Munitions, Hope Converge in Desperate Effort to Save a Beach

The beached freighter’s creaking and groaning didn’t bother Lt. Scot Wilson. Nor did the plastic explosives and drums of homemade napalm all around him on the rocking deck.

Wilson wasn’t the nervous sort, and 15 years as a Navy bomb-disposal specialist had gotten him used to ordnance and swaying ships.

But the flooded engine room--now, that gave him the creeps.

It was pitch black down there, and seawater lapped at Wilson’s feet as he crept along the catwalk, flashlight in hand. The din of 20-foot swells hammering the ship echoed through the empty cargo holds. Now and then, as Wilson taped blocks of explosives to the fuel tanks, the force of the waves made the hull’s steel plates buckle and grind. Boom! That got his attention every time.

His team’s mission: Blast holes in this grounded freighter’s fuel tanks and set the oil ablaze before the surf pounded the ship apart and released a catastrophic oil spill along the Oregon coast.

It was the most complex demolition Wilson had ever directed, and his team had only a few hours to do it.

Wilson kept reminding himself of the cardinal rule in handling explosives: Take as long as you need to stay safe. But if they didn’t take care of business soon, the sea would do it for them. Boom! Cracks were spreading up and down the hull. Boom! Oil was already bubbling out into the surf.

“This ship is dying,” Wilson thought, and he worked a little faster.

Plans for Salvage Proved Futile

The New Carissa, a 639-foot cargo ship en route from Japan to Coos Bay to take on a load of wood chips, ran aground Feb. 4 just north of the bay. For days, government officials and salvage experts plotted to pull the ship off the sand, only to see their plans foiled repeatedly by the brutal force of wind and waves. Finally, in desperation, they decided to blow up the ship to save the shoreline.

This is the story--based on Coast Guard records and interviews with Wilson and leaders of the response effort--of how that daring decision was made, and of the daring way in which it was carried out.

Like many tales of man against nature, it has no happy ending, nor any ending at all just yet. A charred shipwreck remains on a desolate shore, and the extent of its mess is still to be measured.

It began routinely. The New Carissa--built in Japan, registered in Panama and operated by a Filipino crew--arrived outside Coos Bay the night of Wednesday, Feb. 3. The captain radioed for a harbor pilot to guide the ship to port, but the seas at the bay’s narrow entrance were too rough for the pilot boat. The New Carissa dropped anchor just north of the bay and waited.

The next morning, with a pilot on the way, the New Carissa lifted anchor. Almost immediately, wind and swells pushed it toward shore. Around 8:30 a.m., the ship’s bow plowed into the sandy bottom, 150 yards off the beach.

The crew was in no immediate danger. The New Carissa, eight stories high from keel to rail and two football fields long, loomed like an island in the surf.

A harbor pilot, lowered to the ship from a Coast Guard helicopter, almost succeeded in backing out the freighter on the rising tide, but then waves drove it back toward the beach. By the next morning, the surf had driven the New Carissa hard aground.

As helicopters lifted the 23 crew members to safety, dozens of weather forecasters, salvage experts, oil-spill trackers and wildlife biologists converged on the Coast Guard naval air station in North Bend, just across the bay from the beached ship.

Ad Hoc Army Confronts Problem

Leading this ad hoc army was a triumvirate called the “unified command”: Capt. Mike Hall, 54, a square-jawed, square-shouldered Coast Guard career man; Bill Milwee, 62, a frosty-bearded salvage expert representing the ship’s owner; and Mike Szerlog, 32 and looking even younger, an environmental cleanup manager for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

They had two goals: rescue the freighter and protect the coastline from spilled oil. The ship carried 359,000 gallons of molasses-thick bunker oil, used to fuel the ship’s engines, and 37,000 gallons of diesel fuel for running electric generators. It wasn’t nearly as much as an oil tanker would carry, but more than enough to wreak havoc along 100 miles of coastline.

The ship had grounded near a prime crab-fishing area. Oyster farms operated in Coos Bay, and the desolate beaches stretching north from the freighter were nesting habitat for the threatened Western snowy plover.

The day after the grounding, Hall, Milwee and Szerlog considered their options, none of them appealing: They could try pumping the fuel to another vessel, but the raging surf raised the risk of further damage and loss of oil. They could attempt to pump the fuel to tanks on the beach, but it would take five days just to set up the equipment and pave a road through the dunes.

They didn’t have five days. A storm was approaching, and the ship was already taking 16-foot swells broadside. Its stern was burrowing into the sand, which held the ship like a vise. Every five to 10 seconds, a wave smashed into the hull with the force of 6,000 miles of open ocean behind it.

The best solution, the three men agreed, was to pull the ship off the beach. With no tug in Coos Bay powerful enough, they put in a call to the Salvage Chief, a 200-foot vessel based in Astoria, 210 miles north. Nobody knew how long the New Carissa could withstand the crashing surf, but they figured they could wait the day it would take the Salvage Chief to arrive.

