Free Deadliest Sea by Kalee Thompson Page A

smart as running into a burning building.
     
    P ILOT S HAWN T RIPP WAS TIRED . He had landed back in St. Paul just a few hours before, after a four-and-a-half-hour medevac flight to Dutch Harbor and back. A forty-nine-year-old man in Dutch had needed an emergency blood transfusion. The simplest thing would have been to put him on a plane directly to Anchorage, which has the state’s best-equipped hospital. But Dutch Harbor’s tiny airport was completely socked in. A plane couldn’t land. But a helicopter could. The helo in St. Paul—Coasties prefer the shortened term to “chopper” or “copter”—was the closest available aircraft.
    In the Lower 48, the Coast Guard rarely performs medevacs, except in civic emergencies, like Hurricane Katrina, when the Coast Guard transferred more than nine thousand patients out of battered New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes. An additionaltwenty-four thousand civilians were rescued by the Coast Guard from rooftops, floating debris, and even tree branches in the days following the storm. The Katrina tragedy was a shining moment for the Coast Guard. It showcased the strength and flexibility of the service’s real-time planning and response capabilities, and allowed the Coast Guard to demonstrate its willingness to step up and deal with problems that technically fall under other agencies’ purviews. In Alaska, that sort of stepping up happens every day.
    Alaska is bigger than four Californias put together—and has a population of just 650,000 people—less than the city of Columbus, Ohio. It’s unsurprising, then, that so many of Alaska’s communities are cut off from the rest of the world. Only in the heart of the state, branching out from Anchorage, where half the population lives, do maintained roads connect communities on a year-round basis. In many areas the only way to move between towns is by boat or plane. Many remote towns don’t have a real hospital. And even those that do often aren’t equipped to handle high-risk procedures. Or even low-risk ones: There’s only been one baby born on St. Paul Island in twenty years, a little girl who arrived prematurely. At eight months, expectant mothers are ordered to Anchorage.
    The isolation means that medevacs are high on the Coast Guard’s list of calls. In the summertime, it’s cruise-ship passengers from the massive boats that trace the Kenai Peninsula, or the smaller vessels that come into Kodiak and very occasionally visit the Aleutian Chain. Hunters, hikers, four-wheelers, and snowmobilers routinely get themselves into trouble in Alaska’s unforgiving mountains. The massive shipping fleet whose routes ply the Bering Sea are regular customers as well. It isn’t unusual for a rescue crew to be sent out beyond Adak, a former military base two thousand miles west of Kodiak, to lift an injured worker off a four- or five-hundred-foot container ship.
    This medevac had been fairly routine, even though the bad weather and treacherous flying left Tripp wired as he arrived back at the LORAN station. The night vision goggles he and his crew wore in the helo made the Bering look like the opening credits of Star Trek —the snowflakes were like a universe of stars hurtling toward him at light speed. Tripp had sixteen hours left on his shift. He’d pass a couple hours with Call of Duty. He’d had an ongoing competition with pilot Steve Bonn. They were well matched in the game: equally terrible.
    The phone rang a couple minutes before 3:00 A.M ., just after the men had finished a final face-off. Tripp figured it was the on-duty officer at the operations center in Kodiak, Todd Troup, calling to point out some mistake Tripp had made in his medevac paperwork. It was the ops center, all right, but Troup wasn’t concerned about paperwork. A fishing trawler was taking on water, some two hundred miles south of the island. The 60 Jayhawk in the St. Paul hangar was the Coast Guard’s closest asset.
    Tripp did the calculations. The ship