Warrant Officer Greg Hudson was sleeping when he got the call.
The search and rescue technician with the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 103 Search and Rescue Squadron based in Gander, N.L., wasn’t scheduled to work on Feb. 15 when his phone rang at 6 a.m. A container ship on the West Coast of Newfoundland had lost power in stormy weather and was about to go aground with 20 souls on board.
“I woke up to a phone call and they said, ‘We’ve got a mission with 20 people on a boat. Can you come?’”
Hudson grabbed his toothbrush and a bag and hustled to work.
“The helicopter was already fuelled up with extra gas,” he said. “I put my gear on, and we got going right away.”
The rescue crew’s Cormorant helicopter, which was deployed by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Halifax, battled strong headwinds that topped 90 kilometres per hour during the two-hour flight to the MSC Baltic III.
The ship was moving quite violently
“The vessel was just coated in ice,” when they got there, said Capt. Matthew Cox, the chopper pilot. “And the rest of the shore was ice and snow, so it all just blended together.”
Spray was flying, a cliff loomed nearby, and the turbulence was, according to Cox, “really abrupt; that helicopter can handle tons of turbulence, but I’ve never sat in it when it’s shaken that much before.”
Once Cox managed to bring the Cormorant into a hover above the ship, Master Cpl. Gary Normore was the first search and rescue technician lowered on a wire down to the deck of the container ship that went aground just west of Larks Harbour after losing power while enroute from Montreal to Corner Brook.
“I came down second with the medical bag,” Hudson said, noting they landed on the deck beside the Baltic’s bridge.
“The ship was moving quite violently. It was probably dropping a metre to two metres every 20 seconds. It would just smash into the rocks and have, like, a violent jolt.”
The rescue crew had been informed during their flight that there were injuries among the 20 stranded sailors.
“The deck was super slippery. It was all iced over with black ice,” Hudson said.
“We couldn’t really stand up. So, we kind of skated around and used the handrails to get over to the (bridge) door.”
The search and rescue technicians, commonly known as SAR TECHs in the military, tied the slamming door open and got to work triaging casualties.
“The relief on their faces” was evident, Hudson said.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry, man, we’re going to get you out of here. But I’ve got to check on your buddies. Who’s sick? Who’s hurt?’”
The first few sailors he assessed “were walking wounded. They might have been kind of smashed around, and maybe rattled, but they had no real injuries. Nothing critical,” Hudson said.
He got them to help move a “bunch of rubble” thrown around the 207-metre-long ship’s control centre by the force of the storm.
“All the cabinets in the boat had broken and the cabinet doors had broken off and they had all fallen on the floor. And all the books and all their documentation … was all smashed and had fallen all over the place. The desks and the chairs were broken and just everything was flying all over the place, sliding from side to side and smashing into people.”
A couple of men were laying on the floor and bleeding, “moaning and groaning and holding their sides,” he said.
“Everyone who was uninjured was sitting there, ready with a lifejacket.”
Everything was flying all over the place, sliding from side to side and smashing into people
Four of the 20 sailors aboard were hurt.
“The captain had smashed his head as he was trying to fight” with the helm to keep his ship upright, Hudson said.
Another sailor was lying on the floor with a back injury.
Two more SAR TECHs, Sgt. Sebastian Gaudet and Master Cpl. Alain Goguen, were lowered down from the Cormorant with a stretcher to remove patients from the ship, along with a steel rescue basket that people sit in to be hauled to safety.
“As soon as the basket got down, I already had the first patient ready to go,” Hudson said, noting he sent Gaudet back up to the helicopter to receive patients with the flight engineer, Master Cpl. Todd Osmond, who ran the cable hoist.
From the deck of the heaving ship, Goguen, a trainee SAR TECH visiting from Comox, B.C., minded the guideline connected to the hook used to fasten the stretcher and basket to the wire.
The ship’s engineer, who also had a head injury, was able to walk.
“When the basket came down to one of the guys who was guide lining it, he just slid it over to me like a curling rock,” Hudson said.
He helped the engineer into the basket and sent it up to the helicopter.
