Military

A new mooring dolphin will go in this week at Coast Guard Station Juneau.

A barge with a crane has already arrived to drive the pilings.

Matt Waranius is Coast Guard civil engineer and contracting officer for the project. He says a bad section of pier at Station Juneau has been taken down and won’t be rebuilt.

 “We decided to go with a mooring dolphin, which is going to be a three-pile mooring bollard that’s sticking out about 44 feet flush with the end of the wharf and then there will be a catwalk going out to it,” Waranius says.

 He says North Pacific Erectors will be driving the three steel pilings into the seabed.

“So they’ll pick up the piles, they’ll vibrate them into place,” he says. ” They shake them and then from that point they’ll put a hammer up on the top of the crane and it’ll just be some pounding noises.”

Then a platform and catwalk will be attached.

Waranius says those pounding noises will be briefly heard Wednesday or Thursday.

Alaska’s westernmost point is actually in the Eastern Hemisphere.  Attu Island is the last in the Aleutian Chain, and closer to Russia than Alaska’s mainland.

The fog enshrouded island doesn’t get many visitors, but earlier this month the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sherman and some of her crew called, each with their own unique tie to Attu.

The Japanese invaded Attu as well as Kiska Island in June 1942.  Both were highly contested in World War II because of their location.

The U.S. military feared Attu would become a staging ground for attacks on North America. In 1943, American soldiers recaptured the island, turning it into a staging ground for attacks on Japan.

2012 visit

Seventy years later, the 378-foot Sherman glided into Massacre Bay as dawn was slowly breaking through the fog and gloom.

Attu Island has a number of grim-sounding places. Massacre Bay most likely gets its name from the murder of 15 Aleuts in 1745 by Russians.

For Sherman Commanding Officer, Capt. Joe Hester, the trip to Attu was a link to his first years in the Coast Guard, when he was assigned to the Cutter Attu, 20 years ago.

“It was a patrol boat of the Island Class, 110 feet long, crew of 17,” he said.

Hester served twice on the Cutter Attu, in Puerto Rico, where the cutter “chased a great many drug smugglers and illegal migrant smugglers.”

“When I got assigned to the Attu it had occurred to me to do some studying and figure out what the heck she was named after,” he said.  “I’d never heard of Attu Island.”

Attu and San Juan are more that 5,200 nautical miles apart.  Hester did that study “and I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be interesting someday serving done here in the southeast corner of our country in Puerto Rico aboard the Cutter Attu to someday get to the northwestern corner of our country and see this desolate island named Attu.”

Four others on the Sherman had personal connections to the Island.  Two had worked at the LORAN station before the Coast Guard shut it down.

The abandoned Long Range Aids to Navigation Station sits white atop a wide brown bluff, with Mount Terrible in the background.

When the men stepped ashore, Hester said, the two who had served at Attu LORSTA told him they’d never thought they’d see the place again.

“On that desolate island, there’s really only the Coast Guard LORAN station, with 22 people on it, which for those six weeks included these two and they didn’t remember each other,” he said, laughing.  “But that probably speaks a lot to the mindset of the people who serve out there, especially if they’re near the end of their tour. You know, it’s just be focused on the next day … ‘only got six more weeks’ …  just focused on getting out of there.”

One of the five Sherman crew to visit Attu had worked at several remote LORAN stations and always wanted to go to the one on Attu.  The Coast Guard closed the station in 2010, before he got a chance.

As the five were on the island, a Coast Guard C-130 aircraft circled overhead to drop parts to the Sherman.  When the LORAN station was open, the plane was among the few connections to the outside world.  Weather permitting, it came once every other week.

Weather often did not permit.   That was not lost on Boatswain’s Mate Chief (BMC) Shane Melott – a retired Navy man turned Coast Guard.   The day of the Attu visit was cold and so was he, despite the high tech Gore-Tex, thick boots, and other modern gear he wore.

“I was just thinking about how cold we are in the gear that we’ve got today and I know that those guys went out without the type of gear that we’re using,” he said.  “So I’m sure they were just freezing all the time and trying to do what they had to do before getting back in to try and warm up a little bit.”

Melott’s grandfather, from Oklahoma, was a heavy equipment operator on Attu Island during the war. He  didn’t talk much about the experience until his grandson announced he had joined the Navy, (before the Coast Guard).

“My grandfather said that when he was in the Corp of Engineers in World War II he was up here building bases.  And basically he and his team got invited along to go run the Japs out of the Aleutian Islands. And while I don’t think he was in the primary wave to hit Attu, I know he was on Attu.  And he also went to Kiska,” Melott said.

