-Caveat Lector-
Saving a Crippled Ship
The first account of how the crew of the USS Cole kept their ship
afloat
By Richard J. Newman
U.S. News and World Report
Even at ground zero, there was widespread confusion about just
what had happened to the USS Cole after a terrorist bomb ripped a
40-foot gash in its side on October 12. In her stateroom, Lt.
Ann Chamberlain, the ship's navigator, was preparing a PowerPoint
briefing on the next leg of the journey. Without warning, she
says, there was "something like a bang." The ship began to quake.
Smoke billowed, and alarms started ringing. "I thought it was
something that had hit the ship, that something had gone wrong
with the refueling," she says. "I was just confused."
Topside, sailors seemed to be moving in fast forward. Crew
members raced back and forth, tending to dozens of wounded
comrades and shifting into damage-control procedures they had
rehearsed ad nauseam. Several of the Cole's armed lookouts
jumped onto the fueling pier in the Yemeni port of Aden that was
filling the ship's tanks. With guns drawn, they shouted at the
half-dozen pier workers to put their hands in the air. The
workers complied, but begged to turn off the fuel nozzles before
a fire erupted. The guards agreed.
As the dust settled, sailors were beginning to grasp the severity
of the damage done to their ship. As Chamberlain scrambled to
the bridge, she first realized something disastrous had occurred
when a chief petty officer crawled out from below decks, his head
heavily bandaged, and told her that "it was much worse" for
others still trapped down there. She soon saw sailors with severe
burns, multiple fractures, and other alarming injuries.
Within hours, of course, American officials had begun to piece
together what had happened. A small boat posing as one of
several harbor craft tending to the 505-foot warship had puttered
up to the Cole's port side. Two men on the boat then ignited a
bomb that destroyed several of the ship's major compartments,
killed 17 sailors, and injured nearly 40 more. Yet the early
accounts of the bombing still fail to capture the damage done to
the ship, and the horrors faced by the crew, according to
eyewitness reports that are beginning to filter home from Aden
Harbor. "It looked so much worse than I had imagined," said one
sailor who viewed the Cole shortly after the attack. It was
"unbelievable really, with debris and disarray everywhere, the
ship listing, the hole in her side."
Contrary to the Navy's official reports, the Cole was in the
midst of refueling when the explosion happened. Tariq Affara of
Arab Investment Manufacturing and Trading Co.�the firm the Navy
had hired to provide fuel�told U.S.News that the Cole began
mooring procedures at 8:45 a.m. local time on October. 12. A
number of harbor boats operated by a different Yemeni firm called
Al-Mansoob Commercial Group�unaffiliated with Arab
Investment�began hauling the Cole's huge mooring lines out to
stationary buoys. By 9:23 the ship was "all fast"�solidly
moored. Pier workers sent over two fueling lines. At 10:25,
sailors on the Cole gave the "order to receive" and the pier
workers turned on the fuel flow. Nobody aboard the Cole or the
fueling pier seems to have noticed anything unusual until the
small boat approached the Cole about an hour later. It is even
likely that nobody on the Cole noticed the two men on the boat as
they dropped the lines they were handling and stood up�as
eyewitnesses on shore reported--evidently preparing for the
blast. By that time, the boat was probably so close to the Cole
that it was underneath the decks that slope up and outward from
the ship's centerline.
The explosion occurred at about 11:20. To people nearby, it was
rapidly apparent that something catastrophic had happened. The
blast knocked the 17 million-pound warship into the fueling pier.
Windows on a small office on the structure shattered, injuring
workers. On land, about half a mile away, two American
missionaries reported that their house shook from the blast.
Their small adjacent church filled with dust.
Inside the Cole, the damage was far more extensive than even a
40-by-45-foot hole would suggest. "The pictures on the news do
absolutely no justice to the damage caused to the ship," says
another sailor who has seen the Cole. One of the ship's two main
engine rooms�a three-story compartment about 66 feet wide and 50
feet long�was virtually destroyed by the blast. Flooding reached
to the upper level of the compartment. One reason it took the
Navy a week to recover the remains of all 17 sailors killed is
that divers initially were unable to disentangle bodies from the
twisted wreckage. Ultimately, they had to use underwater power
tools to cut the bodies free. The blast also demolished at least
two mess halls. One was pancaked so severely that the floor and
ceiling became almost inseparable. "What used to be a distance
of about 10 feet is now a matter of inches, or fractions
thereof," said one eyewitness. The torrent of seawater rushing
into the hole also flooded an auxiliary engine room and other
compartments, damaging or ruining much of the ship's equipment.