By the time the hook came back down with the empty basket, Hudson had the ship’s captain, who was in a lot of pain, bundled into a stretcher, known as a stokes litter.
Over the next hour, the injured men were hauled up to the Cormorant in the stretcher and the rest went up in the basket, followed by their rescuers.
“It was a clown car once we got back up,” Hudson said of the helicopter’s cabin. “There was standing room only.”
The sailors, many of them from Myanmar, didn’t speak a lot of English. “They had a couple of guys that were able to translate.”
Hudson checked on the injured sailors again, then handed out water bottles. “There were lots of praying hands and thankfulness. They were happy and we took a picture — had a good thumbs up.”
Their rescuers had been wearing dry suits meant to protect them from cold sea water. “When you’re working with 20 people on a boat that’s moving, you get sweaty pretty fast,” Hudson said. “We were definitely ready to cool off once we got back in the helicopter…. It was like being on a stationary bike in the sauna for an hour.”
The fuel is the biggest thing that we’re worried about
Cox had been fighting to keep his helicopter steady during the rescue. “During that hour of just hovering with no extensive use of auto pilots, I was drenched from the waist up,” said the pilot, who shared the Cormorant’s cockpit with Maj. Pete Wright, the commander of Gander’s search and rescue squadron.
Their helicopter landed at Deer Lake Regional Airport, where ambulances were waiting for the rescued sailors. “Just some bumps and bruises, nothing critical,” Hudson said of their injuries.
Mindful of lessons learned during the March 2021 rescue of the crew from the Atlantic Destiny off Nova Scotia, where two different Cormorants from 14 Wing Greenwood experienced technical problems before two U.S. Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopters swooped in to rescue the 31-man crew from the fishing vessel that had caught fire and started sinking, a second Cormorant was deployed behind them from Gander last month, just in case.
“You only have two (hoist) cables, so if you break one then we’re kind of euchred,” Hudson said. “So, we wanted to hedge our bets.”
The rescue was a high point for the Canadian military, said Lt.-General Steve Boivin, who heads Canadian Joint Operations Command.
In 75 minutes hovering above the ship, “it took them 24 cycles of hoist to get them all on board, and we’re talking about doing this with a ceiling of 800 feet, 18-foot waves, and visibility of about half to three-quarters of a mile,” Boivin said. “Talk about impressive stuff.”
According to the coast guard’s most recent bulletin on the Baltic’s grounding near Wild Cove “no pollution has been observed” coming from the ship, which still appears to be upright.
“There are discussions ongoing about the possible development of a road (close to the shore) to allow easier access to the vessel. If implemented, this would also help alleviate the impact sea conditions have on removal operations,” said the coast guard, noting the Baltic has suffered so much damage, “it cannot be safely refloated. The initial focus will be on the removal of the fuel and cargo.”
There were lots of praying hands and thankfulness
T&T Salvage is developing a recovery plan for MSC Baltic III, which is owned by MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company.
The ship’s tanks are holding about 1.7 million litres of heavy fuel, according to the coast guard.
“The fuel is the biggest thing that we’re worried about,” said Wade Park, mayor of nearby Lark Harbour.
“It’s got to be removed in a safe and effective way to prevent any environmental incident for sure. The coastline of Lark Harbour and surrounding area in the Bay of Islands … is our main fishing grounds of our town and that’s the backbone of our town.”
While some of the Baltic’s sailors have left Corner Brook, where they were staying in a hotel after last month’s rescue, the captain and a few of his officers remained behind to answer questions from transportation authorities investigating the grounding, said Mayor Jim Parson.
“It’s good that they’re all safe,” Parson said. “It sounds like it’s going to be quite a long ordeal to get the ship straightened out.”
He confirmed the ship’s captain even dropped the puck at the Corner Brook Royals hockey game last Saturday.
“I’m sure they’d prefer sometimes not to have the attention,” Parson said of the Baltic’s crew. “But if they’re from Myanmar, I guess to be stuck in a place like Corner Brook, on the other side of the world, it’s nice to see something a little different and enjoy some time here.”
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