Big Miracle (31 page)

Cindy and Arnold Jr. had just about given up hope. That night was the worst weather yet. They were thinking about heading back to town for some sleep. All that kept them alone with the whales on this minus forty degrees night was their unspoken fear that the next time they returned, the holes, like the whales that depended on them, would have vanished without a trace beneath firmly frozen ice and windblown snow. The arrival of the Minnesota brothers-in-law brought Cindy and Arnold back from the edge of despair. They expectantly gathered around the small silver and red generator while Randy tried to start it. But it was so cold, its components had frozen solid during the twelve-minute flight from the hangar.

Craig suggested they try again with his own portable generator. That would require another trip back to town. As they all flew back to the hangar, Cindy knew they were leaving the vulnerable whales to their fate, if only for an hour. She wondered if they would survive. She wanted to stay out on the ice with them, but Arnold Brower Jr. wouldn't let her. There were polar bears everywhere. If she stayed alone, the whales would have a better chance of surviving than she would.

Greg was exhausted. He pushed his tired body as far as it would go. He had to get some sleep. It was after midnight and he hadn't slept since before leaving Minneapolis thirty-six hours earlier. Since Rick was the expert on the deicers, Greg was free to fall comatose on his cot at NARL. Rick stood shivering aimlessly in the dark Arctic night as Craig rummaged through his cluttered tool shed for the generator. How could he have lost it, he asked himself. He used it just a week earlier on his hunting trip with Geoff. When he found the generator, it started on the first pull. Treating it just like his truck, he left its engine running for the ride back to the SAR hangar where Randy and Cindy were waiting.

Randy was not thrilled with the idea of flying his helicopter with a gas powered combustion motor running inside his cabin. Crosby prayed that the FAA never found out what he was about to do. Not only was flying a helicopter with a flammable engine running incredibly dangerous, it would also be incredibly cold. It was minus sixty degrees just a few hundred feet off the ground and the onboard heater barely worked with all the windows shut. But with a running engine emitting deadly carbon monoxide fumes, they would have to fly with the windows open.

The trip out was the worst experience anyone of them could ever remember. Randy's arms were so numb from the cold, he could barely fly his aircraft. His left eye froze shut. Cindy broke down in tears that instantly froze to her stinging red cheeks. Rick wished he were dead, and Craig tried to take his mind off the excruciating cold by concentrating on a tune he was trying to hum. Finally, the chopper touched down. Randy lowered his head onto the frozen vinyl dashboard, relieved that his dangerous mission was over. Craig and Geoff cradled the still purring generator like a fragile infant as they walked it out to the slush covered first hole.

Like panting dogs, the panicked whales were surfacing every few seconds. Craig figured the whales had reached the end. At any minute, the mammals could drown. Rick frantically plugged the power cord into the end of one of the compact deicers and dropped it into the corner of the rapidly freezing hole. After bobbing up and down a few times, the buoyed device bounced into position. It was ready to be turned on. At the flick of a switch, it started to work. The slightly warmer water pulled up from a few feet below the waterline bubbled up at the surface. Instantly, the slush and ice around the buoy began to melt. The deicers worked.

In its first ten minutes, the deicer melted the slush and ice in half of the first hole. Almost as quickly, the whales started to calm down. Cindy, Randy, Craig, and Greg were exuberant. Finally, they found a way to help the whales. In his euphoria, Rick discovered a renewed source of energy that propelled him onward to the next hole. He set up his second deicer and dropped it in the hole. Within seconds, it too worked. Soon, the next hole was ice free. Drunk with delirium, four lone souls danced on the surface of a frozen sea in the bitter cold black of an Arctic night.

They knew not to trust everything they felt and saw. Their exhausted consciousnesses crossed into a new realm. They stammered in disbelief. The next sight their eyes beheld was more than their weary minds could compute. The whales were in the second hole. Just a few minutes after it cleared of ice, the whales gave the first sign that they were interested in being rescued. The whales had moved.

The next move was man's.

