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September 9, 2005
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By Nathaniel R. Helms
The oil exploration jack-up rig Ocean Warwick was blown from more than 60 miles offshore to come aground against the northern shore of Dauphin Island. ( Photo: Nat Helms, Copywrite 2005 DefenseWatch magazine) |
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Dauphin Island, Alabama (9-5-05) - While all eyes focused on the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans, Louisiana the morning after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast late last month people from Gulfshore, Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida were suffering their own miseries with little attention and even less support from the federal and state officials scrambling to get a handle on the magnitude of the disaster.
While the filthy waters filled the New Orleans basin, the thousands of people who lived east of there who only a few days before had celebrated their luck to live in such a beautiful place sat and wondered what to do next. They now had nothing.
By the time President George W. Bush decided to end his long summer vacation and take charge of the mess that had been the prosperous Gulf Coast at the height of tourist season, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) and a handful of Army National Guard troops were already working night and day to reach out to the suffering folks that a few days before had been enjoying their kind fates.
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Sitting in the middle of this misery is the USCG Search & Rescue Station at Dauphin Island, Alabama ( Above ), situated on an upscale, high-end island development separated from the surrounding rural poverty by a high-rise concrete causeway. It is a strange place for tragedy. In normal times the Coasties that work there bless their luck and wonder how life in the service can be so good. But, when hurricanes drop in for a visit, and they have twice in two years, Dauphin Island is no place to be. Such was the case when DefenseWatch was invited to observe the Coast Guard when it was a bright beacon of order in a world gone mad.
It was evident from its operational tempo that the Coast Guard was prepared for the storm. On the day before Hurricane Katrina struck the Coasties at Dauphin Island took their portable 25' patrol boats and headed to the USCG Air Station at nearby Mobile, Alabama, a big, substantial training base with hangers stout enough to protect their craft. The station's two 41' patrol boats moved inland to protected waters under their own power to wait out the storm. As soon as Hurricane Katrina had passed they came back ready to do what the Coast Guard does best – save lives. Since the storm the Coasties, like everyone else, has been living on Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) and bottled water and sweating it out in the amazing heat and humidity of the Gulf Coast in summer time.
Just getting to Dauphin Island to watch them make it happen was an effort. There was no gas, no electricity, no food, and no water anywhere around. The roads taking a visitor there lie in the lowlands kissing the waters of Mobile Bay.
A 12-foot storm surge and 150 MPH+ winds demolished all the wood-framed buildings it encountered on the lowlands adjacent the Alabama coast. |
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Katrina's vengeful breath passed over bogs and marshes and settlements of wooden shotgun houses, and over mobile homes perched among the bait shops, and over fast food marts and marinas and boat slips covering the fine white sand along the Gulf Coast. It wiped them out. What remained was scattered about like blowing trash at a landfill.
The 150 mile-an-hour winds and raging tidal surge had churned the debris into an unlikely stew of roofs and porches and turned over cars, and fallen trees. What had been awnings and signs and telephone poles and all other manner of construction lay scattered about in piles just out of the way of the roads. In many places the road surface was washed away, replaced by packed sand. Everywhere was the stench of rotting fish mixed with sewage and garbage and the corpses of small animals and the occasional missing person that still hadn't been found. The sights and smells in the waning daylight were very sobering.
All travel between 11pm and 6am was forbidden, making it impossible to get on Dauphin Island before dawn. A curfew was on and the only traffic moving was police cars and various other first responders. To make sure there was no confusion the Alabama State Police had placed a check point barring the way across the causeway to Dauphin Island. That meant spending the night among the homeless sharing a sand-covered concrete floor in a flooded out volunteer fire department full of dazed families sleeping on fold-up cots and wearing donated clothes. Some of them had been there five days. It was very humbling to share a night with them.
By 7am the next morning the Dauphin Island Search & Rescue Station was already alive with activity. The normal complement of two 41-foot patrol boats and two 25-footers was enhanced by two bigger, more impressive looking shark grey 47-foot search and rescue boats and several more 25' high speed boats with their characteristic orange hulls and aluminum deck houses. The all-volunteer reinforcements to beef up operations had arrived from Desten, Panama City and Pensacola, Florida as soon as Katrina had passed, according to station spokesman, Bosun's Mate 1 st Class Ryan Christensen. The 33-year-old Dike, Iowa, native was the glib voice of the station and a veteran of many emergencies since he joined ten years ago.