One day turned into two, then three. The Salvage Chief, stuck in port by the same storm, didn’t get under way until Sunday, Feb. 7, chugging south at just 5 mph against heavy seas.

The incident commanders wore a brave face in public, saying the ship still could be saved. “We have no fear,” Milwee told reporters. “We’ll get it out of here.”

But by the time the Salvage Chief arrived Monday night, five days after the grounding, the New Carissa had developed cracks between two of its six fuel tanks, and bunker oil was burping from below the waves. Gobs of tarry oil washed ashore, and cleanup crews were dispatched to shovel, scrape and bag the mess.

Trying the Aleutian Solution

Tuesday brought more bad news. Insurance inspectors boarded the vessel and declared it a total loss, in no shape to be refloated. The leaks had expanded and the engine room had flooded, knocking out the ability to heat the cold, thick oil so it could be pumped off the ship. And meteorologists said another storm was racing in, packing 65-mph gusts and 25-foot swells.

Tuesday night, Hall, Milwee and Szerlog retreated to “the hole,” a lieutenant’s office they had commandeered as a refuge from the hubbub of the command center. Over six days, they had watched all their options slip away. All but one, perhaps. They had considered it early on but dismissed it as too risky.

Now Hall broached the subject: What about burning the oil?

The men fell silent for a moment. Milwee was the first to speak. It had been done before, he said, in Alaska. The Aleutian Solution, he called it. Between 1979 and 1988, five grounded freighters and fish processors had been set afire along the Alaska coast. But those were in remote areas, far from any towns. Here, the homes of Coos Bay were just over a mile away.

“The public’s going to be severely concerned,” Szerlog warned the others. “We’re going to have a huge amount of black smoke.”

Setting the New Carissa’s fuel ablaze would be the biggest oil burn ever tried in U.S. waters. Once they started the fire--if they could start it--they couldn’t just turn it off.

They laid the groundwork that night, calling in Navy explosives experts, collecting weather data, working up a burn plan. But they left the decision for morning.

At 7 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 10, the three men were back in the hole. The storm was expected to hold off until that night, and the Navy team was on its way. The governor had signed off on the idea of burning, as had the U.S. secretary of transportation.

“There are going to be armchair quarterbacks, second-guessers,” Hall said. “We’re all unified in our decision to do this--am I correct?”

Yes. They would stand together.

At 10 a.m., they walked down the hallway to the media room and announced their plan of last resort: To save the coastline, they would torch the ship.

Finding Safety in Danger

The night before, Lt. Scot Wilson and his wife had just put their 4-week-old son to bed. Wilson was looking forward to a little shut-eye himself after a long day at the naval air station on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle.

The phone rang at 9:30 p.m., and Wilson soon was out the door, heading to the station’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 11. Meeting three team members there, he told them the mission: A shipwreck in Oregon needed burning, and they were to supply the match.

Pretty straightforward, Wilson thought. For a man trained to disarm bombs, underwater mines and nuclear devices, this did not sound like the most challenging of assignments.

The biggest part of Wilson’s job is to find safe ways to do unsafe things. A stocky 5-foot-10, Wilson considers himself a Type-B personality: laid-back, cool under pressure. Rush into a situation involving explosives, he knows, and you might never rush out.

The team started packing: remote firing devices, survival suits, demolition tools and 18 incendiary grenades--cylinders the size of a Campbell’s soup can, filled with an aluminum-oxide-based mixture that ignites to create a pool of molten metal. These would help heat the sluggish, poorly combustible bunker oil to its flash point.

They took off at first light from Whidbey Island in a C-130 cargo plane, and by 10 a.m. Wednesday, they were at Coos Bay.

Hall gave them the bad news. Wilson had thought all his team would have to do was set fire to oil pumped into open cargo holds. Now, with the engine room flooded, there was no way to pump that fuel from its tanks, located beneath the three-quarter-inch steel deck of the cargo holds. They’d have to blast into the fuel tanks and burn the oil there.

Trouble was, the incendiary grenades they had brought probably weren’t powerful enough for that. Flying in more explosives from Whidbey would burn up hours they didn’t have.

With the storm bearing down, they had to try something. Wilson put his odds of success at 1 in 4.

Lowered to the New Carissa’s deck in a Coast Guard helicopter’s rescue basket, Wilson and his teammates set to work, shedding their bulky survival suits in favor of green camouflage. On the bottom of each of the two forward cargo holds, above the fuel tanks, they built a nest of sand, into which they set six incendiary grenades. Two 5-gallon cans of gasoline went on top of each nest.

Two of the aft holds were open to the sea. Oil floated in them, supported by seawater, surging up and down about three feet as each wave crashed against the ship. They taped an incendiary grenade to a can of gasoline and lowered it on a rope, hoping it would be just above the oil when it ignited.

