Oceans and Seas

the work of author Michael Krieger

Part 103: Testified – All the Men In the Sea

Posted by on May 10, 2019

Part 103: Testified – All the Men In the Sea

Panic Attacks

Since the sinking Victor has, according to Dr. David Mielke, the Tulane University Hospital psychiatrist who testi­fied on his behalf in his lawsuit, “become a shell of what he once was.” Dr. Mielke said that Victor is a nonfunctioning member of society, able neither to work nor to attend school regularly. Victor described his condition to me: “I have panic attacks—flashbacks where I’m underwater and where every­thing turns dark—and, good God, this [is] during the day and, hell, this is the worst: when that head bobs up in front of me. It cripples me basically. Sometimes it’s triggered by rain. Then what I do is just lock myself indoors.”

crew and divers

Victor Diaz suffered horribly from PTSD subsequent to the sinking.

PTSD

According to Victor, the panic attacks, besides fostering uncontrollable nervousness, usually produce headaches and sometimes blistering of the skin on his fingers. Often he can’t watch movies. Mostly he just stays in the house. Because his PTSD is so severe, he has developed what psychiatrists call dissociative syndrome, one of whose symptoms is the inability to control the body. Therefore he can’t drive a car.

Nightmares

Nor, Victor says, are his nights free of agony. Almost every night he is afraid to go to sleep because his nightmares are so frequent and so severe that he wakes up gasping. He said, “Every night the dreams and the scenario repeats itself. So I have lived it every day for the past almost six years. There’s not a night that [goes] by that I can honestly say that I slept per­fectly well; there might be one in a 365-day year.”

9mm

I asked Victor what effect his nightmares and panic at­tacks have on him. “I cannot describe it to you,” he answered. “It’s beyond control. I used to have a 9 mm [automatic]. It was to the point where I’d had enough. McDermott had won. I was not going to fight it. I could not live through this hell again, so I took the 9 mm and I had cocked it. I had put it in my mouth and I was about to pull the trigger. But you know, a lot of men died. A lot of good people perished. And these son-of-a-bitches were not going to get away with it. So I turned on the hot water in the bathtub, the shower, and I basically scalded myself. I put the gun away. I finally got rid of it. But there’s been a few times that I came really close to pulling the damn [trigger].”

No Cure

Though Victor takes what his wife describes as a “phar­macy of [prescribed] medicines,” she says they don’t stop the flashbacks, panic attacks, or nightmares, but just dull them. Victor receives weekly outpatient treatment at a veteran’s hos­pital. The psychiatric nurse-practitioner who sees him has had twenty-six years’ experience working with PTSD sufferers, both in the military and in VA hospitals. She said, “Victor is one of the worst cases I’ve seen in twenty-six years, and that includes POW and concentration camp survivors. Every day he lives in hell. Every day he grieves over the men who died. Every day he thinks of drowning in that sea. Every day he thinks of the com­pany who let this happen once before and knew this storm was coming and didn’t do anything to save its men.” She continued, “There’s no cure [for him]. There’s no, like, having surgery and having it taken out. At present he’s totally dysfunctional. We are just trying to teach him to cope, not to kill himself, and to get some enjoyment from life.”

According to Dr. Mielke, Victor’s prognosis is poor.

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Part 102: Repercussions – All the Men In the Sea

Posted by on May 3, 2019

Part 102: Repercussions – All the Men In the Sea

Protest

And indeed a 1991 agreement between C.C.C. and North Bank Towing did clarify this point. North Bank’s tugs (including their chartered North Carolina) were themselves chartered by C.C.C., and with that charter was transferred au­thority over and responsibility for both the tug and the supply boat. If the Captain John or the Carolina had been lost or dam­aged or their crews injured or killed owing to C.C.C.’s insisting on a hazardous course of action, the captains could have protested. If their formal protests were later upheld in court, the company and/or the crews would have been compensated by C.C.C. Captains Trosclair and Cassel (and their crews) were not very happy about C.C.C.’s insistence on riding out Roxanne at sea, but there was nothing they could do about it.

award

Captain Trosclair did not have the authority to tow the 269 out of harm’s way.