BMC Mellott called  Attu Island desolate but gorgeous.  He said it now has special significance to him.

It was Capt. Hester’s idea to visit Attu during the Sherman’s fall Bering Sea patrol.  He described trenches, abandoned fuel tanks, and a few memorials as standing “in silent witness to the courage and sacrifice” of those who fought to reclaim the island for the U.S.

He watched the five crewmen’s reaction, including BMC Melott.

[quote]“And he walked the beaches and he saw the piers and saw the places where his grandpa had served about 70 years ago.  It meant something to me and I think it meant a lot to the chief,” Hester said.[/quote]

As the men departed the island, a snowy owl “landed atop a cement door frame, standing alone amidst the rubble of a World War II building in the tundra,” the captain said.

[quote]“The giant bird never deigned to even  look at us, only over its shoulder, possibly contemplating the large white Coast Guard cutter in the bay from which we’d come and would soon return, leaving this barren, quiet place to the owl and the geese, to the abandoned wreckage of war and fishermen long gone, and to the ghosts and memories that haunt” Attu.[/quote]

 

 

Lt. Lance Leone was the only survivor of a fatal helicopter crash in 2010, in which three people from Coast Guard Air Station Sitka died. Leone was the co-pilot aboard Coast Guard Helicopter 6017 as it flew back to Sitka from Astoria, Oregon.

Leone recently talked about the mission and the events leading up to the flight, as well as his experience in the cockpit with Lieutenant Sean Krueger, the pilot in command and a longtime friend. On their way north, they saw a small Coast Guard boat leaving a station in Washington. Krueger decided to fly low over the boat.

“And he started a righthand turn down in a decreasing altitude along the coastline. At this point in the flight recorder it gets very interesting. I say “Well, that’s Quillayute.” And I say it wrong. … But I said it, and on the third time of saying it, moments later, we hit something we never saw.”

Electrical wires, stretching nearly 2,000 feet between the mainland and nearby James Island. The impact caught the chopper’s right main landing gear. Its four main rotor blades broke off, and the fuselage was torn into five pieces, coming to rest in shallow water about 150 yards northeast of the island.

Leone talked more about the crash with KCAW’s Ed Ronco in an interview that was recorded last week.

LEONE: I was in the left seat. My shoulders and my knees and my head were all banging around in the cabin for I don’t know how long. It felt very slow motion, but then there was a rapid stop, and that rapid stop quickly became a rapid liquid stop. And I was underwater, upside-down, in a helicopter.

RONCO: It happened that fast.

LEONE: It was that fast. We were flying, everything was fine, and then it blew apart. When I was underwater I didn’t know anything. It felt like the world was shaking apart.

RONCO: What did it sound like?

LEONE: Screeching? Screeching and cracking. I had double hearing protection, but it was kind of like a pounding and a screeching. I got to listen to it on the voice recorder and it is literally screeching and crashing. I don’t know how to link it to … what anyone else would hear. I guess, like a car accident?

RONCO: Was that difficult, listening to those recordings?

LEONE: I had the opportunity to read the recordings months in advance. Actually this time last year was the first time I had the ability to read through the recording and to go through and see what I had done right. I’d read the investigation and seen everything I’d done wrong, and that the crew had done wrong, because that’s what they’d focused on. But to see what I’d done right and everything I did to the best of my ability, but then to listen to it and hear the sounds, it was … I would say “troubling,” but I was ready for it, based upon my desire. I didn’t have to. My lawyers could’ve just listened to it with me outside the room, but I wanted to make sure the nonverbal made it into there.

Leone is referring to nonverbal communications going on in the cockpit. He wanted to make sure they were part of the investigation record, which would later be summed up in what’s called a FAM, or Final Action Memo.

RONCO: The FAM says there were six minutes between impact and the time you fired off a flare. What was going on in those six minutes?

LEONE: So, after the abusive vibrations and then it stopping underwater, I did what every aviator would do out there. We train on it all the time. Yearly, we’re flipped over in a chair and go through the procedures. I did the procedures the Coast Guard taught me. I retracted my collective, found my exit, pushed the exit out of the way. Undid my cords, released my harness and pulled through the hole to get out. This is where it changed a little from what I’d done before. I was kicking to get out and I wasn’t getting to the surface. I hadn’t put my regulator in to breath underwater yet. I just assumed I’d be able to get out quicker than be able to have to put that in. Normally when we do it, it’s a slow flip in a chair. This was an unbelievably fast hitting the water. I can’t quote on how many Gs but I know there was a lot of impact having been flying through the air at 125 knots, and hitting the wires at approximately 115 feet. At that point, we were a projectile.

