Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (29 page)

“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.

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.

Fortunately a small swell was next, and he let the current push him up and over it. He was far from the raft and didn’t even think about swimming to it, knowing Neil would lower the hook as soon as he got the survivor out of the basket.

In the cabin, Adam struggled to get out of the basket, first pivoting so he could be on his knees, then lifting his chest out while placing his hands on the helicopter floor. Some water sloshed out of the neck of the survival suit, but most slid downward inside the neoprene, first forming a giant belly, then moving to his feet, making it look as if he had on enormous clown shoes. Neil grabbed him under the arms and helped get his legs out of the basket, then motioned for Adam to crawl toward the front of the aircraft to allow more room for removing the basket. Neil worked as fast as he could, but a nagging voice inside his head was saying to speed things up. He tried to balance haste with precision—one mistake could put the whole rescue in jeopardy. For a moment he considered asking how much time to bingo, but pushed the notion aside.
Just focus on what you can control,
he told himself.

Steve Bonn kept watch on Dan and updated Neil. “I’ve got eyes on the swimmer. He is being pulled far from the raft so we’re going to have to pick him up. No way he will be able to swim back.”

“Roger,” said Neil. “Stand by. I’m disconnecting the basket now.”

A minute later Neil lowered the hook to Dan, who clipped it to his harness. By prearrangement, Dan was hoisted just above the wave tops and air-taxied toward the raft.

Neil later recalled a frightening moment when he was looking down at Dan: “He was swinging like a wrecking ball because his fins were acting like sails. I grabbed hold of the swaying cable to steady it, and that’s when I felt my shoulder pop.”

Neil had dislocated his shoulder, but he could do nothing about it at that moment because the raft had just come into view. “Okay, ah . . . forward and right fifteen feet,” he panted.

Dan was carried to within twenty feet of the raft, and Neil put him in the water, watched him unclip, and started retracting cable. The pain in his shoulder was radiating outward into his arm and down his back, and he thought,
We can’t abort this mission because of me.
He decided he’d fix the problem himself. Positioning himself sideways to his jump seat, he took a deep breath and then launched himself—injured shoulder first—into the seat. A searing, burning sensation shot through his arm, but he felt the bone go back in the socket.

Adam Prokosh—in pain himself from several injuries—watched Neil with wide eyes, not sure why the hoist operator threw himself into the seat. Adam wanted to ask what had happened, but the rotors were too loud, and the hoist operator was already racing to reattach the basket.

•  •  •  

Rescue swimmer Dan Todd had a more difficult challenge reaching the raft than he did the first time. He was in the midst of a series of waves that seemed ever more confused. “One minute,” he later explained, “a big wave approached from the back and I’d be bodysurfing, but then the surge of the wave would carry my legs right over the top of my head and I’d have to ball up a little to avoid getting my back broken.”

The waves were going toward the raft, but the current was moving the opposite way, and although he repeatedly bodysurfed, balled up, then swam, he still couldn’t get to the raft. “Just when I’d get the hang of these waves coming up from behind me, another wave would materialize off to my side and slap me in the face, rolling me sideways. They were absolutely crazy. But it was the current that really made everything so difficult.”

Trying to cover a mere twenty feet in such a strong current became a frustrating journey. He’d bodysurf a wave tantalizingly close to the raft, but as the wave passed Dan, it would collide with the raft, pushing the vessel beyond reach.

Dan’s arm hit something in the foam and he grabbed it with his hand. A fifty-foot line trailed from the raft to a parachute-shaped sea anchor made of fabric, intended to slow and stabilize the raft. The rescue swimmer held on tight, let a wave push him forward, then pulled in a couple feet of slack until the wave hit the raft and straightened out the line, pulling Dan along, about three feet below the surface. The next wave propelled the swimmer forward, and again he hauled in a couple more feet of slack before being towed behind the raft. “I couldn’t help but notice that while being dragged,” Dan remembered, “how peaceful it seemed just a few feet below the surface. It was actually quite beautiful, and if I looked downward, the visibility was excellent. Then when I’d come to the surface, it was complete chaos, like being inside a washing machine. The difference was so unexpected it was striking.”

After three or four of these rides, Dan reached the raft and motioned for the next survivor to come out. This hoist went like clockwork. The basket was just a few feet away, partly because Neil was learning to gauge the waves and the current, but also because Steve Bonn had maneuvered the aircraft to a mere ten feet above the wave tops. Normally the helo would be a good thirty feet above the biggest waves, but Steve knew the lower he positioned the aircraft, the less time the basket would be in the air and blown around. Steve relied on Jenny to warn him when a big wave was coming, and he ignored the continuous cautionary voice from the radar altimeter, squawking, “Altitude, altitude.”

Jenny was juggling her duties of monitoring the instruments, managing communications with the orbiting C-130, recalculating the fuel burn, and operating the in-flight camera. She was looking through the camera to find Dan in the white water below when she reminded herself to scan the seas again. Just as her head was turning to look out the side window, something caught her eye in the chin bubble down by her feet. A snarling peak at the top of a giant wave was rushing up toward the belly of the helicopter.

Steve felt the pressure on his collective (the control lever for altitude) as Jenny announced in a hurried voice, “Up! Up! Up!” Together the two pilots sent the helo climbing, barely escaping the extreme wave.