Two decks below in the dark engine room, Wilson’s team placed an incendiary grenade on each of several small tanks of fuel and lubricating oil.

By 6 p.m., Wilson and Bosun’s Mate Chief Bill Lee were crouching in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter hovering a mile from the ship.

Lee pushed a button on the remote firing transmitter. A brief flash and a plume of oily smoke rose from the ship. Every charge had fired.

But minutes later, the smoke faded. The grenades hadn’t penetrated the tanks. Wilson thought they were done, the mission a failure.

Then, for the first time in a week, the weather turned in the salvage effort’s favor. The storm had stalled and wasn’t expected to hit the coast until the following evening.

They had one more chance.

“We’re going big,” Wilson said. “Whatever we do next, it has to work.”

A Beefed-Up Mission

Thursday morning, Day 8 of the grounding, Wilson set to work again, now with a crew of 10 and a bunker full of powerful explosives flown down from Whidbey. What had begun as a simple mission had turned into the most complex of his career. He just hoped he’d have enough time to do it.

The cracks in the New Carissa’s hull had expanded overnight. One of them was wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Whenever a big swell hit, the freighter’s hull groaned and twisted.

On the floor of the two forward cargo holds, Wilson and his men laid 3-inch-diameter hoses filled with plastic explosives. Two 25-foot lengths of these hose charges went side by side, with a third length placed on top for good measure. Ten feet away, they laid a second line of charges parallel to the first. Sandbags piled on top would help direct the charge downward.

Using explosive strips called shape charges, the team fashioned triangles with legs two feet long, stacking them three high and placing them on the floor of the cargo holds. These would punch out air vents atop each tank, bringing oxygen down to the burning oil.

That ought to get them in, Wilson figured. Next, to heat up the barbecue, they hoisted in 55-gallon drums filled with diesel, gasoline and thickening agent--a sort of homemade napalm. Twelve of these went into each of the two forward holds, topped by blocks of plastic explosives.

The engine room had its own set of fireworks: blocks of C-4 plastic explosives on the fuel tanks, incendiary grenades in the bilge to burn off the oil streaming from the fractured tanks.

By 4:30 p.m., the team started leaving the ship. Wilson and Lee stayed behind to perform the most dangerous task: tying all the ordnance together with detonation cord and blasting caps.

Lee was winched up to the helicopter at 5:30. Wilson followed a few minutes later, and at 5:45 p.m., they found themselves crouching again by the open door of their chopper.

Media helicopters circled in the distance. Townspeople crowded up on Radar Hill. This had better work, Wilson thought. His stomach was in a knot.

Wilson got on the intercom to the pilot and started the countdown.

“10-9-8-7 . . .”

At 1, he slapped Lee on the back, and Lee pushed the button.

A fireball erupted from the New Carissa. Flames clawed 300 feet up through a mushroom cloud of black smoke. A beautiful sight, Wilson thought. This baby would burn for a while, and the wind was carrying the smoke offshore.

Wilson and Lee grinned and shook hands, then told the pilot to head back to base.

Five hours later, the burning New Carissa broke in two.

The next morning, Hall, Milwee and Szerlog took their turns before the TV cameras.

“Good morning,” Milwee said, “and it is a good morning.”

Hall noted that the ship had continued burning through the night, and that every drop of oil burned was a drop that couldn’t foul a beach. Szerlog reported that the wind was blowing the smoke offshore, leaving air quality in Coos Bay better than Los Angeles sees on a good day. Wilson and his team were lauded as heroes.

But the tale of the New Carissa was not over. If it is human nature to want tidy solutions, it is the nature of oil to stick around.

The fires burned much of Friday and were reignited during the next few days with flares and gelled petroleum drips. Last week, however, officials realized their early estimates that up to 90% of the oil had burned were optimistic. Inspections showed that about half had burned, up to 70,000 gallons had spilled, and 135,000 gallons remained in the bow section.

Langdon Marsh, Szerlog’s boss and director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said the spilled oil appears to have caused little initial damage to wildlife. But some of it undoubtedly sank into the sand beneath the surf and will reappear occasionally to blight the shore. “You’ll see the effects of this for years,” he said.

By this weekend, yet another storm had opened a new crack in the bow and driven it farther up the beach. Salvagers were trying to pump some oil to tanks on the beach in preparation for the next step: towing the forward section of the ship 200 miles out to sea and sinking it.

They hoped that there, held down by thousands of feet of frigid water, the New Carissa’s remaining oil will finally cause no more harm.

This story is based on Coast Guard records and lengthy interviews with Navy Lt. Scot Wilson; Oregon Department of Environmental Quality officials Mike Szerlog and Langdon Marsh; and Coast Guard officers including chief information officer Gene Maestas and helicopter pilot Chris Martino.