Military

One of the most riveting stories of disaster and bravery at sea is now a television documentary, being broadcast this week on KTOO’s 360 North.

Tragedy and Courage on the Bering Sea, by filmmaker John Sabella, recounts the fire that destroyed the Fishing / Processing Vessel Galaxy in 2002.  The story is told entirely by the ship’s captain, Dave Shoemaker.

As Rosemarie Alexander reports, Shoemaker is now devoting his life to training people who spend their time on the water.

On October 20^th, 2002, Captain Dave Shoemaker and his crew aboard the 180-foot Galaxy were fishing in the Bering Sea some 30 miles southwest of St. Paul Island in the Pribiloffs. About 4:20 p.m., the ship was hit by a very large wave on the starboard side.

From all accounts, smoke was immediately detected on multiple decks.  Captain Shoemaker was in the wheelhouse when a factory foreman alerted him.

Thick, black smoke began to fill the bridge.

As he set the fire alarm, explosions began to wrack the ship.

“The next thing I feel is this boat rock violently and this explosion took place, and now I’ve got people screaming ‘man overboard,’ ” Shoemaker told filmmaker John Sabella.

Up to that point, it had been just another day on the freezer longliner.

“Within 4 minutes there had been a huge backdraft explosion that basically destroyed the vessel and most of its survival equipment and all of their safety plans and procedures,” Sabella says.

He originally produced training films for fishing groups with Shoemaker. The television documentary grew out of those projects.

“This catastrophe occurred so fast it just overwhelmed the crew,” Sabella says.

The 137-page U.S. Coast Guard accident report is gripping, but the story of the Galaxy in the Captain’s words is powerfully evocative.

The documentary condenses the more than three hours between the discovery of smoke to Shoemaker’s rescue.  He was the last man on the burning ship.

“I’m asking people to jump off the back of a boat that’s 34 feet out of the water at the dock, and add 20-foot seas to that. You’ve got 40, 45, 50 feet and these kids are standing back there petrified,” Shoemaker recounts in the documentary. “Not only am I going to have them jump off the back of the boat,  I’m going to have them jump out of a four-story building.”

Several of the crew members were in their early 20s; for some it was their first experience on a floating processor.

Three men died, but the rest were rescued, including a National Marine Fisheries Observer who was in the frigid water for nearly  an hour and a half without a survival suit.

Since that day, Shoemaker has told the story hundreds of times.

“And when I bring up the fact that I prayed on the bow of the boat on the Galaxy I was actually saying ‘goodbye world, hello heaven.'”

Shoemaker had been with the Bering Sea fleet for nearly 30 years, but this was a near-death experience no one ever expects.

Good Samaritan boats broke off their fishing to help rescue the Galaxy crew. Later, skippers called him in the hospital where he recovered from his burns.

“They said, ‘you know Dave, if it can happen to you it can happen to any of us. We need to pay closer attention.'”

He is now a Coast Guard certified trainer with the North Pacific Fishing Vessel Owners’ Association.

“This is something I’m going to do for as long as I can do it and get in front as many fishermen that I can,” he says.

He has realized a goal of speaking to the cadets at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.  He’s become a trainer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA fisheries.

It wasn’t that Shoemaker or his crew had not trained for emergencies before. Training was part of their work.

“I think one of the things that happens in the fleet is everybody becomes calloused at one particular point or another, because we don’t have the experience to relate to. We’ve not had  the emergency we had to deal with.  We become a little hardened to the fact that it could in fact happen,” he says.

Shoemaker knows mistakes were made that day. Throughout the film he talks about trying to regain control of his crew and the ship.

The Coast Guard report of the Galaxy fires and sinking calls his actions extraordinarily brave and heroic. He and two other crew members were given Coast Guard commendations.

“Twenty-three people managed to survive and I attribute that to the effort, energy and heroism of every individual on the vessel that day,” he says.

He believes most of the Galaxy crew members have left fishing.  His therapy for dealing with the trauma is to help other fisherman achieve through training what he calls a level of unconscious competence in emergency response.

Tragedy and Courage on the Bering Sea can be seen on 360North, Sunday, at 7 p.m.  360North can be found on GCI cable channel 18 in Juneau, and channel 15 elsewhere in Alaska, as well as DirecTV and Dish Network.

The new director of the Missile Defense Agency Vice Admiral James Syring called the test an overall failure.

The ground based missile defense system has a spotty record. The program has been around for decades. Critics dubbed it the “Star Wars program” when it was introduced during the Reagan Administration.

It’s been five years since there was a successful test.

Phil Coyle, a senior fellow with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, once oversaw tests for the Department of Defense.

“That type of failure has occurred twice before in flight intercept tests,” he said of the most recent failure.

The Missile Defense Agency hopes to move ahead with its plan to add 14 new interceptor missiles to Fort Greely by 2017. That would bring the total in Alaska to 44.

Syring vowed the new missiles will be tested before they’re purchased, something that hasn’t always happened in the past with the ground based system.

