Wisniewski Surfaces in Popular Mechanics. The Wiz has Nine Lives.

Racist Coast Guard Captain Douglas Wisniewski explains why another program that he oversees has caused great embarassment for the Coast Guard. From the court-martial of Webster Smith to the death of Lt Jessica Hill, Wisniewski has casted a giant shadow. His body count is stacking up. His career has left a trial of dead bodies and ruined careers from Atlantic shores to Arctic Zones, to Europe and the Far East.

Coast Guard regulations are not the only things that are written in blood. The fitness reports and the epitaths of of some cadets and officers are also written in blood. Wisniewski has left a bloody trail, but none of it has been his. Webster Smith was blamed for Kristen Nicholson's abortion, and Jessica Hill was blamed for her own death, and the death of BM2 Steve Duque. Shame. Shame. Where will he surface next?
'Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.'
- Oscar Wilde

This article was excerpted from the 28 December 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics.



On a brisk, sunny afternoon last August, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy came to a crunching halt in 4-ft.-thick pack ice, 490 miles north of Barrow, Alaska. The polar icebreaker had just completed the western leg of its summer mission to study the Earth's crust for the National Science Foundation. Since the ship had been at sea for more than 40 days, the commanding officer, Capt. Douglas Russell, offered the crew a little rest and relaxation: He let most of the 84 sailors and 35 scientists on board disembark for several hours of ice liberty. A few crew members armed with rifles kept watch for polar bears; others played football, drank beer or just milled around.

Lt. Jessica Hill, 31, of St. Augustine, Fla., and Boatswain's Mate Second Class Steven Duque, 22, of Miami, decided to make an impromptu training dive near the bow of the 420-ft. ship. Both were Navy trained, and considered seasoned divers. However, this would be their first cold-water descent using scuba gear. As the ship's diving officer, Hill was charged with supervising the dive plan and all per­sonnel involved. This included a third diver, who briefly floated in the 29 F water before climbing out, shivering inside a leaky suit.

Unlike a porous wet suit, a dry suit acts as a barrier between the body and the water, helping the diver withstand freezing-cold temperatures. Air inside the suit affects the diver's buoyancy. It compresses as pressure increases with depth, reducing buoyancy, and expands as the pressure decreases again near the surface. In order to avoid ascending too quickly, divers often carry extra weight. Hill and Duque each loaded up with an additional 62 pounds.

At 5:45 pm, Hill asked three of her shipmates to serve as diver tenders for the operation. She briefed them on safety protocols and informed them that the maximum depth of each of the two 20-minute dives would be 20 ft.

Three minutes into the training session, Duque's safety line began to play out quickly. "I had the impression he was swimming away from me sideways under the ice," Duque's linesman later told investigators. Within seconds, Hill's line began to do the same. The third diver returned to the scene 20 minutes later and noticed that too much line had been spent. He ordered the dive support team to "haul 'em up." Though other bystanders joined the effort, it took three more minutes to bring Duque and Hill to the surface. EMTs worked for more than an hour to revive them, but it was too late.



Capt. Douglas Wisniewski, who oversees Coast Guard diving operations, spent months analyzing what happened that day. Mistakes had been made at every level of command. The Coast Guard hadn't checked the scuba equipment in the Healy's dive locker in five years, nor had it posted a more experienced dive master on board to oversee operations and properly train the dive personnel. (Hill had only 24 dives in her career.) Capt. Russell should never have authorized a dive during a party and without a standby diver. He also should have checked Hill's dive plan with the Coast Guard Diving Manual, as procedure required. Finally, Hill's dive plan did not include adequate safety procedures, or sufficient training for the support team.

Wisniewski was unable to determine conclusively why the divers carried such an unusually heavy load (more than twice the recommended amount), and why they failed to drop that weight when they began to descend uncontrollably. Against Coast Guard rules, some of the lead weight had been stashed in zippered compartments, which would have made it difficult to release. The divers also likely succumbed to nitrogen narcosis, a sense of drunkenness resulting from the body's increased absorption of nitrogen, under pressure.

The real culprit, however, was inexperience. "Hill and Duque simply didn't have enough dives under their belt," Wisniewski says. As a result, the Coast Guard is expanding its diver training program: creating new predive checklists, increasing the frequency of dive inspections and examining how to rotate its most experienced divers throughout the fleet. New policies for equipment maintenance and command oversight are also under review.

Wisniewski believes the most important lesson to be gleaned from this tragedy is to follow the rules: "Those procedures were written in somebody's blood." And sadly, so are the new ones.

Monday Morning Quarterbacks Question Explorer Turnover.

Monday morning quarterbacks in the Antarctic tourist industry are asking for instant replay on the sinking of the the MS Explorer, a veteran of the polar cruise ship trade, purpose-built to operate in extreme polar environments, and manned by an experienced crew. That it sank during what appears to have been the most routine of circumstances – cruising through young pack ice in mild weather – has coaches and players scratching their heads.

"I'm totally shocked and surprised," says Leif Skog, who was captain of the Explorer for six years in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. "She was just outstanding in her design, perfect for ice navigation. It's very unlikely that pack ice caused this."

Jim Barnes, executive director of the Washington-based Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, which monitors tourism and other activities, concurs. "To think [the Explorer] could sink in less than 20 hours from a relatively modest incident is very surprising," he says. "It makes you wonder if something else happened, because it really doesn't add up."



