When Coast Guard rescuers reached four men who had tumbled into a 40-foot industrial tank at the top of a Washington mountain, they found that two of the men were hurt too badly to move, and one of them was lying in a pool of fast-drying concrete.
The workers had been installing a roof on the steel tank when it collapsed, sending the crew and tons of debris falling to the bottom.
When Coast Guard rescue swimmers, Chief Benjamin Brown and Aviation Survival Technician Jon Claridge, reached the bottom of the tank, they found themselves in a cramped, dark, and chaotic scene.
“On top of that was all the construction debris,” Brown told Task & Purpose. “The workers had been pouring concrete on the roof before it collapsed. So the ground was uncured concrete. The consistency was just like mud when we initially got down there, and then as the scene went on, it started to cure and got a little harder. One of the patients was lying on his back, sort of, like, as if he had fallen in mud. So we had to kind of dig him out.”
Over the next three hours, the swimmers and the Oregon-based crew on the MH-60 extracted the four men from the bottom of the tank, pulling off a uniquely challenging rescue, even by the full-throttle standards of the Coast Guard.
In the tank, the rescue swimmers — experts in rolling waves and high winds of mid-ocean rescues, but far less familiar with confined industrial accidents — juggled four patients, two of whom were critically hurt. The pair worked amid the debris and hardening concrete from the collapsed roof as they treated what injuries they could and packaged each patient for a long hoist out of the tank.
In the MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, the pilots watched their gauges and orbited to save gas, knowing they could not leave or even land to conserve fuel because of radio contact with the swimmers.
But while the pilots flew and the rescue swimmers tended to the patients, the center of the mission was the helicopter’s flight mechanic, Logan Harris. Over the course of three hours, Harris executed nearly a dozen hoists, navigating both the rescue swimmers and the four patients out of the tank, whose rim was now a jagged mess of rebar poles. Over 100 feet below, missing the hoist by just a foot could snag a swimmer or a patient, endangering them and the helicopter.
And though most of the crew were seasoned rescue veterans, the mission was Harris’ second-ever live rescue.
“I don’t have a ton of experience as a flight mechanic. One live hoist previous to this. I won’t say it was a mundane case, but certainly nothing like this,” said Harris, who spent six years as a helicopter mechanic in the Marines before joining the Coast Guard to fly. “I definitely pushed the envelope for me personally, but we had a solid crew that kind of kept everything together.”
A call for help
Harris, Brown, and pilots Lt. Mike Travers and Lt. Mike Bucha had spent the morning on a training flight in a Coast Guard Air Station Astoria, Oregon-based MH-60, by coincidence, practicing a hoist over dryland. But soon after returning to Astoria, a call arrived from local first responders asking for assistance.
“We got the word it might be four people trapped inside of a water tower that had potentially collapsed, and that was really all we got,” Travers said. “It worked out because most of us were already in our dry suits, ready to go. I met Chief Brown at the aircraft right for the pre-flight, and told him what was going on. And that was when he asked if it would be a good idea to bring a second rescue swimmer, which is generally a common practice we try to employ when we’re doing anything inland, because some of those environments can be rather demanding and it’s nice to have a second person on the ground.”
After a 30-minute flight to Taholah, Washington, on the west coast of the Olympia peninsula, the crew arrived overhead and quickly learned that the fire departments on the ground had no way to reach the men inside the tank.
They decided the two swimmers would be hoisted down. It would be, Harris quickly realized, far from routine.
“So the structure having rebar on the outside was definitely a major point of contention,” Harris said. “Devices coming up and down can get impacted by the rotor wash and get a bad swing. So, obviously, that swing heading towards rebar is not good.”
A second major issue would be the height. While a typical Coast Guard hoist during a mission might be from 40 feet high, the tank forced the helicopter to hover at 120 feet above the ground. Any lower, Harris said, and the winds from the helicopter’s rotor wash — trapped and amplified by the tank’s walls — would have been unbearable to both the rescuers and patients inside.
“From the height of the hoist, it’s hard to tell exactly what the swimmers are looking at down there, so I was trying to keep [a] really close eye on their hand signals,” Harris said. “Where they need to go, where they need devices to be.”
Harris estimated that the tank was probably 30 feet wide, but when its roof collapsed, dozens of steel rebar rods poked inwards around the lip. That meant when he lowered the swimmers or, later, each time he raised a patient in a 7-foot steel litter, he had to bring them up through the lip of exposed rebar.
“Navigating devices in and out of that environment was particularly tricky,” he said.
Over the course of the three-hour rescue, Harris lowered and raised the helicopter’s cable over a dozen times, never getting hung up.
In the tank
When the four workers fell, all were injured but two more seriously than their coworkers, who could walk. One who could not move was lying in a pool of wet, uncured concrete. Though the concrete was still wet and pliable when the rescuers arrived, they quickly realized they were in a race to free the patient and finish the rescue before it set.
By the time the team left, the material had hardened under their feet, said Claridge, one of the other rescue swimmers who was lowered into the tank.
“I was having to use my hands and dig some of that wet concrete away from his side, because we only had like six inches all around him to work,” said Claridge. “So we were just digging, like, holes to try and get space to move in.”
The crew originally believed they could make quick work of lifting the men in a rescue basket, a small cage that patients can sit inside to be hoisted up. But all four men were too badly hurt and would need to be put on backboards and sent up in a litter — which, at nearly seven feet long, would be more likely to be caught up on the exposed rebar.
Adding to the difficulty was their workspace. The only spot on the floor of the tank clear enough for the two to treat a patient and load them in the litter was against the wall, which was far off the straight line down the center that the hoist needed to follow.
Each time Harris raised a patient with his controls up above, the swimmers had to grab the litter and stabilize it in the center of the tank.
Flying overhead
In the helicopter, Travers and Bucha were worried about two issues: fuel and communicating with their swimmers. The helicopter had left Astoria with a full tank that might last five hours if the pilots conserved fuel. But the long hovers for the hoists ate into that time.
“The closest place to get fuel was about 30 miles away,” said Travers. “But one of the big things that ended up being a big gas drainer for us was we had no way to communicate with them unless we were directly over the top. A lot of times, if we can, we’d like to land, and that’ll preserve a lot of fuel, but just because we had no way to communicate with them, it wasn’t the right decision for us to kind of hang them out to dry by themselves with no way to communicate. So we just went into what we call a max endurance orbit over the top and primarily operated off hand signals instead of a radio.”
A key time saver was the organization by first responders around the tank. Fire and ambulance services from local fire departments lined up ambulances on a road 200 yards from the tank. After each patient was brought on board — a process that required Harris to not just operate the hoist, but then pull up the litter’s 120-foot guide line by hand each time — the crew immediately landed at the ambulances, where a crew would transfer the patient to a gurney, handing Harris a new backboard to replace the one with the patient.
“We would not have been as successful without the help of the local EMS and fire department,” said Travers. “They really set up a pretty amazing operation on the ground for us to be able to transfer the patients quickly.”
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