Power and Empire

The watch supervisor nodded. “Man overboard. Understood.” He passed the call to the command duty officer in the Joint Harbor Operations Center on the other side of the frosted glass wall.

The CDO, Chief Petty Officer George Rodriguez, assigned a JHOC operations specialist named Sally Fry to monitor the call through Rescue 21, an advanced maritime C4 (computing, command, control, and communications) program. Rescue 21 used a variety of fixed towers to vector the ship’s position each time it transmitted, superimposing a line of position on a digital chart. Best case scenario, the transmission hit multiple towers and took the “search” out of search and rescue, but even one tower would put the distressed vessel somewhere along that given line.

In a calm but authoritative voice belying her junior status and twenty-three years of age, Petty Officer Fry engaged the young man at the other end of the radio in a conversation during which he said little but “Man overboard” and “Please to help.”

Both the straits operator and the operations specialist were female, and the transfer went so smoothly that the person reporting the mayday never knew he’d been passed from Vessel Traffic Services to the rescue management side of the JHOC house.

A time clock began the moment the command duty officer became aware of the distress call.

Chief Rodriguez looked across his workstation and nodded at the Operations Unit specialist, who returned the nod, letting the chief know he was already building a case in Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. Among many other nuanced factors, SAROPS accounted for pre-distress vessel movement, present wind speed, and water currents, generating an estimated location of the vessel when rescue assets arrived.

Next, Rodriguez picked up the phone and activated Air Station Port Angeles to spin up their B-Zero response crew and get the ready-helo flying toward Orion. Anyone watching the process might have thought the call happened simultaneously with his other actions — and they would not be far from wrong. As command duty officer, Chief Rodriguez had the authority to send assets before even notifying his boss, the search-and-rescue mission coordinator.

The SMC made it crystal clear. When it came to SAR, the initial response of the U.S. Coast Guard was to “go there.”

• • •

The junior duty officer at Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles answered the phone on the first ring. CDO Rodriguez passed on the information to the JDO, who repeated it back, then hung up and pressed the extension for the senior duty officer, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Slaznik, pilot in command of the B-Zero response helicopter.

Each Coast Guard air station in the United States had at least one B-Zero response crew on duty at any given time. They slept next to the hangar and were ready to deploy inside a thirty-minute window. Each SDO had his or her own way of doing things, and this one liked to be called prior to the SAR launch alarm being activated.

The SDO answered quickly for so early in the morning. “This is Mr. Slaznik,” he said, his words thick with sleep. The pilots were accustomed to these middle-of-the-night calls. Lieutenant Commander Slaznik seemed to live for them.

The JDO relayed the scant information regarding Orion’s man-overboard report and the SDO repeated it back to assure the petty officer he was awake and moving.

“Let’s go ahead and wake up the crew,” he added, before hanging up.

The SAR alarm wailed a moment later, wresting his copilot, Lieutenant Becky Crumb, from a deep sleep in the adjacent room. Slaznik called her cell phone, just to make sure she heard the siren, and said in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, “Get to the choppa!”

The flight mechanic and rescue swimmer slept in a building closer to the hangar and nearer to the alarm.

Slaznik splashed cold water on his face and smoothed the bed head out of his dark hair. He sat on the edge of his rack while he pulled up local weather and any Notices to Airmen on the Electronic Flight Bag program on his iPad. Winds gusting to forty with heavy rain in the strait. He groaned. As a helicopter pilot, he didn’t mind the wind. In fact, wind helped him with his hover when the bird was heavy, but it wreaked havoc on the hoist cable and made the rescue swimmer’s job all the more difficult. And his swimmer on this crew was a newbie, fresh out of thirteen weeks’ training. They’d gone out earlier that day on a jumper from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but locals had fished the body out before they got there, so it wasn’t a real call-out. The kid had handled himself well, asked good questions during the CRM open conversation Slaznik encouraged during any mission. This was going to be different. The kid was going to get wet. The weather was skosh, but it was a good thing he was going to cut his teeth on a simple man-in-the-water operation.