MENU
SECTIONS
OTHER
CLASSIFIEDS
CONTACT US / FAQ
Advertisement
Coast Guard Lt. Bruce Tucker, holding his 13-month-old son, Benjamin, was cited recently for his role in saving the lives of four sailors caught in a pounding storm off the Virginia coast.
MORE

Coast Guard hero practiced at saving lives

Coast Guard hero practiced at saving lives

Lt. Bruce Tucker didn't rappel from a helicopter or drop a life raft when the U.S. Coast Guard rescued four people from a sailboat stranded in the North Atlantic during a vicious storm last year, but the role the native Toledoan played was just as vital to the sailors' survival.

Lieutenant Tucker was one of six officers at the Coast Guard's Atlantic Area Command Center in Portsmouth who coordinated the rescue effort involving planes and helicopters from both the U.S. and Canadian coast guards, two U.S. Navy ships, and three merchant vessels. They recently received the Coast Guard's Search and Rescue Controller of the Year Award for 2005.

Besides summoning the res-cuers, the command-center personnel had to tell them where to look. That task became very complicated because the emergency beacon of the sailing vessel Al Meisan had washed overboard and its master and mate both drifted away while trying to launch a life raft, inadvertently leaving the boat's three least experienced passengers alone on board in the thrashing sea and howling wind.

Advertisement

"Everybody just came together," said Lieutenant Tucker, who is nearing the end of his active-duty tour and will soon re-enter the Coast Guard Reserve. "Our command center coordinated everything. We were the heart of it all."

"There were great challenges in being able to do this search and pick the right place to search," said Lt. Cmdr. David Deuel, supervisor at Rescue Coordination Center Norfolk. "They really had their game on for that case and applied everything they were trained to do."

It was 5:30 a.m. on May 8, 2005, when Lieutenant Tucker came on duty for a 12-hour shift as watch commander at the Atlantic Area Command Center, which oversees Coast Guard homeland security and coastal interdiction operations as well as search and rescue for the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. About four hours earlier, the lieutenant said, the crew of the Bermuda-bound Al Meisan had activated the vessel's emergency beacon, which included satellite positioning equipment indicating a location about 430 nautical miles east of Cape Charles, Va., and 265 nautical miles southeast of Nantucket, Mass.

By then, he said, the prior shift had dispatched a C130 aircraft and diverted two of the merchant ships toward the scene. It also determined the location of the USS Trenton, a Navy ship summoned to serve as an intermediate refueling platform for Coast Guard rescue helicopters that otherwise could not have reached the stricken sailboat.

Advertisement

Lieutenant Tucker said reports from rescue aircraft indicated weather conditions at the scene evocative of The Perfect Storm, a book and movie based on a storm that struck the North Atlantic on Halloween weekend of 1993: 25 to 30-foot seas and sustained winds of 90 mph. While one of the merchant vessels found the Al Meisan, he said, the rough conditions kept it from getting too close, and a helicopter was used to retrieve the three people on board.

That left the master and mate still missing.

To find them, the command crew used computer models of the wind and ocean currents to indicate areas where they were most likely to be found.

The crew of a C130 eventually found the men 10 miles northeast of the sailboat in one of the high-probability zones, and one of the merchant vessels plucked the mate out of the water, still alive 19 hours after the distress call first came in. By then the sailboat's master had died, but the mate had stayed with him and the body was recovered, too, Commander Deuel said.

Illustrating the situation's complexity, the commander said, the empty lifeboat was found 15 miles south of the two sailors' position. It had been blown in a direction different from that of the ocean current in the area.

That one of the five aboard the Al Meisan perished is unfortunate but has to be viewed in the larger context of the other four being rescued, Lieutenant Tucker said.

"For the 50-plus people I have rescued over the years, I've lost maybe 10 or 15, and that's tough," he said. "The people that I helped save mean a lot to me. That is the greatest honor, that there are 50 people who are still around because of me and my crew."

Lieutenant Tucker, 33, is on leave pending discharge from active duty next month after having been activated from the Coast Guard Reserve in February, 2003. He has moved back to Toledo with his wife, Lisa, and their 15-month-old son, Benjamin. He plans to remain part of the Coast Guard Reserve and will do his duty turns as a watch officer at the Great Lakes District headquarters in Cleveland.

Lisa Tucker said the crisis-management ability that her husband honed during his 3 1/2 years in Portsmouth dispatching, and later coordinating, emergency responses may have helped save Benjamin's life two weeks ago when he suffered a febrile seizure that caused him to stop breathing.

Such seizures sometimes result when a small child's body temperature spikes because of infection or, in Benjamin's case, after receiving a vaccine shot for certain diseases.

"He [Bruce] was so calm," Mrs. Tucker said. "I was panicking, I won't lie. He just went into 'work mode' and dealt with the situation. He gave CPR [cardio-pulmonary resuscitation] in the back of the car on the way to the hospital. Just as we pulled up to emergency, [Benjamin] coughed and started breathing again."

Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.

First Published August 28, 2006, 10:45 a.m.

RELATED
SHOW COMMENTS  
Join the Conversation
We value your comments and civil discourse. Click here to review our Commenting Guidelines.
Must Read
Partners
Advertisement
Coast Guard Lt. Bruce Tucker, holding his 13-month-old son, Benjamin, was cited recently for his role in saving the lives of four sailors caught in a pounding storm off the Virginia coast.
Advertisement
LATEST frontpage
Advertisement
Pittsburgh skyline silhouette
TOP
Email a Story