Repercussions

Another subject that must be discussed is how the sinking affected the survivors. What, if any, repercussions did they ex­perience after their ordeal? Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is the long-term psychological and physiological effect of a severe trauma. Aphrodite Matsakis, Ph.D., former clinical coordinator for the Vietnam Veterans’ Outreach Center in Maryland, in her book Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Com­plete Treatment Guide, states that PTSD can strike combat vets; concentration camp survivors; rape, torture, and crime victims; abused women and children; and survivors of vehicular acci­dents and natural catastrophes. All these groups have been in situations of grave danger in which they were helpless. Suffer­ers are likely to experience nightmares and insomnia, depres­sion, flashbacks they can’t block out, anxiety, and often drug or alcohol addiction. PTSD can affect the victim’s employment possibilities, personal relationships, and even his or her ability to cope with the simplest aspects of day-to-day living.

PTSD

Dr. Matsakis goes on to say that although PTSD first be­came known to the public as “shell shock”. suffered by some World War I soldiers, its recorded incidence dates back to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote after the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. that an Athenian soldier, after wit­nessing a comrade die next to him, suffered permanent blind­ness without any wound. World Wars I and II, then Korea and Vietnam, opened people’s eyes to the psychic horrors of war. Less well known are the similar effects, now well documented, experienced by women and children after repeated sexual and/or physical abuse. The study of PTSD, or traumatology, is a relatively new area of psychology; PTSD was only classified in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the diagnostic and psychological classification authority, in 1980.

Aftermath

Very few 269 survivors suffered long-term physical in­juries, but many claim to have experienced PTSD to the point where their personal lives or their employability or both have been threatened. Perhaps the most serious claims are those of Victor Diaz. The lead dive tender not only underwent the trau­mas of being on the sinking barge and in the sea, but also wit­nessed at close range a compatriot’s disintegration in a rescue vessel’s propellers and the victim’s severed head bobbing up in front of him.

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Part 101: Dive Crew – All the Men In the Sea

Posted by on Apr 26, 2019

Part 101: Dive Crew – All the Men In the Sea

The Bell

Would this plan really have worked in the face of Rox­anne’s 35-foot waves? Ray Pepperday, who was intimately fa­miliar with the equipment, did not think that a tug could lift the 15-ton diving bell in hurricane-fed seas. Even if it had been able to, he didn’t believe the bell could safely be towed to Carmen or another port. Helicopter transfer of the bell ashore would also have been impossible because of the copter’s inabil­ity to carry that much weight or endure that much wind. Finally, even if the tug or one of the supply boats had been or­dered to attempt to tow the bell to port, that would have left only two vessels to rescue everyone else. Three boats were hardly able to do it.

Emergency alarms in Spanish. Courtesy Tim Noble

Request Denied

After Roxanne’s first pass, according to diving superin­tendent Chuck Rountree, he twice radioed Ed Burgueno, Mc­Dermott’s diving liaison in Carmen, seeking permission to bring the entire diving contingent ashore. Rountree said that he wanted the six divers who had undergone emergency de­compression checked by a hyperbaric physician, rather than trusting the doctor on the barge, who had no special training in diagnosing and evaluating problems resulting from accelerated decompression. Also, Rountree thought that the 269 was no longer safe and he did not want any of his men to stay on­board. Prior to Roxanne’s return, a high-speed crew boat could have reached the barge in three hours. Actually, for a short while between Roxanne’s first and second appearance, there was a crew boat alongside the barge. Nevertheless, Rountree said that his request was denied and that Burgueno ordered the entire dive crew to remain onboard so that they could com­plete the remaining work as soon as the 269 could be towed back to the work site. Burgueno says he doesn’t remember Rountree ever asking him for permission to bring the diving group ashore, nor does Lobb recall such a request.

