Deadliest Sea (29 page)

W
ITHIN A COUPLE OF WEEKS
, the cutter was on patrol back up near the ice edge. It was a sunny day with no wind, and the water was dead calm near the retreating ice floe. Captain Lloyd piped an instruction for the crew to report to the flight deck. It was time for a swim call. The ship’s bagged survival suits were sorted by size. The crew pulled them on and leaped off the stern deck into the ocean. They bobbed up and down in the water, practicing swimming and linking arms in the flat seas. The officers paid $3 each for the privilege, a collection for the ship’s morale fund. For the junior crew, the exercise was free. Chuck Weiss observed from the deck. He was impressed by how well the suits worked, and it made him feel good to see everyone out there for so long.

Weiss had seen a few of the rescued
Ranger
crew members again, in the UniSea Bar in Dutch Harbor. He was accustomed to getting some nasty looks from fishermen at the bars in Dutch. The Coasties didn’t always feel welcome in there; they were the cops on the water, after all. But after the rescue, when Weiss walked in with a group from the ship, several fishermen came right up to them.

“Hey, we want to get you guys some beers!”

More people approached the Coasties: “You guys off the
Munro
?”

“Yeah,” one of the seamen answered.

“Right on!”

Weiss was slapped on the back. Someone ordered him a drink. Soon, there was a round of shots in front of them.

“These guys right here, they’re lifesavers,” one fisherman announced to the crowded bar.

I
N MID
-A
PRIL, THE
C
OAST
G
UARD
and NTSB Marine Board of Investigation convened in a third location, in a conference room at the Red Lion Hotel in downtown Seattle, just a few blocks from the famous fishmongers at Pike Place Market and less than two miles from the Fishing Company of Alaska’s corporate office. One by one, the
Ranger
fishermen described what they thought had contributed to the sinking. The engineers often didn’t keep consistent watch, some said. Several more testified that there was regular drinking on the boat, often among the ship’s officers. A number of men said that in recent months the
Ranger
had been traveling through ice more forcefully than they had experienced before, on this or other vessels.

“The ice is just like being…on a frozen lake,” Ryan Shuck explained several days into the Seattle hearings. “You see a few little cracks in it…. You couldn’t really see a lot of water between one piece and the other. It was pretty dense.”

Shuck recounted for the board the arguments he’d witnessed between the fish master and the previous captain, Steve Slotvig, including the fight about the boat’s speed traveling through ice. And he was questioned about who he’d seen drinking on the ship.

“Quite honestly,” Ryan answered, “I’d say probably 80 percent of the crew, at one point or another.”

“Did you use alcohol on board?” Shuck was asked.

“I have.”

“Was alcohol allowed on board?” one of the Coast Guard investigators pressed.

“No.”

“What was the company’s policy?”

“The company’s policy is no drugs or alcohol on the vessel.”

“But you’d estimate 80 percent of the crew was drinking even though that was the policy?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I’d say that’s probably a conservative estimate.”

Ryan was asked if he’d seen any of the engineers drinking. He testified that the assistant engineer, Rodney Lundy, was frequently intoxicated.

“Did you ever see him actually drinking alcohol or beer?” the Coastie pushed.

“Not on the boat.”

“So how did you know that he was frequently intoxicated?”

“I guess just the same way that, if you went down to the bar right now and had a six-pack of beer and came back up, I’d probably know,” Ryan said to a few grim smiles. “You can just tell.”

Many of the
Ranger
crew, including Ryan, answered the Marine Board’s questions with counsel by their side. Even before they arrived back in Dutch Harbor, some of the men had been talking about lawsuits, and soon after Ryan Shuck’s girlfriend read his e-mail from the Coast Guard ship, she Googled “maritime lawyer.” When the rescued men checked into the Grand Aleutian, they were greeted by messages from lawyers wanting to represent them. By the time the board convened in Seattle three weeks later, the crew had split fairly evenly into two groups: those who wanted to keep fishing for the FCA, and those who were ready to lawyer up.