Sketchy reports of the moments, hours, and days following the
explosion are beginning to paint a picture of a crew working
feverishly to save the ship and their comrades. Some of the
wounded were transferred to the fueling pier, and from there to
shore via the fueling company's small boat. With no power for
several days, repair crews on the Cole toiled in darkness or
under the faint light of lanterns. The crew didn't sleep for 48
hours after the explosion. When they did rest, most sailors
slept above decks, unable to tolerate the stifling heat or the
smell of death below. "I can't even begin to imagine what
they've been going through," says one naval officer who has
served on several ships in the region.
Navy officials report numerous acts of heroism, though they
haven't yet singled out any sailors for commendations.
Immediately after the blast, says one senior Navy official,
several sailors dived into the harbor to rescue comrades who had
been blown into the water, or who had literally walked off the
ship, dazed by the blast. Below decks, two enlisted men worked
frenetically to pry the mangled door off one of the mess halls,
where eight sailors were trapped. They rescued seven. The
eighth died.
Those not tending to the wounded worked to seal off the ship,
which skipper Cmdr. Kirk Lippold had ordered into "zebra"
condition�all watertight compartments closed. The crew
eventually managed to "de-water" several of the flooded rooms,
while facing unique challenges. At one point, after a seal blew
and the ship lost power for the second time, the entire crew
formed a bucket brigade for a full day. While they bailed, a
diver worked to fix the seal with a hand-held lantern and tools
powered by a gas generator.
In an odd way, the crew seemed to cherish the challenge of saving
the ship. Several days after the explosion, new ships arrived in
the harbor. The Navy offered to rotate in some new crews, and
let some of the Cole sailors rest up in hotels in Aden. "They
tried to get the crew swapped out," says a senior Navy official,
"and most of the crew refused." The tableau both spooked and
inspired sailors arriving to offer relief to the Cole. "Right
now, there are 250 sailors just a few miles away living in hell
on Earth," said a crew member on the U.S.S. Hawes, a frigate
that steamed to Aden to support the Cole. "I'm sitting in a nice
air-conditioned stateroom; they're sleeping out on the decks at
night. You can't even imagine the conditions they're living in,
and yet they are still fighting 24 hours a day to save their
ship. The very fact that these people are still functioning is
beyond my comprehension."
While investigators from the FBI scrutinize evidence and hunt for
the culprits, Navy leaders are trying to figure out how to keep
it from happening again�especially since one of their fears is
that copycat terrorists will try to pull off another such stunt.
Ideas include giving foreign ports an arrival window of a couple
of days instead of a couple of hours. That would make it harder
for terrorists to predict when the ship would arrive. But it
would also cost extra money, because the Navy would have to pay
the contractors to simply stand by for a while. The Navy could
also add security teams to the logistics parties that go to ports
in advance of big ship visits. They could inspect all craft
scheduled to service a ship. Only those boats would be allowed
nearby. Crews could even place plastic barriers around a ship,
such as those used to contain oil spills, to establish a security
perimeter of 20 feet or so. That might be enough to keep a bomb
like the one in Aden from penetrating the ship.
But such measures would be "incredibly laborious," says one ship
commander. "Some ports won't even want us," he adds. And senior
commanders continue to point out that it is impossible to patrol
the world's hot spots while eliminating every risk. "If we're
going to be a world leader, we can't go to fortress America,"
says Adm. Robert Natter, commander of the Navy's Atlantic Fleet,
to which the Cole belongs. But military leaders also are itching
for retribution. "We can't continue just to be on the receiving
end of this," says a senior military official. "We've got to go
on the attack." Which means the bad guys might be the next ones
to be surprised.
� U.S.News & World Report Inc.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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