Leone used an emergency air supply helicopter crews carry. It’s called a HEEDS bottle, which stands for Helicopter Emergency Egress Device. It carries about 1.5 cubic feet of compressed air. How long that lasts depends on how you breathe. In training, Leone could usually get between 7 and 13 good breaths out of it. But after the crash, as he tried to find his way out of the underwater wreckage, he only managed six.

LEONE: Coming to the surface, my eyes were burning because when the 6017 crashed, we were pretty much max-fueled with JP8 jet fuel, which is very similar to kerosene. So when I came up on the surface, I was covered in kerosene. I still had my helmet on, and I started looking for anything to float on, because I couldn’t kick hard enough to keep my head and my body out of the water enough to be comfortable.

Leone broke his collarbone in the accident, and as he tried to inflate his life vest, he discovered his arms weren’t working.

LEONE: It was the first time I’d ever asked my body to do something and my body said “No.” But my wrist worked, and so I cranked my wrist against the base of the regulator, which was sitting right to my left, and for some reason, it worked, with just that little bit of wrist motion.

The vest inflated, but there were still problems. Leone’s dry suit was torn and filling with water, and although he says he wasn’t in pain, he certainly was injured.

LEONE: I had a piece of helicopter that had lodged itself in my left forearm. My right hand was fairly mutilated because of pounding against something in the helicopter. My right shin was open to the bone. The bone looked like a corncob that had been eaten – like the white, remaining husk of corn. My ankle was badly swollen. But the only real injury was a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder, which are both seatbelt injuries from the seatbelt that saved my life.

Now floating in the water between James Island and La Push, Washington, Leone began to look for his crewmates.

LEONE: I’d assumed based on every survival class I’d taken that everybody else would be there. I’d not taken classes where you’re the only one left to survive. You’re always part of a team. And I couldn’t find Sean, Brett and Adam. I didn’t know where they were. It was very disheartening, but I knew I had to stay afloat if I could ever figure out where they were.

Leone looked for his emergency beacon, but with his arms disabled, he couldn’t get to it. Next, he reached for a signaling mirror to try and reflect sunlight and catch someone’s attention. As he opened that pocket, out popped a pencil-sized flare. He managed to assemble it using only his fingertips. By the time he fired it into the air, a skiff from the La Push harbormaster’s office was already heading in his direction.

LEONE: As they approached me, they said “We’re going to grab you, we’ve got other people looking for the other three.” I, at that moment, had the wherewithal to tell them “I don’t want you to pull on my arms,” because I didn’t feel like they were attached. In my head, I kind of envisioned them being disconnected from my body, although my fingers worked. Because I couldn’t use the rest of them, I just pictured they were either just flopping around with nerves just connected, but with bones not… so they, with all the training that they’ve had, pulling fishing nets aboard that boat, they scooped me out of the water by dropping the gunnels of the vessel below my back and sliding me into the back of that johnboat – I call it a johnboat, but it’s just an aluminum craft. But those were the heroes of the day for me.”

Leone was taken to a nearby hospital and then medevacked to Seattle for further recovery. His parents from Maine and Florida, and his family in Sitka met him there within 12 hours.

LEONE: Ellen, my unbelievably great wife, loaded up the children, got an Alaska Airlines flight the Coast Guard booked for her, and she landed in Seattle. The pilots came on the intercom and had everyone sit down so she and the children could get off. The Coast Guard brought her directly to the hospital to see me.

Less than a week after the crash, hundreds of Sitkans, as well as high ranking Coast Guard officers and elected officials gathered at Air Station Sitka for a memorial service in honor of Krueger, Banks and Hoke. Leone was there, too.

LEONE: I had wanted to attend a memorial service in La Push, but my doctors wouldn’t let me go, because they were afraid of blood clotting.

RONCO: Were you medically ready to leave the hospital when the memorial service happened, or was that a little faster than – it just seems fast to me, I guess.

LEONE: I didn’t like being in a hospital. I don’t like being a patient. I like helping people, I don’t like being helped. I don’t know what it is about my personality. The day after the accident I asked when I could stand up and they said “Just wait one more day.” So on Day 3, I stood up, walked around, did the stairs, and on that day I started the long process of physical therapy. It was quick. Similar injuries to a car accident. Obviously physical wounds were very quick to heal. Now, the mental stuff took a lot longer.

In 2010, a Coast Guard helicopter crash in Washington state claimed the lives of three airmen from Sitka.

Today, for the first time, we’ll hear from the sole survivor of the incident, Lieutenant Lance Leone.