The company had made settlement offers to the fishermen early on: $25,000 to those who got into a life raft pretty much right away, $35,000 to the men who struggled in the water for a time before finding their way to a raft, and $75,000 for those who were
airlifted by the Coast Guard. Larger offers were made to some of the more senior crew members who’d played a key role in evacuating the ship. Factory manager Evan Holmes was one of them.

Like many of the
Ranger
fishermen, Evan had lawyers calling him in the days and weeks after the disaster. He was told that he was hurting some of the more junior guys by settling, that because he was a more experienced crew member, his lawsuit would help theirs. The pressure pissed Evan off—and so did some of the things he’d heard the guys saying. Like that they’d called the ship “
Ranger
Danger,” as a few crew members had told reporters. It wasn’t the boat that people were talking about when they used that phrase, as Evan remembered it. It was the crew.

Evan took the FCA’s money. He just wanted it over with. People died, and no lawsuit was going to change that. Evan wasn’t planning to go back to fishing—at least not right away. He wouldn’t rule it out for the future, though. He still had buddies up in Dutch. It was decent money, after all, and he’d been good at the job.

S
EVERAL DAYS INTO THE
M
ARINE
B
OARD
testimony in Seattle, Coast Guard Commander Chris Woodley was called to the witness stand. The
Ranger
had been one of about sixty head-and-gut boats enrolled in the Alternative Compliance and Safety Agreement (ACSA) and Woodley had been the original mastermind behind that program.

The goal of ACSA had been to take a fleet with proven safety problems—driven home by the loss of the
Arctic Rose
and the
Galaxy,
just a year apart—and increase its safety standards. The fact that most of the boats in the fleet had been making and selling fish products that legally only classed and load-lined vessels were permitted to sell gave the Coast Guard the leverage
needed to get the program off the ground. Most ships in the fleet were too old to be touched by the class and load line societies, Woodley explained to the Marine Board, and new fisheries management regulations focused on conservation banned companies from replacing old boats with new ones. The companies’ hard-fought fishing quotas were “tied to the steel.” Even if a company were willing to scrap an aging vessel and spend $10 million or $15 million on a new ship, they’d just end up with a beautiful new boat they couldn’t fish.

“We had several options in front of us,” Woodley testified. “Our first option is we could tell them, you guys can’t make these products anymore…. They could simply operate as fishing vessels, engage in simple head-and-gut processing operations, and there would be no increased safety standard for about fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred people that work on board those boats. That didn’t really seem to be a viable option. We’re about improving safety, not the status quo.”

Instead, Woodley explained, they came up with a new program that would bring the boats up to an “equivalent” level of safety as to what the class and load line societies require. Going into the program, the major concerns were about vessel stability, watertight integrity, and the degree to which crew could safely get off the boat in an emergency (an issue that is not addressed by class and load line societies).

“Did [the ship owners] ever express their concern over the workload that it was going to take for them to come into compliance with the program?” a Marine Board member asked.

“Absolutely,” Woodley answered. “This is a heavy lift for this fleet. We’ve estimated—this is a rough estimate—about forty million dollars going into these boats. I think, quite frankly, a lot of owners were very surprised at the condition of their vessels once they started dry-docking them and you had a marine
inspector—a Coast Guard marine inspector—climbing the tanks and finding a lot of damage.”

The board had already questioned FCA Operations Manager Bill McGill about the FCA’s experience with ACSA. The tall, gray-haired captain had sailed as master of the
Alaska Ranger
for more than a decade before advancing to a desk job, and he acted as the spokesperson for the FCA throughout the Marine Board process. (Company owner Karena Adler was never called to the witness stand.) McGill told the Marine Board that it would have made more financial sense for the FCA to stop making the ancillary products that would be banned if they didn’t comply with ACSA, than to comply and invest in the significant upgrades the safety program required. Still, the FCA had enrolled their seven vessels and had spent several million dollars on the program to date.