Dauphin Island was running 24 – 7 and the crews were already showing some wear, Christensen said. Gone were the days of puttering about looking at hot chicks on pleasure boats enjoying Mobile Bay while they waited for an emergency call, one Coastie noted without a trace of remorse. It didn't seem to matter. These Coasties said they liked to get in their boats and try to save people. They call themselves "boat drivers" and take immense pride in sailing to places others fear to go.
On the 47-foot USCG motor life boat 47300 the four-man crew was already on the dock doing their pre-patrol boat checks when the orange-hot sun popped into the sky. Like airplane drivers getting ready to soar they went over their craft with a fine eye. The man in charge, called a "coxswain" in Coast Guard parlance, is 33-year-old Bosun's Mate (BM) 1 st Class Micheal Alexander, and that is how he spells his first name by the way, he noted. Alexander is a quiet, self-assured 12-year veteran from dusty, bone-dry Amarillo, Texas, which is about as different from the sea as it can get. He's got a wife and 12-year-old son already giving his mother fits back in Desten. He said he got out of the Coast Guard once for a year and wondered why. He hasn't done it a second time.
Ironically the boat he commands was built by Textron Marine Systems of New Orleans. Coast Guard engineers designed the prototype which was tested in the harsh waters off Cape Disappointment, Washington, where Alexander trained to run the boat. Alexander says the new 47-footers can operate successfully in extreme conditions, such as storm force winds and 20-foot plus breaking seas to provide assistance under the most severe of all marine conditions. Now it is back home saving lives.
The engineer on board 47300 is 26-year-old BM 2 nd Class Trey Huneycutt, from Garner, North Carolina. He's been in the Coast Guard eight years and intends to make it a career. He left a very sick wife at home and worries about her. But, duty called and he left her anyway. Coasties crave action and hurricanes make for some good action.
Rounding out the crew in Fireman (FN) Jeremy, a stout, gregarious 23-years old lad with blonde hair and a quick laugh from South Bend, Indiana, and a lean, tanned 21-year old, Seaman (SN) Nicholas Hearn. Both men have been in the Coast Guard three years, they said.
Sommer and Hearn are obviously proud of their boat. They liked making rounds and checking out the big diesel engines and other gear that makes things work. Sommer said he didn't know if he was staying in, but with another year to go on his first hitch he still has time to think about it.
Ditto for Hearn, from nearby Jacksonville, Florida. Hearn is originally from Capetown, South Africa, and the youngest man on the crew. Hearn says he may stay in if he can get into marine safety and environmental law enforcement. He likes that sort of thing. In his off time he SCUBA dives and goes fishing. Hearn says he was brought up on the water and is at home on it.
It doesn't take long to get under way on a million dollar, high-tech 47-footer. Huneycutt pressed some switches on the ultra-modern control panel high up on top of the deckhouse and the big diesels rumbled into life. The exhausts burned a bit too black and Sommer noted it might be time for an oil change while Hearn and he hauled in the inch-thick mooring lines keeping them secured to the dock.
Sommer said his crew took over 47300 from another small boat station that didn't take good enough care of it to suit the Coast Guard. In return the other station got this crew's thirty-year-old 41-footer. Huneycutt said they spent a month cleaning and fixing it up 47300 until it was to Alexander's liking.
The Coast Guard makes boats last a long time because it takes good care of them, Alexander noted. Small boats on rough seas in no place for mechanical trouble and 47-footers are made just for that. The 20-ton boat can roll completely over and still right itself with a bit of luck. One crew recently ran out of luck and three of the men perished when the boat's upper works caught on rocks and trapped them inside the hull when it rolled on a training mission. So it pays to be careful, Alexander said.
