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Local Coast Guard rescuer to be honored Tuesday
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| For his rescue efforts last December that saved a man on a sunken tugboat off the coast near Florence, Petty Officer 2nd Class Roman Baligad from Group/Air Station North Bend will receive a special award in Washington, D.C. World Photo by Lou Sennick |
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By Howard Yune, Staff Writer The words came calmly and almost unemotionally from Roman Baligad, his brown hair closely cropped, as the U.S. Coast Guard petty officer described the night he put his life at risk to save that of a seaman caught in the storm-wracked Pacific Ocean.
Two and a half hours into the morning of Dec. 30, 2002, the 34-year-old Baligad recalled Friday at Group/Air Station North Bend, he and the three other members of a Coast Guard helicopter rescue team - the pilot, Lt. Robert Decoopman; co-pilot, Lt. Michael MacMillian; and flight mechanic, Michael Chynoweth - were aroused from their bunks at Air Facility Newport, where they were serving their one day of the week on call. Barely awake, the men were given their mission: to fly southwest over the Pacific Ocean, into sheets of rain and wind, and locate the Primo Brusco, a tugboat pulling a barge crammed with a million board-feet of logs to California from its home port in Longview, Wash.
Twenty-five miles southwest of Florence, the ocean was beginning to swallow the Primo Brusco - and threatened to devour its five crewmen.
Traveling into the teeth of a winter storm, the Primo Brusco was caught in a vise of 20-foot-high waves and 60-knot wind gusts. The waves quickly overwhelmed the 100-foot-long tug, and at 2:30 a.m. Capt. Dennis Cooley radioed the Coast Guard to report the vessel taking on water.
Despite the distress call, and the biting wind and rain, Baligad still thought in terms of salvaging the stricken boat as well as its crew as he and his crewmates boarded an orange-painted HH-65 Dolphin helicopter, its hoist cable mounted in a pod above the right-side hatch.
"As we pulled the helicopter out of the hangar, we put in a de-watering pump so that we could de-water the vessel and bail it out," said Baligad, a 13-year Coast Guardsman and a rescue swimmer since 1992. But while the helicopter was in the air, the four men received chilling news over the two-way radio: at 3 a.m., a half-hour after the captain's distress call, the tugboat's electronic radio beacon had come into contact with the Pacific's waters and activated.
The Primo Brusco had slipped beneath the waves; there would be no vessel to de-water, only five men trapped in roiling seas. All that was left for the Coast Guardsmen was to find and retrieve the seamen - and somehow survive the attempt.
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About 3:15 a.m., Baligad and his crew arrived at the tugboat's last location - to discover another Coast Guard helicopter, from Air Station North Bend, hovering over the log barge the Primo Brusco had been towing. Three times the North Bend helicopter lowered itself trying to find survivors aboard; three times the torrential rain and hampered visibility frustrated the crew's efforts.
Decoopman, piloting Baligad's helicopter, hovered closer to the barge and finally got a better view: no people hanging onto the vessel or its cargo of logs. Meanwhile, the first helicopter crew at the scene discovered a life raft nearby, with Dooley, the tug captain, and two seamen inside. Baligad's crew turned its attention back to the ocean waters, looking for the two sailors still missing: specifically, for the flashing strobe lights attached to wet suits, life rings and other ship's gear.
"We saw three flashing strobes a half-mile apart," Baligad said. Mounting himself on the helicopter's hoist hook, he lowered himself toward the water to the first strobe: the electronic beacon, but no sign of a person. Retracting Baligad's hoist, the crew hovered toward the second flashing light and again lowered him, only to find an empty light ring.
One strobe remained and the Coast Guard crew moved toward it. Clad in a blue neoprene suit with a 15 pound backpack of first-aid supplies over his shoulders, Baligad once more was lowered on the hoist, the violent winds now tossing him about like a tetherball on a rope.
Waiting below the hoist was a fourth seaman from the Primo Brusco, Mike Jensen, hanging onto another life ring but quickly being overcome by cold and fatigue, even in his wet suit.
Though he was putting his life on the line to retrieve Jensen, Baligad remembered his mind being on automatic pilot, having no thought but to follow the tenets he had learned years earlier, training at Coast Guard rescue schools in North Carolina and Florida.
"The training kicked in and the fear wasn't there," he said. "We train for this kind of thing every week."
Dangling from his hoist hook a few feet from the ocean's surface, Baligad tried time and again to reach for Jensen, only to have wind and waves lash his body and drive him away. Twenty minutes went by as the helicopter crew tried to deliver him to the seaman, to no avail.
"It wasn't a rescue by the book," he remembered; "usually we're taught to stay on the hook, but this time the wind kept blowing me away from him." Time - and the helicopter's fuel supply - were running short; the crew had not only to pull Jensen to safety, but to return him to land. Only one option was left: to let go of the hoist, drop into the frigid waters and retrieve Jensen before the bone-chilling 52-degree waters overcame him.
Baligad made his choice; he unhooked himself from the cable and moved toward the seaman. Above, in the Coast Guard helicopter, MacMillian and Chynoweth hastily rigged a "rescue basket," a cage-like stretcher, onto the hoist hook and lowered it to the surface. Within minutes, both men were pulled aboard the helicopter, first Jensen inside the basket and then Baligad.
The helicopter's fuel tank running almost dry, Decoopman was forced to find the nearest airstrip, where he would have but one chance to land in the driving rainstorm. He brought the aircraft down at Florence Municipal Airport, with barely 20 minutes' worth of fuel left in the tank and an ambulance waiting to whisk Jensen to a hospital.
Late that morning, the three survivors aboard the life raft were rescued by the crew of a Coast Guard motor lifeboat from the Umpqua River Coast Guard Station. Seven Coast Guard air and sea units, from as far afield as Sacramento, Calif. and Kodiak, Alaska, continued to comb the Pacific for 36 hours in search of the fifth member of the Primo Brusco's crew.
Their search ended the afternoon of New Year's Eve when the body of Monte Nelson, 44, of Oroville, Wash., was discovered. The strobe light attached to his wet suit had malfunctioned and he succumbed to hypothermia, the Coos County medical examiner later ruled.
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More than nine months after he pulled Mike Jensen out of the Pacific to safety, Roman Baligad will be honored in Washington by a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
On Tuesday evening, the Association for Rescue at Sea will present Baligad with the AFRAS Gold Medal, awarded annually to an enlisted Coast Guard member for an act of extraordinary bravery during a sea rescue.
"I'm overwhelmed by it," he said, adding his only wish is that he could share the honor with Decoopman, MacMillian and Chynoweth, his crewmates during those two harrowing hours. "I wasn't alone; it took the whole crew to pull off that rescue. Without any one of them I couldn't have done what I did."
Indeed, Baligad remembered, all the crewmen were astonished, when it was over, to realize how far they had pushed their equipment - and themselves - beyond their limits.
"When we got back," he said, "we couldn't believe what we did. It was one of the most extreme and dangerous rescues I've been through."
Even the award ceremony on Tuesday, however, pales in Baligad's mind to a private honor he received in February: from Mike Jensen, the man he rescued. He, his wife and his grandmother wrote letters of thanks to him and the other guardsmen, then visited them later that month to Air Station North Bend.
"It was right before the new year," Baligad remembered, "and Mike thanked me for giving him the chance to see another new year." |