“We are fishermen, but we are not dummies,” McGill told the board. “The North Pacific is a rough place to make a living, and anything that enhances safety and seaworthiness of a vessel is an admirable goal.”

In late 2007, Coast Guard marine inspectors traveled to the shipyard in Japan where the FCA had most of its dry dock work done. There was more work than could be finished in the scheduled time, and the
Ranger
left the yard with a number of work items unaccomplished. All the boats enrolled in ACSA were originally supposed to have met the program’s safety requirements by January 1, 2008. By the time the
Alaska Ranger
sank three months later, the FCA ship still hadn’t met many of the ACSA goals. Then again, neither had significantly more than half of the other head-and-gut boats.

It appeared that the Coast Guard’s effort had fallen short. The Marine Board heard testimony that ACSA was underfunded and undermanned. The Coast Guard’s Chief of Inspections for the
state of Alaska revealed under questioning in Anchorage that he’d never even heard of ACSA until late in 2007, almost a year and a half after the program got off the ground. Clearly, there were communication problems between the two districts involved in bringing the boats up to the new standards. Inspectors were behind on their paperwork, and the Coast Guard’s computer data system wasn’t updated to effectively keep track of the ACSA work lists. But the Marine Board’s fact-finding revealed that the underlying problem was that this fleet of boats was in much worse shape than the Coast Guard examiners knew when they started out. The ships’ work lists were long, and the extensive dry dock time required to complete the repairs was hard to come by. It was true that most of the enrolled head-and-gut boats still hadn’t met the ACSA standards. But almost all of them were in much better shape than they had been a few years before—or than they ever would have been if the local fishing vessel examiners hadn’t pushed for the program in the first place.

W
HILE THE
C
OAST
G
UARD WAS FOCUSING
on what had gone wrong with its alternative safety program, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Anchorage was studying what had gone right. Fishing vessel safety expert Jennifer Lincoln had witnessed the ACSA program from its inception. She remembered the day when she’d driven to downtown Anchorage to meet her friend Chris Woodley for lunch. On his desk were the data from the National Marine Fisheries Service that proved the head-and-gut boats were illegally processing ancillary products. Woodley told Lincoln about his plan for an alternative safety program that would improve the seaworthiness of the Bering Sea head-and-gut fleet and showed her a list of additional safety requirements he and Charlie Medlicott had
come up with based on the
Arctic Rose
and
Galaxy
casualty investigations. Woodley asked Lincoln what she thought.

She was thrilled. Woodley’s program would require the head-and-gut boats to install life rafts on the rail of the ship that could be launched by a single person. There would be stronger requirements for training: at least five drill instructors on each boat that sailed with thirty-six or more crew. Study of earlier disasters had found that reflective tape and standard flashlights were sometimes not enough to allow rescuers to find survivors in the water—especially at night. As part of ACSA, all the survival suits on the Bering Sea head-and-gut fleet would be equipped with strobe lights.

On Sunday, March 23, 2008, Lincoln got a text message from Charlie Medlicott, the Coast Guard’s fishing vessel examiner in Dutch Harbor. “
Alaska Ranger
sank. Forty-seven people on board,” it read.

Lincoln called him. It wasn’t just about his job, and the devastating fact that one of the ACSA boats sank just as the program they’d pushed so hard for was getting off the ground. Charlie knew the guys on that boat.

On Monday morning, Lincoln was on a plane to Dutch. She’d guessed that the
Alaska Ranger
sinking would warrant a Marine Board, and she’d read enough Coast Guard accident reports to know the board would focus on a wide array of topics. She wanted to be sure that data on training and survival equipment were well captured. It would be valuable for evaluating the changes that had been implemented as a result of ACSA. Lincoln knew that it was essential to gather the information immediately, while the survivors’ memories were fresh and before they left town. Together with the NTSB investigators, Lincoln interviewed each of the fishermen before the formal questioning began. “What’s your first language?” she asked each of the survivors. “Tell me about your immersion suit.” “Did you have a strobe light?”