 Skipper tells father he went by the book
A Tribute to the Missing
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By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
ABOARD THE U.S. COAST GUARD RESCUE BOAT 41317 — The longer the search, the more it feels to searchers like a matter of going through the motions.
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| The Coast Guard’s 41-foot search-and-rescue boat is berthed at Sand Island. Day after day, the crew plows through the water off O‘ahu looking for the missing students, teachers and crew from the sunken Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru in "a kind of a political task."
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser |
As the Coast Guard crew looks for victims and debris of the Ehime Maru, hope fades each day that they will find anyone alive or dead.
Today is Day 21 of a search-and-rescue effort for nine people lost at sea when a U.S. submarine hit a Japanese fishing vessel off the coast of O‘ahu.
It has been a week since searchers have spotted any debris they know for sure came from the Ehime Maru.
But political pressure from Japan is extending the search weeks beyond the date when the U.S. Coast Guard would normally call off a search for survivors of a shipwreck.
The Coast Guard says it is taking wishes of the Japanese into consideration in continuing this search, because in Japanese culture the importance of recovering bodies is strong enough to demand it.
Rescue manuals say that in 77-degree water, hypothermia sets in after 12 to 24 hours. But the Coast Guard also doesn’t want to give the impression that it is seeking to recover the dead.
"We don’t want anyone to think we’re out looking for bodies, because we don’t go out looking for bodies," said Pat Baker, a Coast Guard search-and-rescue planner in the command center in downtown Honolulu. "I’m searching for survivors. The likelihood is not good. That doesn’t temper the effort at all."
Clipping through 4-foot waves at 21 knots an hour, searchers aboard U.S. Coast Guard rescue boat 41317 hang on as their 41-foot boat makes it 9 miles out to the scene of the accident.
Salt water splashes on their faces, the sun beats down, and most crewman wear earplugs to drown out the engine noise.
The Ehime Maru is 2,003 feet below, but all four crewman and their boat chief can see is water.
They track the perimeter of the surface, travel in expanding squares, but find nothing.
After 70 minutes of searching, they head back to the dock, refill about 54 gallons of diesel fuel used on the trip, and wrap up the mission for the day.
Costs now over $1 million
If the Coast Guard were to put a price tag on the three weeks of search-and-rescue efforts, not including Navy costs, the total would reach more than $1.06 million, said Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Greg Fondran. By comparison, the search-and-rescue effort in the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 totalled $6.5 million, and the 1999 Egypt Air Flight 990 case came to $3.9 million.
The initial rescue effort for the Ehime Maru was 24 hours a day.
For the Coast Guard, the search has dwindled to a few hours at sea a day and a helicopter search that crisscrosses in a pinwheel pattern over the crash site. There are daily Navy sea and air searches. The Navy also has brought in special deep-sea equipment to survey the sunken ship.
The Coast Guard concentrates on the surface, but must be available to pull away for other assignments that may need emergency help. Last week, in addition to the Ehime Maru search, the Coast Guard coordinated the rescue of fisherman off the coast of Kona, as well as the rescue of four people on board a disabled sailboat 300 nautical miles southwest of the Big Island.
At the crash site of the Ehime Maru, the crew are on alert, but there’s a sense that the action is past, as when firefighters wait at the scene of an already extinguished blaze.
"It’s more of a training opportunity at this point," said Robert Schmidt, officer in charge of the Coast Guard’s Honolulu Station. "It’s something we’ve got to do.
"This is kind of a political task," he said. "Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t be doing this."
Schmidt and his crew were working on the Friday afternoon when the tragedy happened — when the USS Greeneville rammed a Japanese high school’s fisheries training vessel.
Schmidt remembers trying to break the language barrier with the Ehime Maru captain. Schmidt recalls wishing that the number of missing had been a misunderstanding. He wished that his crew had helped rescue them all. But the Japanese captain meant "35" when he told Schmidt that was how many were aboard. Nine people were not found.
The missing linger
Coast Guard Seaman Jeremy Knochel couldn’t sleep that night when he came home from the rescue.
"It was exciting at first, but it was sad," he said. "You feel bad."
Fellow crewman Nick Duncan, who has been in the Coast Guard for six months, comes from a family of rescuers. His father is a fire chief in Bloomfield, N.M.
Duncan is proud to be part of this search-and-rescue effort. But frustration is just below the surface.
"We were excited and happy that we could rescue who we could," Knochel said.
"But the other nine kind of linger in your head," Duncan said. "Where are they?"
Correction: If the Coast Guard were to put a price tag on three weeks of search-and-rescue efforts since the Ehime Maru sank off O‘ahu, the total would reach $1.06 million, not $1.6 million as a previous version of this story incorrectly reported.
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