The MH-60 Jayhawk, known by its tail number, 6017, had been upgraded in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. An aircrew of four left Air Station Sitka to pick up the new chopper in Astoria, Oregon and fly it back to Alaska.

On July 7, 2010, during the first leg of that return flight, the helicopter struck wires near La Push, Washington, and crashed into the sea.

Lieutenant Sean Krueger, who was the pilot in command, along with Petty Officer First Class Adam Hoke and Petty Officer Second Class Brett Banks – were killed.

Leone, the co-pilot, faced criminal charges in the aftermath of the crash. Those charges were dismissed, but an official reprimand was placed on his record, and he was transferred to a desk job in San Antonio, Texas.

He spoke to KCAW’s Ed Ronco last week. It is the first time he’s talked on the record to a news organization, and we’re going to bring you the interview in three parts. Today, we begin just before the crash, which happened shortly after Leone transferred to Air Station Sitka.

LEONE: I literally had just gotten there. I was still living in a bed and breakfast in the community because my household goods had not arrived yet. So, all of our couches and stuff had not arrived yet from Elizabeth City, because it was taking a barge around the whole world. I don’t know where it went exactly.

RONCO: It felt like the whole world.

LEONE: It felt like that.

RONCO: If we can begin with when you first get to Astoria: Was it the morning of? Or the night before?

LEONE: We were assigned to fly down to Astoria in the Juliet model. 6017 was flying from Elizabeth City, which was an aircraft I’d flown before quite a bit. It was flying across the country and we were flying down from Sitka. We were going to rendezvous in Astoria, exchange paperwork on the two different aircraft, and then the pilots were going to shake hands, swap aircraft, and we were going to fly back to Sitka, and the other aircraft was going to fly back to Elizabeth City. It’s an often done thing in the Coast Guard. Our large depot maintenance is all done in Elizabeth City, so we have to switch our aircraft out.

RONCO: What does it feel like to pick up a new chopper? Is it like driving a car off a lot, or…

LEONE: So, it’s interesting — 6017, I had actually flown it the whole time I was in Elizabeth City. I’d done most of the test flights on it when it came out of the depot maintenance. I’d flown it. When we say it’s brand new, it was refurbished. We’d bought these 60s in 1991 through 1993 – that timeframe – and they’re the same aircraft. They look absolutely gorgeous always, because we have some of the best maintainers in the world. They’re not brand new, but they are totally, beautifully refurbished. The 6017 had sat in Elizabeth City and I’d flown it on cases in Elizabeth City. It was great to go from the J model to the T model. It was like a new aircraft even though they’ve just been polished and re-done from the inside, like they do with most aircraft that you fly on in the commercial world. They just replace all the parts.

Leone says he was selected for the mission two days beforehand. He and Lt. Sean Krueger, the chopper’s pilot, had met at the Academy. And although Leone had known Krueger for most of adult life, this would be one of their first times flying together. As co-pilot, Leone’s responsibility was inside the cockpit – to monitor equipment and navigate the helicopter along a safe course.

LEONE: The morning of the mishap, we all woke up, we had breakfast at a hotel in Astoria. Everyone was very happy to have had the opportunity to go to Astoria. It was one of the warmest couple days on record there. Leaving Sitka, heading down to Astoria where it was beautiful, taking the opportunity to do lots of shopping at Costco. We were all very motivated to get back home.

LEONE: We’d spent three days talking about, on the way down, what we were going to do on the way back up. How the weather, what the winds were going to be affecting. We did a lot of talking around the dinner table and the breakfast table that morning about some of the different things we were going to have to experience. The morning was fairly hurried, because we knew we had a long way to go. 900 miles with a possible 20-knot headwind depending what altitude we were at was going to make it a very long day, so we knew we had to get on the road. We got all the checklists completed, a lot of business on the ground. We took off, climbed to 800 feet, and upon reaching 800 feet, we realized we’d had a headwind that was predicted. We came right back down again to a lower altitude. It was more of an off-shore or on-shore breeze, because there are cliffs all along that shoreway there. It was an absolutely gorgeous day.

The Jayhawk had been upgraded with a new avionics system – those are the electronics that control the helicopter. It included a new autopilot system. Leone refers to it as a “coupler.”

LEONE: When you cross through into Canadian airspace, you have to tell them exactly what time and what location you’ll be crossing into that airspace. So I set that track, I told them how far away it was, and I engaged our auto pilot, which couples up the flight controls with the path I’d set. The path was an offshore path that hit a point on the Canadian airspace, which we would then tell them we were going to fly through there.

RONCO: So Canadian authorities know exactly where you’re going to be, and that that’s you.