Indeed, the initial explanation of the ship's sinking on Nov. 23 – that it struck submerged ice, sprung a "fist-sized" leak, and was doomed by uncontrollable flooding – doesn't hold water for ship-design experts. Essential pieces of the story are missing, they say. Those include what the vessel really struck, why flood control efforts failed, and how the second collision with a large iceberg occurred and when did it occur.

Serious doubt has been casted on the ice-damage explanation; however, multi-year pack ice is so hard that a bergie bit made of multi-year pack ice can cut through a steel reinforced hull like a hot knife through warm butter.

Sander Calisal, professor emeritus of naval architecture at the University of British Columbia, casts doubt on the ice-damage explanation. He notes that Explorer's 1A-class ice-reinforced hull ought to have withstood accidental contact with submerged ice. "If there were some kind of underwater ice then, yes, there will be some impact, but I would assume it would be relatively minor." An iceberg large enough to cause serious damage would be readily visible to radar, sonar, and the eyes of the bridge crew.

Mr. Skog, Seattle-based vice president for marine operations at Lindblad Expeditions, Explorer's original owner, says collisions with submerged ice are very rare events. In a polar career spanning three decades, he can recall only a handful of times when ships he served on experienced ice damage. All amounted to dents, save one incident when a cargo ship he was commanding suffered a small, easily contained leak in the Arctic.

Further, such damage almost always occurs in the bow area, which is double-hulled as an added precaution on ice-going vessels. But the Explorer's leak had to be in the middle of the ship, he notes, because as she sank, she remained on a level, bow-to-stern trim. When she sank, it was not bow first or stern first.


The apparently small size of the puncture suggests the ship may have struck something harder than ice, according to Claude Daley, an expert in ice-reinforced ship design at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. "A fist-sized hole doesn't sound like ice damage to me," he says. "You need something very hard to cause a small hole in steel. Stone, for instance."

One possibility, says Skog, is a large stone embedded in floating glacial ice. "There can be huge rocks frozen into the ice, and they can be hard to see," he says. "When I was down there in the '70s, in poorly charted waters, you would see things that looked like little islands, but were actually floating."

Whatever caused the damage, Mr. Calisal says it shouldn't have sunk the ship by itself. "Passenger ships are designed with many watertight compartments to contain flooding," he says. "There had to have been a chain of failures to prompt the captain to abandon ship."

Explorer's owner, GAP Adventures of Toronto, is unable to provide further information on the incident, now that their insurance company, Steamship Mutual, is investigating, according Susan Hayes, the GAP Adventure's vice president for marketing. "We don't know exactly what happened," she said. "At this point, I'm not actively in the loop."

Reviewing the facts
Initial reports from the company – and accounts given by passengers and crew – suggest something unexpected happened aboard the ship while the crew worked to contain the damage.

The incident started about midnight local time (GMT-3), when the Explorer struck something, suffering damage amidships on the starboard side of the lowest passenger level. Passengers there recalled hearing two loud bangs and the sound of rushing water, as their cabins began to flood. They alerted the crew, and a distress call was sent out at 12:20 a.m.

While passengers congregated in the muster station on an upper deck, the crew located what Ms. Hayes said was "a crack and a fist-sized hole." The Toronto Globe & Mail reported Nov. 24 that the crew sealed the affected compartment with watertight doors and, for about an hour, appeared to have stabilized the situation with bilge pumps.

Several witnesses have since recounted that while they were waiting in the muster station, the Explorer drifted into a large iceberg. The iceberg – which one passenger described as being as big as the ship – reportedly struck the damaged starboard side.

Water levels reportedly began rising again sometime after 1:30 a.m., although it is not clear if this was a result of the second collision. Power failed, and, at about 3 a.m., Captain Bengt Wiman gave the order to abandon ship. Two other cruise ships arrived on the scene at about 7 a.m. to begin plucking passengers and crew from lifeboats and rafts. All 154 aboard were rescued. Explorer, which had rolled on her starboard side, reportedly sank that evening.

"The worst thing is that the ship probably sank with the secret of what really happened," says Skog, who hopes investigators manage to find the answer. "On our ships we need to know the facts; speculations aren't really fruitful for us."

Monday morning quarterbacks throw the most touchdowns.

BACK TO THE FUTURE:




Millvina Dean, the last remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster,
seen here in 2002, is auctioning mementoes from the doomed liner to
pay for her nursing home fees.



This is a Friday, April 17, 1998 file photo of Millvina Dean, 86, a
living Titanic survivor, as she looks up and smiles as she signs a
Titanic movie poster for an enthusiast at the Titanic Historical
Society's convention in Springfield, Mass. As a 2-month-old baby,
Millvina Dean was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from
the deck of the sinking RMS Titanic. Now Dean, the last living
survivor of the disaster, is selling some of her mementos to help pay
her nursing home fees. Dean's artifacts, including a suitcase given to
her family by the people of New York after their rescue, are expected
to sell for about 3,000 pounds (US$5,200) at Saturday's auction in
Devizes, western England. Dean, 96, has lived in a nursing home in the
southern English city of Southampton Titanic's home port since she
broke her hip two years ago.


Commander P.H. Nargeolet walks away from the M.V. Royal Majesty with
Millvina Dean, 84, of England at the Black Falcon Pier in Boston in
this September 1, 1996 file photo. Dean, a surviver of the Titanic
disaster was on board the Royal Majesty when it sailed to the site
where the Titanic's maiden voyage ended 84 years ago and watched as
research vessels tried to raise part of its hull to the surface.
Although a cable snaped sending the hull plunging down to the ocean's
floor, Dean was thrilled to be there.