? and ?sharks and daisies.? Blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back, Southwick said he outmaneuvered instructors who put him in choke holds underwater, instilling a basic lesson: If you lose, you drown.

?If you've ever seen the look in someone's eyes when you swim up to them, you'd understand,? Southwick said. ?You have the chance to significantly impact their lives, and that's pretty cool.?

Like many in the Coast Guard, before Southwick started saving people he learned to kill them. He spent seven years as an Army infantryman. At the time, he said, many in the Army had an attitude like, ?You could be at war tomorrow - yeah, right.?

He prepared himself and others for battle, but he neither saw combat nor had the opportunity to test his training.

But Southwick said it's worked out for the best. He has had ?more business on a day-to-day basis? in the Coast Guard than in the military.



The PacRose rescue was fairly routine - just a hoist down to the deck and the retrieval of a patient. But routine doesn't mean it's easy, as Southwick can attest to.

Last January, fishing some guys out of the water almost made him a statistic.

?I could see the underside of the boat coming right at us,? he said. ?I knew we were going through the screws, and I knew I was going to die.?

If he had, he would have been the first rescue swimmer to perish in the water. A few have died in helicopter crashes.

Southwick had gone to help crewmembers from a sinking vessel seventy-five miles southwest of Kodiak. After struggling into survival suits, the five crewmembers abandoned ship and got into a life raft.

Swimming through heavy seas, Southwick helped two of the men into a basket, which was hoisted by the helicopter. When he was trying to help a third, he discovered the cable connecting the basket to the helicopter had broken. In the fifty-five-knot winds, it had rubbed against the base of the Jayhawk.

Southwick held onto the third guy but they got separated from their life raft.

?The waves were so big that the raft fell down the waves' faces,? Southwick recalled.

Meanwhile, the helicopter hovered helplessly above them. But rescue was on its way, or so Southwick thought. A fishing boat arrived, but it got too close to the stranded men.

?I was four or five feet underneath that thing. I saw the bottom of the boat coming right for my head,? Southwick said. ?Somehow we squirted out. I got on the boat and then I threw up. It scared the bejesus out of me.?



Southwick pulled on an orange full-body hoisting harness and a green gunner's belt as the PacRose thrashed in waves below the helicopter. He clipped himself into a hook on the floor by the door.

The door slid open and Watson, the helicopter pilot, said, ?Begin hoist.?

Southwick lifted a few inches off the deck, then went out the door, disappearing from view. He prefers to land on ship decks like he's Spiderman, crouched and ready for action. But when he was lowered to ten feet above the deck, the PacRose took a twenty-foot wave. Southwick landed like a sack of potatoes.

He recovered quickly and five crewmembers, ecstatic to see him, scrambled to help. They led Southwick below deck to the patient, demanding to carry his gear as a show of appreciation.

The sick Ukrainian seemed less excited to see the swimmer. The patient couldn't speak English but his eyes were big and white with fear. He was about to dangle fifty feet in a tiny litter.

In the C-130 plane circling above, Harman was busily radioing instructions to the flight corpsman in the helicopter. Intravenous solutions of saline and sugar water were prepared for the patient.

Southwick and the Ukrainian were safely hoisted into the helicopter and the man was flown to the hospital in Kodiak. Patient laws kept the man's condition confidential, but he apparently made it through just fine.

Situation ?normal? in Kodiak. Extraordinary anywhere else.