LEONE: Correct. We were making jokes about it. I don’t think Canadians ever shot down an American plane headed north. It’s way more important going into American airspace, but you give them the same courtesy that they give us.

Krueger was an experienced pilot whose career included a three-year exchange program with the British Royal Navy. But Leone was more experienced on the revamped helicopter’s systems, especially the autopilot.

LEONE: I was very excited to show him how you can engage it. It will fly itself. As long as you keep it away from obstacles and have the right altitude it will fly you safely to wherever you tell it to fly you.

By this time, Coast Guard 6017 was nearing La Push, Washington. The small town on the Olympic Peninsula is home to the Quileute Tribe, as well as a small Coast Guard boat station.

LEONE: We both saw something up ahead. It was a Coast Guard cutter leaving port – actually, a CG small boat, a 47-footer, leaving (Station) Quillayute (River).

The helicopter was flying at 220 feet when Krueger began flying it toward the boat. Leone says it’s a maneuver pilots often perform at sea when checking on fishing boats or spotting a Coast Guard vessel. The Coast Guard’s report on the accident acknowledges that performing the maneuver is not isolated to this incident, but says vessels should not be – quote – “zoomed” except in an emergency or during rescue operations. Leone describes the next 42 seconds, when Helicopter 6017 slowed to 115 knots, descended to 114 feet, and passed over the boat.

LEONE: At this time, he (Krueger) said “coupler disengaged” and he started a righthand turn down in a decreasing altitude along the coastline. At this point in the flight recorder it gets very interesting. I say “Well, that’s Quillayute.” And I say it wrong. I can’t read it. It’s a very difficult word. It’s like many Tlingit terms that are hard for us to read in our language. But I said it, and on the third time of saying it, moments later, we hit something we never saw. And … I was … at that moment, everything changed.

That’s Coast Guard Lt. Lance Leone, recorded last week (Nov 12) at the studios of Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. His attorney, John Smith, listened in on the conversation from his office near Washington, D.C., but did not prevent his client from answering any of our questions.

Tomorrow, Leone describes the accident, and how it changed his life and his career forever.

“We were flying, everything was fine, and then it blew apart. When I was underwater I didn’t know anything. It felt like the world was shaking apart.”

 

A new memorial was dedicated on the waterfront on Tuesday to commemorate those who lost their lives aboard the U.S.S. Juneau seventy years ago.

The new memorial still retains the original plaques and flag standard of the old memorial. But it’s shaped differently and located near the south end of the Seawalk.

The previous memorial — built in 1987 near where the new Visitors Center is located – visibly suffered from the elements.

Some of the sounds and voices from Tuesday’s rededication of the U.S.S. Juneau Memorial included the Juneau Community Band, CBJ Port Director Carl Uchytil, an invocation by Lieutenant Colonel Pat Travers of the U.S. Air Force Reserve and who is also pastor of Saint Paul’s Church, CBJ Port Director Gary Gillette, U.S. Navy Petty Officer Gregory Cazemier, Assemblymember Randy Wanamaker, and trumpeter Dave Hurlbut.

 

 

Six-hundred and 87 sailors, including the five Sullivan brothers, died when the light cruiser U.S.S. Juneau was sunk during the naval battle of Guadalcanal.

Four sailors – mostly medics and pharmacists by training – were transferred from the Juneau to the cruiser San Francisco before the Juneau was sunk.

Out of the estimated 115 sailors who initially survived the explosion and sinking of the Juneau, only ten sailors remained when they were rescued eight days later. They rest had succumbed to sharks and exposure.

The Department of the Navy’s Naval Historical Center lists two of the ten survivors as Signalman First Class Lester Eugene Zook and Chief Gunner’s Mate George Imari Mantere.

Albert Shaw of Juneau was a nephew of Mantere. Shaw says Mantere came up to Juneau for the 1987 dedication of the original memorial. We talked to him about his uncle as we hustled from the new memorial site to a reception at the Visitors Center.

 

 

[vimeo 53978266 w=500 h=303]

Five people were reported rescued Wednesday morning after their tug and barge went aground on the Aleutian Chain.

The 78-foot tug ‘Polar Wind’ and the barge ran hard aground in Pavlov Bay Tuesday night in eight-foot seas and 30-knot winds.

A Coast Guard H-60 helicopter from Kodiak hoisted two crewman aboard and an H-65 helicopter from the cutter Sherman hoisted the other three crew. They were all taken to nearby Cold Bay on Wednesday morning.

No injuries reported and no pollution reported so far. The Coast Guard says overflights of the grounding site are likely. The owner of the tug is also expected to the salvage the vessel.