The Harrowing Helicopter Rescue of the Kulluk Rig

Coast Guard aircraft commander Jason Evans pointed his MH-60 Jayhawk directly into sustained 50 knot winds as he came into a hover 40 feet above the deck of the oil rig Kulluk. Below him, the rig plunged up and down in swells as high as 30 feet. It was the afternoon of Saturday, December 29, two days after a buckle on the tow line connecting the conical oil rig to the Shell tug Aiviq broke, leaving the Kulluk powerless is violent Gulf of Alaska seas. Evan?s aircraft was one of two Coast Guard helicopters charged with evacuating the 18 workers on board.

The hazards of the mission?high winds, heavy seas, freezing water?were evident to Evans and his three-man crew, and typical of their search and rescue (SAR) missions out of Air Station Kodiak. Unique was the design of the Kulluk, which has no propulsion of its own and from a distance looked like a toy top, a wobbling, brightly-colored cone bobbing on the churning surface of the Gulf of Alaska. The Kulluk?s superstructure stretches 150 feet up from the vessels? deck.

"Usually when you're going to a fishing vessel or a pleasure craft, you can keep your blades above their masts or antennas or superstructure," says Evans, a 36-year-old lieutenant who has been stationed in Kodiak for a year and a half. "But because this is 150 feet, there's no way to stay above the superstructure. You've got that superstructure beside you, abeam you, and it's swinging toward you the whole time."

The Coast Guard crew was able to communicate with the Kulluk workers by radio. They were experienced mariners, and not injured. Often a Coast Guard rescue swimmer is sent down in the helicopter?s rescue basket to facilitate a rescue, but that wouldn?t be necessary in this case. Instead, Evans gave the swimmer a new job: to watch the blade tips. "If the superstructure starts approaching 10 feet you need to say something to me immediately," the pilot told the swimmer. Meanwhile, Evans tried to avoid spatial disorientation by keeping his own focus on the horizon. He was also aware of an additional hazard: a replacement tow line that by Saturday once again connected the Kulluk to its primary tow vessel, the Aiviq.

The tow line was 500 to 700 feet long, and attached to the Kulluk right beneath his aircraft. "That was one of my concerns?is there a hazard of the tow line recoiling, rebounding into the rotor blades, if it were to break again," Evans says. Earlier in the day, Evans? crew had hoisted four baskets full of spare parts down to the deck of the crippled Aiviq, whose engines were partially disabled by contaminated fuel. He?d asked about the tow line, concerned that it could snap, spring up, and get fouled in the hovering helicopter. Though Evans was told that the lack of slack in the line would make such a recoil extremely unlikely, it remained one more hazard to keep in mind.

As Evans held the hover over the Kulluk, flight mechanic Derrick Suba lowered the metal rescue basket toward the? deck. The Kulluk?s crew had been instructed to let the basket touch the deck before they grabbed it, to discharge any static electricity. Tied to the basket was a long line that the crew on deck would use to stabilize the basket as the rig workers were raised back up to the helicopter one-by-one. "The Kulluk had a lot of movement, a lot of pitch, a lot of roll. The elevation of the deck was changing at least 30 foot altitude," Evans says. "We'd be trying to maintain a 40-foot deck height and they'd take a big swell and the deck would come all the way up right under the bottom of the aircraft." Such conditions made Suba?s job of managing the hoist cable extremely challenging. "If he had too much tension in the cable, the deck would drop out from underneath the basket as the rig workers were trying to get loaded in," Evans says.

Although the conditions were extreme, they?re exactly what the air crew trains for, and in less than half an hour six of the oil workers were safely inside the aircraft (a second Kodiak Jayhawk recovered the remaining 12 in two separate trips). "That's a risky flight, a risky situation," says Evans, who has flown several more missions to the Kulluk since the Saturday rescue. "Whenever the seas are that heavy and the winds are that strong, it's raining, it's snowing, lower ceilings, there's reduced visibility, that compounds it."

The extended Kulluk scenario had been demanding for Kodiak Coasties, who usually get some downtime between late December and early January. Since the disaster began, the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley, which carries a crew of 112, has been stationed near the grounded oil rig (the ship had been scheduled for a Bering Sea patrol before it was drawn into efforts to prevent the Kulluk?s grounding). "We are putting all the assets, all the personnel that we can towards the response," Coast Guard Capt. Paul Mehler said at a Thursday press conference organized by Unified Command, the collaboration of industry and government representatives who have joined to manage the response. "It is definitely a heavy lift for our crews but it is not beyond what we can do safely and what we're manage."

"It's a huge group effort at all levels to manage and prioritize flights, assets, and people," says Evans. "We've been burning through crews one right after another." Evans was flying again on New Year?s Eve, sent out specifically to try to document the Kulluk?s grounding, which occurred just before 9 p.m. on Monday, December 31. Meanwhile, many of his fellow pilots were celebrating at the Golden Anchor, a bar at the air station. "Winds were sustained 60 mph and it was gusting 70. Seas were 30 feet and when we got on scene it started blowing snow and rain," Evans says. "We could not even orbit the Kulluk because the winds were so strong. I told the crew, This is not worth it, we're going home." His crew ended up flying by the Golden Anchor 10 seconds after the ball dropped.

In many ways, it?s fortunate that the Kulluk debacle is unfolding so close to Coast Guard resources. The rig is now grounded 40 miles southwest of the Kodiak Air Station, the largest Coast Guard facility in Alaska. The helicopter flight takes just 20 minutes. The Coast Guard has five MH-60s at the air station right now, as well as three smaller 65 Dolphin helicopters. That won?t be the case for much longer. On January 13, two of those Jayhawks along with their aircrews are scheduled to be transferred to St. Paul, a tiny island in the Bering Sea that serves as a SAR staging ground during the historically dangerous winter crab-fishing season. Those helicopters and crews will depart for St. Paul as scheduled next week, according to Coast Guard public affairs officer Sara Francis. In the meantime, Shell has announced intentions to bring in its own aircraft?hopefully manned by pilots who have plenty of experience flying the Gulf of Alaska in wintertime.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/survival/stories/the-harrowing-helicopter-rescue-of-the-kulluk-rig-14940780?src=rss

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