16

Saving Whales the Old-fashioned Way

Colonel Tom Carroll was frazzled. He tapped the sharpened tip of his pencil on the Formica conference table provided for him by ARCO, his Prudhoe Bay hosts. His glazed eyes peered aimlessly through the frosted glass window and out to sea. In front of him lay a field of dirty Styrofoam coffee cups that had accumulated since his National Guard unit hastily set up shop there five days earlier. All his mind could focus on was the prostrate, abandoned barge which lay listless on the ice.

The operation to save the three whales proved to be the strangest mission of his life. Called from his Anchorage home on a Saturday afternoon, Colonel Carroll was initially put in charge of a logistical aspect of a burgeoning whale rescue. His commanding officer, General John Schaeffer, assigned him a single straightforward task. General Schaeffer ordered him to move a 185-ton hoverbarge from its frozen dry dock at Prudhoe Bay to Barrow, 270 miles across the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean.

Just seventy-two hours after arriving in the Arctic netherworld, Tom Carroll was briefing the president of the United States. If that wasn't enough, he was also falling in love with one of the president's assistants whom he had never seen. But just as the colonel's star began to rise, it fell back to earth with the force of a falling meteor. The colonel was back on the ground facing the bitter reality of Arctic logistics. His fifteen minutes of fame were drawing to a close, at least for now.

By the night of Thursday, October 20, day five of Operation Breakout and day thirteen for the stranded whales, Colonel Tom Carroll found little comfort in the thought that his mission seemed a failure. He told his men they performed their duties with honor and distinction. They were assigned a difficult task with no more than an even chance of success. Despite mounting press recriminations, the colonel told his men they could hold their heads high.

Just as the colonel's emotional cycle entered the acceptance stage and his natural healing process began, General Schaeffer called and asked him what he was planning to do for an encore. Carroll thought Schaeffer was poking fun at him. After all, he thought, any more performances like the one he just directed and the entire Alaska National Guard might be the next endangered species.

General Schaeffer told Colonel Carroll if it were not for the National Guard, the whales would have long since perished. Carroll had much to be proud of. The general insisted that the Guard's participation and the colonel's command would continue as long as the rescue did. The Guard had invested too much time and money to back out now. If they did, the general said, the press would interpret it as a sign of weakness, a blow from which the Guard might not quickly recover.

It would also send the wrong signal to the rescue itself. If the Guard, with all its resources, gave up on the three whales, how would that play with the chain-saw-wielding Eskimos? Schaeffer ordered Carroll to devise alternate plans to assist in the whale rescue. If no further logistics were available in Prudhoe, he wanted Colonel Carroll to redeploy most of his men and equipment to Barrow. That was where the action was. There was plenty the Guard could do there. Randy Crosby and his Barrow Search and Rescue helicopters were overworked. The Guard could help SAR run helicopter press tours of the whale site, and if necessary, they could coordinate press access to the rescue. Tom Carroll was back in business, though on a smaller scale. But as far as the press knew, he had never missed a beat.

Just a few hours earlier, the whales recorded their first hint of progress since the rescue began. At last they started to explore the new holes the Eskimos had cut for them on Wednesday. The Minnesota deicers couldn't possibly have arrived at a more dramatic moment. They saved the whales when they were literally on their last breaths. Wednesday night's brittle cold completely sealed nearly every hole except the two kept open by the deicers.

The colonel thought quietly for a moment about ways to help. His brief experience with the barge taught him many valuable lessons. Chief among them was the difficulty of performing even the Arctic's simplest jobs. Unlocking the barge from its four-year frozen berth was a feat in itself. Herculean efforts were required just to move it, some of which had never been tried before. While creative ingenuity was the only option available to many Arctic expeditions, the colonel's detailed post mortem determined that an operation so fraught with unconquered obstacles could not depend entirely upon improvised solutions.

Carroll decided that Arctic innovations were better left to the innovators. If the National Guard was going to play a role of any significance in the whale rescue, the colonel resolved, it could only be done through tested, proven means.

Carroll called Ben Odom, the head of ARCO Alaska, and the rescue's chief financier. The two men had been in daily contact ever since the colonel and his unit arrived at Odom's expansive North Slope facility five days earlier. The barge failure didn't change Odom's mind. He wanted those whales freed and his checkbook would stay open until they were.