•  •  •  

Dan, treading water, watched the helo shoot upward, relieved to see it had dodged the three-story wave and gotten the survivor safely in the aircraft. Just as he pivoted to see if the raft was close enough to try to swim to, he witnessed the nightmare of every rescue swimmer. A big wave caught the raft just right and lifted it almost completely out of the water, flipping it like a pancake, so that its black bottom was now on the surface. The orange canopy was completely submerged. Panic shot through Dan.
Where are the people?
He started swimming with every ounce of strength he had.

Jenny saw the whole thing happen in slow motion. “I’d been scanning in all directions for extreme waves, and thinking that even though the magnitude of the seas was bigger than anything I’d seen, what really got my attention was the speed they were going. A mass of water moving that fast possesses an extraordinary amount of raw energy, and I marveled that Dan was in the midst of them. Then I looked toward the raft just in time to see it flip. Both Steve and I gasped, then watched Dan sprinting toward it.”

The raft likely flipped because with two fewer survivors in it, the vessel was both lighter and unbalanced. Strong rotor wash from the aircraft might also have assisted the wave in launching the raft into the air.

The fear that people were either drowning or fighting to get out of the upside-down raft gave Dan an extra boost of strength, and he swam and bodysurfed quickly toward the raft, prepared to either dive down and through the doorway or perhaps cut through the fabric floor if he had to. Just as he arrived, heads started popping up, and he counted all four remaining people hanging on to the outer lifeline encircling the raft.

“Are you okay?” shouted Dan to the group.

Someone yelled back, “We’re good.”

Dan made a split-second decision not to try to right the capsized raft.
The raft is enormous,
he thought.
It may take forever to get it right side up. They have something to hold on to, and they all have survival suits and flotation vests. Let’s get them out of here.

“Okay,” Dan hollered, looking at the person closest to him, “you’re next. Just relax and follow my directions.”

The decision not to right the raft was correct, and helped the remaining rescues go more quickly. Already outside the vessel, the survivors were ready to go. Over the next twenty minutes all four sailors were successfully hoisted up.

•  •  •  

Neil was exhausted from nonstop hoisting and wrestling the loaded basket into the cabin over and over, but when he was finished with the sailors and was looking down at Dan, he had a chance to smile. He saw Dan pull out his knife and stab the raft, knowing procedure called for sinking empty life rafts so no other aircraft or vessels would get in a dangerous position for a rescue that wasn’t needed. But what made Neil grin was that the raft had several compartments, and Dan had to repeatedly stab the raft to get it to start sinking. “At first,” recalled Neil, “I wondered what he was doing. . . . It looked like he was trying to kill some creature from a horror movie, and the creature was winning.”

•  •  •  

Jenny glanced behind her in the cabin where the survivors were packed like sardines. Most were quiet, still in a daze or in outright shock from their ordeal. Jenny radioed the C-130 that they now had all six survivors safely in the cabin, and that they were about to pick up their swimmer. Peyton Russell suggested that when they got the rescue swimmer safely on board, they should investigate a possible PIW (person in water) before they moved on to the other
Bounty
life raft with the remaining three survivors.

When Dan was lifted into the helicopter, he slumped against a survivor, panting and trying to get his breath, after thirty-five minutes of nonstop exertion. He thought how in rescue swimmer school he went through the “six-man multi,” where trainees had to rescue six “drowning” instructors in half an hour. He remembered that the rescue-swimmer manual required swimmers to have the strength to perform in heavy seas for thirty minutes. A wave of nausea rolled over him, partly because he had swallowed so much seawater, and partly because he was coming down off the adrenaline buzz and his body was crashing. He wondered how long it would take to get back to base.

Then Neil leaned in close to Dan and said, “The other helicopter had to leave because of fuel, and there are still three people in the raft. Mr. Bonn wants to know if you feel strong enough to get back in the water.”

If the helo has enough gas to keep going, I’m going to keep going, too,
thought Dan. He shouted to Neil, “Tell Mr. Bonn yes.”

Jenny recalls how they first took a few moments to investigate the possible PIW. “We came across some debris, mostly survival gear out of the overturned life rafts, along with a couple empty Gumby suits. After a quick search we had to get to the raft with the three remaining people in it because we were getting low on fuel.”

Steve put the Jayhawk in a hover near the raft, and down went Dan, now swimming markedly slower than earlier. To save time he did not enter the raft, knowing that rescue swimmer Randy Haba had probably already briefed the sailors earlier when he extracted four of the seven. Dan also remembered how when he was inside the first raft, he was thrown from one side to the other, and he wanted to avoid that possibility. So instead he stuck his head inside the vessel and hollered, “It’s only three of you, right?”

The survivors acknowledged yes, and Dan then asked about injuries and they said they had none. “Okay!” shouted Dan. “We gotta move fast.” Then he pointed to the person closest to him and hollered, “You first!”

He put the survivor in the basket without incident, but when he looked back at the raft, he saw that it had flipped.
Not again!
Just as before, Dan put his head down and began sprinting to the overturned raft. Only this time his depleted energy was no match for the waves and the current.
I’ll never make it.
Both his arms and legs felt as heavy as tree trunks, and instead of stroking and kicking smartly through the water, the sensation was as if trying to push through mud. Rolling over on his back, he looked up at the aircraft and saw Neil crouched by the open cabin door. Dan gave a thumbs-up, meaning he needed to be picked up. He prayed that the last two people in the raft had escaped and were holding on to the lifeline.