Authority

One question a mariner might ask is why the two tug captains, if they realized that Roxanne was a danger both to the 269 and to their own vessels and men, didn’t simply tow the 269 into Carmen when they had the opportunity—regardless of what C.C.C.’s Lobb or Perot dictated.

Normally, a tug captain has the authority, indeed the re­sponsibility, to safeguard both the tug and the tow. Usually a towed craft, most often a barge, is unmanned. In cases where the towed vessel has its own captain, the tug’s captain nor­mally maintains overall authority. In this instance, however—in the view of Washington State admiralty attorney Lynn Bahrych—because foreign-flag vessels (the Captain John and the Seabulk North Carolina) were towing a vessel of Mexican registry (the 269) in her own territorial waters with a Mexican captain onboard, the 269‘s captain would have overall author­ity—unless some agreement between the tugs’ owners and C.C.C. stipulated otherwise.

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Part 100: Pointing Fingers – All the Men In the Sea

Posted by on Apr 19, 2019

Part 100: Pointing Fingers – All the Men In the Sea

Life Jackets

Then there are the questions raised about the number and quality of the jackets themselves. Richard Lobb said that all of the life preservers had been properly inspected prior to Roxanne. According to the testimony of several survivors, how­ever, many were the original life jackets issued when the 269 was new, twenty-eight years before the sinking, still lettered with the 269‘s original name, L. B. Meaders. Some of the jackets didn’t have lights, or at least ones that worked. Many men only had the flat work vests, which are not made to be worn for long periods in the water and do not have the buoyancy of reg­ular life jackets. Even worse, some of the crewmen claimed, many of the vests and life jackets had deteriorated and should have been replaced. Acid and other corrosives spilled on some vests had dissolved the plastic foam flotation.

Many of the life jackets were in very poor condition and may have contributed to the deaths of some crew members.

Worthless

Survivors said that many jackets had lost part of their flotation, and in some cases the jacket fabric was rotten. According to Eulalio Zapata, Pitalua Mazaba said part of the reason he lost all his front teeth was that he had exhausted himself swimming because his jacket didn’t have enough flotation. Another crewman, fished naked out of the water by a rescue boat, said he had taken off his clothes because his life vest wouldn’t support him and his clothes were dragging him down.

Worn-Out

Angel Fernandez Ramirez, whose body was found in the sea near Mérida, was wearing a flat work vest, though it is not certain that he drowned. One fatality may be linked to a worn-out jacket. Some crew members have said that Roberto Cruz Gomez, El Padre, might still be alive if he had not been wear­ing a life jacket that tore apart as he was being pulled onboard the Ducker Tide.

Crew members also claim that some of the self-inflating life rafts were defective, although Lobb claimed that their in­spection certificates were up-to-date. Survivors say that most were not equipped with lights and Very pistols. Many of the rafts were lost when, upon being inflated, their tethers snapped in the hurricane winds and they were blown away be­fore anyone could reach them.

Divers

The six divers who were in saturation when Roxanne passed the first time were very fortunate that the 269 did not sink then. If she had, they most likely would have died either from drowning or from the bends. According to safety experts from McDermott Underwater Services, contingency plans in case the 269 was in jeopardy while men were still in saturation called for the divers to move into the pressurized diving bell, which could then be lowered to the sea bottom. Its cables would be fastened to a buoy floating on the surface. One of the tugs would tow the bell to port, where the men would be transferred to a decompression chamber.

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Part 99 – Shallower – All the Men In the Sea

Posted by on Apr 12, 2019

Part 99 – Shallower – All the Men In the Sea

Surf Zone

As the 269 and her tugs were driven east by Roxanne’s wind and waves, they sailed into even shallower water until, where the 269 sank, it was only 50 to 60 feet—and they were  still more than 30 miles from shore. Nevertheless, the surf zone, according to Tolman, is a function of the ratio between water depth and wave height, rather than distance from shore.