At a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, Syring told Chairman Dick Durbin the country rushed to install the missile interceptor systems because of perceived threats. There are more weapons in the missile defense stable, including the more successful sea-based Aegis system.

Durbin said the government wastes money on the land based system by buying missiles before they’re proven to work. He called the move “flying before buying.”

“The deployment schedule was so demanding that there was deployment before development, deployment before proven test. And that was not the case when it came to Aegis?” he asked Syring.

“I would agree with that sir,” Syring responded.

Aegis is designed to intercept shorter-range ballistic missiles. The ground based interceptors in Alaska and California are designed to knock out long-distance missiles.

Syring told the panel his agency needs to continue testing the ground-based systems.

“We cannot stop testing. We must continue to test. We cannot wait another 4.5 to 5 years to test again,” he pleaded.

Each one of those tests costs more than $200 million. The agency plans two tests in the coming years. The next would be in March – and if that’s successful, Syring said the Agency would start buying missiles for Greely.

Syring said the Pentagon decided to expand the missile field in Alaska because of threats from North Korea.

Phil Coyle said neither North Korea nor Iran has the capability of hitting the U.S. with a long-range missile yet, and if either did, it’s unlikely they’d use it.

“Both Iran and North Korea have done some reckless things, but they’re not suicidal,” he said in a Wednesday phone interview. “And if they were to attack the United States or Europe, or in the case of North Korea, Japan, that would be really suicidal. It would justify the most massive retaliation you could imagine.”

While the missiles won’t arrive at Fort Greely for some time, construction work refurbishing missile field one is expected to begin this summer.

The United States’ only heavy icebreaker will soon be back in service after a four-year, $90 million renovation. The USCGC Polar Star was scheduled to leave Unalaska last Friday to undergo several weeks of ice trials in the Arctic.

The 399-foot-long ship is painted bright red. Its decks are clean and shiny, and brand-new anchors rest in neatly coiled piles of chain on the prow. Ensign Paul Garcia explains that this is all the result of a massive overhaul of the ship that wrapped up in 2012. “The engines were getting replaced, the main gas turbines were getting replaced, all of our cranes … those are all brand new,” he says.

The ship also has new navigation equipment, new systems for lowering anchors and small boats, and a newly-equipped gym and movie theater to keep the crew in good spirits during polar voyages that can last up to six months.

The renovations are extensive and impressive, but the question still remains – does the ship actually work?

“Now, we need to make sure that all our equipment is functioning correctly, that we’re still able to withstand the same amount of force and break the same amount of ice that we were back in the ’80s,” says Garcia.

To that end, the crew of the Polar Star will be heading up to the Arctic, where they will perform various ice breaking maneuvers using a strategy that amounts to repeatedly beaching the ship on the ice.

“We have a lot of weight up forward,” says Garcia. “We kind of have a rounded hull and so we use our three main gas turbines to come up on the ice and then use that weight to come down and it smashes the ice and that’s how we create the channels. It’s called backing and ramming.”

And since the Coast Guard hasn’t had a heavy icebreaker for several years now, these ice tests will also be an opportunity for inexperienced crew members to get trained and qualified.

“You’re always going to have some growing pains,” says Garcia. “But this few weeks that we’re out here should hopefully take care of those. Fall time, I think we’ll be fully operational again and ready to perform any mission that the Coast Guard needs us to perform.”

While the Polar Star is heading for Arctic waters this summer, it will actually be spending most of its time in service in the Antarctic, breaking channels through the ice to resupply McMurdo Research Station. In addition to this yearly mission, dubbed Operation Deep Freeze, the ship will be available for scientific research, search and rescue and law enforcement missions, and, most importantly, maintaining a U.S. “presence” in Arctic waters.

It is one of those rare Congressional exchanges that’s both dramatic and compelling: Yesterday during a House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who lost her legs and use of her right arm when she served in Iraq, dressed down an IRS contractor who used his military disability status to receive government contracts reserved for disabled vets.

Women in America’s armed services will have new options for what units they can join in coming years, the Pentagon says. The military said in January that it will end its combat exclusion that set a minimum size for units in which women could be deployed; the limit kept many women away from front-line combat units. The shift means women could join elite forces such as the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs.

Some Thane and Douglas Island residents saw an unusual sight Thursday night: The ferry Matanuska sailing up Gastineau Channel.

Witnesses posted Facebook notes guessing it had made a wrong turn. Ferries take a different route to Juneau’s Auke Bay ferry terminal.

But it turns out the ship was delivering a passenger in need of medical attention.

A 45-foot Coast Guard boat met the Matanuska to collect the 72-year-old man between 10 and 11 p.m. Thursday.

Agency external affairs staffer Grant DeVuyst says an ambulance took the man from a downtown dock to Bartlett Regional Hospital. The nature of his ailment was not disclosed.

The same boat picked up a 66-year-old man with stroke symptoms from the cruise ship Golden Princess earlier that night. The man was taken to Auke Bay and on to the hospital.

No information was immediately available about the two passengers’ conditions.