The patrol was planned to cover a 160-mile swath of Mobile Bay between Dauphin Island and Gulfport, LA. The object was to make the Coast Guard's presence known as well as being on station to assist in search and rescue operations, law enforcement, and aids to navigation recovery in the devastated bay. Mobile Bay is too shallow for navigation except in the marked channels for deep-draft vessels so the crew must make sure commercial vessels stay where they belong to prevent piling up on unmarked sand bars and reefs. The job is made doubly hard because all the buoys marking the safe channels had been swept away and were only now being replaced.
The crew uses a state-of- the-art Global Positioning Satellite navigation system to keep track of where they are. There is a color LCD display panel on the bridge and another in the secondary bridge housed inside the boat. The image on the screen replicates a chart Alexander keeps in his hand. From either location the crew can run the boat although they all agreed being outside is where to stay. In rough seas the crew straps itself into chairs similar to fishing thrones to operate the boat. Even in moderate seas it bucked and rolled and rumbled through the waves making white water over the bow and spray on the bridge. Riding on it day after day is not for the feint hearted.
The eight-hour patrol was routine. There was very little traffic on the bay and what there was with a few exceptions was military traffic bound for Biloxi and Gulfport. Normally this time of year the bay full of commercial traffic, pleasure boats, and fishing vessels harvesting the crabs and other abundant marine life in the bay, Alexander said. But not now because it is too dangerous for the few boats that survived the storm to try to make it out on their own. Although oil rigs and production platforms dotted the horizon and were clearly evident in the horizon around the boat, nothing was moving toward them. Most of the time it was an empty sea.
It is the same along the distant shoreline. All the roads following the curve of Mobile Bay were damaged, as well as bridges and culverts and causeways to small islands and peninsulas lining the coast, officials there said. Twice we passed barges loaded with military engineering equipment destined for the dark shore to our starboard. That was Biloxi and the water was too filled with debris to take 47300 in close, Alexander said. Instead 47300 remained about six miles offshore to make sure it stayed in clear water.
Several times giant CH-53 helicopters passed overhead and the radio crackled with cryptic messages from Coast Guard vessels working the bay. We met up with the 87-foot patrol boat Stingray tied up in the middle of the bay and Alexander steered around her for a picture session. The Stingray's hull was dirty with exhaust smoke, an unusual sight on the normally pristine white hulls of the Coast Guard vessels. It was just another sign of how hard the Coast Guard was working.
Twice the black-hulled USCG Cutter Saginaw hove to in the horizon working an aids-to-navigation mission. She was talking a lot to somebody on the radio and Alexander said it was because she is so busy. There was another black hull called the USCG Cutter Oak doing the same thing somewhere else in the area. There was a lot of radio chatter coming from her also. Getting the lights and buoys back in the bay is vital to commerce in the region.
Nothing exciting happened that Tuesday and that was ok ay too, the crew agreed without much enthusiasm. The patrol ended as it began at the Coast Guard dock on Dauphin Island when the sun was high in the horizon and the heat of the day was wilting. 47300 had burned 175 gallons of diesel fuel, patrolled 160 miles of coastline, and the crew and two guests had consumed half a case of MREs while the Coast Guard made its presence known on Mobile Bay once again. There was nothing else to report.
That is how it is these days, Alexander said. And it will remain so until the emergency has passed and the tired Coast Guard crews can go back to their ordinary routine of mere12-hour days. In the meantime some days nothing happens and on others all hell breaks loose.
Regardless, most of the time the men and women of the United States Coast Guard go about their business without too much attention and very little fanfare. Maybe it is because " Semper Paratus –Always Ready," is the Coast Guard's official motto and that is how things should be. But the younger, more irreverent Coasties from the television generation have a motto of their own; " Semper Gumby –Always Flexible," is what they say because that is how they have to be in an organization that is expected to do more with less all the time.
It pays to be flexible in the Coast Guard, the crewmen on 47300 agreed, because they never know what they are about to encounter.
©2005 DefenseWatch.Contributing Editor Nathaniel R. "Nat" Helms is a Vietnam veteran, former police officer, long-time journalist and war correspondent living in Missouri. He is the author of two books, Numba One – Numba Ten and Journey Into Madness: A Hitchhiker's Account of the Bosnian Civil War, both available at www.ebooks-online.com. He can be reached at natshouse1@charter.net. Send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
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