“The shallower it gets,” Hendrik continued, the slower a wave can go forward, but it still has all this energy to move for­ward, so it grows higher and steeper. If it gets too high, it can­not support the amount of energy that it transports. When that occurs, the crest of the wave goes faster than the wave itself and literally falls off. Then you get breaking waves. The high­est individual waves you can have are about half the water depth, so if the barge was in 80- then 60-foot water depths, the waves were 25 or 35 and occasionally 40 feet. As soon as you get into the surf zone, you rapidly transition into a place where almost every other wave breaks [and] walls of water [hit] you continuously. So for practical purposes, they essen­tially went on the beach.”

In the shallow water in which the 269 went down many waves broke on the barge.

Hendrik further reflected on what might have saved the 269. “If they had managed to get themselves 25 miles to the north the day before, they might have been able to ride this thing out without trouble. They would have been uncomfort­able, but they would not have been in the transition zone, where basically you are on the beach already.” Thus it seems the choice of location for the 269 to ride out Roxanne may have contributed to her sinking.

Lifesaving Drills

In the litigation that followed the sinking of the 269, attorneys would also argue that some of the loss of life and the trauma suffered by the survivors was attributable to deficient lifesaving gear and lack of drills. According to several crew members interviewed, there were never any safety or lifeboat drills on the barge. So when she went down, they said, some people couldn’t find their life jackets and many others who did find them didn’t know how to wear them. Richard Lobb re­called only one lifesaving drill and could not remember when it occurred. If there had been regular drills, attorneys argued, everyone would have had a life jacket, would have known where it was, and would have known how to wear it. This was a double tragedy, since many of the crewmen did not know how to swim.

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Part 98: No Good Options – All the Men In the Sea

Posted by on Apr 5, 2019

Part 98: No Good Options – All the Men In the Sea

Beaching

What about just beaching the 269 northeast of Carmen? The captains of two smaller self-propelled barges certainly considered that choice Sunday morning as Roxanne headed back toward them. But it seems likely that Richard Lobb made the correct decision not to attempt beaching his barge. The area between Carmen and Campeche, 110 miles to the northeast, was the most probable location for such a beaching. North of Campeche the tidelands shoal out some 15 miles, and the 269 would have been stranded where no one could easily reach shore. Even south of Campeche the 269 could not have gotten closer than a quarter mile from the beach before grounding. If she were aground that far from shore with 40-foot waves pounding her, she could well have broken up, as Lobb predicted she would be. The men would have been forced into a monstrous surf littered with flotsam from the barge, and the death toll could have been much higher than it was.

isla del carmen

The beaches between Isla del Carmen and Campeche shoal out, sometimes for miles. It would have been extremely dangerous to run the 269 aground on these beaches.

Deeper Water

The two other options were to tow the 269 to another lo­cation where she might ride out the hurricane or to try to hold position just east of the oil field, which is the decision that was made both times Roxanne approached. Evidently little or no thought was given Saturday evening, October 14, to towing the barge 25 miles due north, where the water depth is at least 130 feet instead of the 70 to 80 feet in which she tried to sur­vive Roxanne. According to Richard Lobb’s testimony in a dep­osition, it was decided to tow the 269 to shallower water, 15 to 20 miles southeast of the Nohoch-A platform, where it might be calmer. In fact the area to which the 269 was towed was a “cleared towing area” and a preferred location for riding out storms, Lobb said.

Analysis

Hendrik Tolman, a Dutch civil engineer and mathemati­cian, is one of the world’s foremost experts on wave structure. He trained in coastal engineering and the subcategory of off­shore engineering at Holland’s Delft University. He specialized in designing and analyzing structures that are erected in the surf zone. He now works as a contractor for the National Cen­ter for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Maryland. Hendrik makes estimates of wave size, which the center then uses as part of storm warnings for mariners.

Upon analyzing the 269‘s positions on the fifteenth, the water depths involved, and Roxanne’s positions relative to the barge, Tolman was not at all surprised that she sank. “This thing [the 269] basically ran into the surf zone,” he said. “They really got nailed because they were simply in too shallow water. And they went really, basically, from the perspective of how waves transform, from being pretty bad in the deep ocean [during a hurricane] to being absolutely horrendous entering the surf zone.”

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