Ben Odom's enthusiasm for the project was shared by nearly everyone at Atlantic Richfield. From the executive dining room to the canteens, the rescue was a big topic of conversation throughout the ARCO Alaska tower. It united the company's 25,000 employees like no other event Ben Odom could remember.

No oil company in Alaska ever got more favorable press coverage than ARCO did during Operation Breakout. Normally the whipping boy of oil dependent environmentalists, ARCO now worked side by side with Cindy Lowry and Greenpeace. ARCO swallowed any hint of criticism by pouring resources into a rescue destined to save three animals endangered by nature, not man. Of course, the green's later sniffed that ARCO's work freeing the whales did nothing to clean up the 11,000 acres of North Slope Arctic tundra they claimed were “ruined” by oil drilling.

Standard Oil Company was one of ARCO's global competitors as well as a partner in the gigantic consortium of oil companies working the North Slope fields. Standard Oil donated three chain saws to the rescue. No good deed, no matter how small ever goes unpunished, particularly when committed by an oil company. When Standard confirmed their donation, the media immediately howled that the company spent more money announcing their contribution than their contribution was even worth.

Odom couldn't have been more encouraging to the colonel and his National Guard guests. The barge setback notwithstanding, the longer the rescue went on, the more ARCO could benefit from the goodwill generated by their efforts. Besides, Ben Odom wanted the whales freed for the same reasons everyone else did. They were innocent victims whose plight couldn't help but stir human compassion. He told Carroll that he and ARCO were at his service. Whatever the colonel wanted or needed, Odom would do his best to provide. Carroll contacted Ron Morris in Barrow to find out what options, if any, the NOAA coordinator was considering. The colonel informed him the Guard had the mandate to help in whatever manner Morris saw appropriate. Morris told Carroll that he and Cindy had called upon experts at NOAA and Greenpeace to draw up a comprehensive list describing every plausible technique for breaking the ice or moving the whales.

Cindy Lowry was amazed by the extensive research her colleague, Campbell Plowden, had conducted from the besieged Greenpeace headquarters in Washington. Between asking and being asked questions of and by nearly everyone professing to be an ice or whale expert, Plowden had been on the phone for four days straight. He sent nightly faxes to Cindy in Barrow outlining what he had learned that day. She reviewed and edited the reports before passing them on to Morris.

The most promising alternative to the abandoned barge seemed to be “portable” water jet pumps. Originally designed to dislodge minerals imbedded in granite, they proved more than capable of blasting through thick Arctic ice deposits. The powerful pumps shot water pressurized at 35,000 pounds per square inch. Manufacturers assured Plowden they could blast through an eight foot wall of solid ice. But there were no pumps to be found in Alaska. Private contractors only brought them up to the North Slope on a per job basis. Like the Boeing Vertol helicopters Bill Allen wanted to use to tow the barge, the independent water jet operators fled the slim pickings of the North Slope in search of more promising pastures.

Every other option had too many drawbacks. Phosphorus burning powders were ruled out because of the potential destruction to other marine life, including free-swimming whales, that were in the area. The steel and glass cutting particle steam erosion laser was too heavy to transport from the Lower 48, and the mini icebreaker owned by the Amoco oil company was busy protecting a drill ship in the Arctic Ocean two hundred miles north of Prudhoe.

Earlier in the week when the barge was still expected, Cindy heard a rumor there was an icebreaker docked in Prudhoe Bay. The owners of the ship, the
Arctic Challenger,
turned down Plowden's request for help. It would be suicide, they argued, for their small ship to fight the Arctic ice so late in the year. The last time they tried to sail from Prudhoe to Barrow the voyage took three weeks, the ship was severely damaged, and that was in September. Luckily, no lives were lost, but this year the ice was even thicker and the owners were not about to risk their ship again for the sake of three whales. Plowden couldn't blame them.

About the only idea that seemed even remotely feasible, if comparatively lame, came from the suddenly resurrected Tom Carroll. After hearing about the Eskimos cutting manual ice holes, Carroll asked Marvin King, VECO's top man in Prudhoe, if he knew of any readily available device that might cut holes even faster.