[CW] Article in "Juneau Empire" about rescue of MS PRINSENDAM 1980

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

Article in "Juneau Empire" about rescue of MS PRINSENDAM 1980

https://www.juneauempire.com/news/a-drastic-sea-rescue-that-saved-all-from-a-cruise-ship-fire-marked-juneaus-100th-birthday-what-would-happen-today/The
burning cruise ship Prinsendam 200 miles from Juneau in the Gulf of Alaska
in October 1980 after 519 people abandoned ship into lifeboats and were
rescued. An oil leak in the engine room started a fire just as Juneau was
celebrating its 100th birthday on Oct. 4. (Credit ASL-P313-12-06)

A dramatic sea rescue saved all from a cruise ship fire on Juneau’s 100th
birthday; what would happen today?


519 Prinsendam passengers saved from lifeboats; now officials say best hope
is another cruise ship.

[image: 1.jpg]
* <https://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/info/baudot.htmlz>*
By Laurie Craig
Thursday, June 27, 2024 5:21pmNEWSCRUISE SHIPS

 It was Friday night and Juneau’s 100th birthday party had started early.
Revelers were kicking up their heels at area bars and taverns. Suddenly
several long blasts from a ship’s horn screamed and echoed off the
mountains downtown calling sailors to the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell
for immediate departure. A cruise ship 200 miles offshore in the Gulf of
Alaska was on fire with more than 500 people aboard, mostly elderly
passengers, with a typhoon headed their way.

Juneau was preparing for the party of the century — literally — on
Saturday, Oct. 4, 1980. It was the anniversary of 100 years since the
town’s founding and the discovery of gold.

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell from Seattle was tied at the downtown
military dock for the coming celebration the next morning. Its captain was
scheduled to lead the parade as grand marshall. Finishing touches would be
frosted onto a 34-foot-tall totem pole-shaped birthday cake that would rise
in the atrium of the State Office Building later that day.

Meanwhile, 200 miles west in the Gulf of Alaska things were not as festive
aboard the 427-foot luxury liner Prinsendam. Shortly after midnight on Oct.
4 as the passengers and crew were tucked into their bunks, the ship’s fire
bell rang. Twelve minutes after a fire started the captain came on the
loudspeaker with this message:

“Attention passengers. We have a small fire in the engine room. It is under
control and there is no danger, I repeat — there is no danger. However, we
ask all passengers to come up to the Promenade Deck while the smoke is
being cleared. We are very sorry for this inconvenience.”

Both danger and inconvenience would be considerable during the next few
hours.

Dangers and rescue resources at sea — then and now

With a second straight record-level cruise season at its peak in Juneau
now, what might happen if a similar disaster — quite possibly aboard a far
larger ship with several thousand passengers and crew members — occurred in
waters well away from port?

“The best rescue platform for a cruise ship in distress is another cruise
ship,” said Jennifer Whitcomb, the U.S. Coast Guard 17th District’s search
and rescue program manager, in a June 21 interview.

 [image: 36686935_web1_Prinsendam-JUE-240626-3_1.jpg]
 A cruise ship with several orange lifeboats visible is docked in downtown
Juneau on June 20. With 10 times as many people aboard present-day cruise
ships as were on the Prinsendam in 1980, the U.S. Coast Guard says it is
well prepared to safely evacuate passengers due to advanced communications,
navigation and continuous scenario training. Officials say another cruise
ship offers the best rescue potential for assisting in response. (Laurie
Craig / Juneau Empire)

Whitcomb, in a June 24 follow-up email, noted another cruise ship offers
additional lifeboats, significant accommodations for evacuees, food,
onboard medical facilities and some weather protection from rough seas and
strong winds by positioning its size and bulk to calm rescue conditions.

On the night the Prinsendam caught fire a large vessel in the vicinity —
while not a cruise ship — would demonstrate the value of such assistance.

Passengers aboard the Prinsendam were mostly wealthy, older travelers on a
long ocean voyage between Vancouver and Asia when a leaky hose sprayed oil
onto a hot pipe in the engine room, igniting a fire. Attempts to control
the fire failed as smoke and flames began to fill the confined below-deck
spaces. Meanwhile, above, passengers moved as directed through the dark,
quiet ship — dead in the water without engines — from staterooms to upper
deck lounges and the dining room. Thinking they would be able to return for
warmer clothing and valuables, many evacuated in nightclothes.

Smoke began to infiltrate the waiting areas. The people moved outside. They
emerged on deck into a starry night with calm seas. Green bands of the
aurora borealis rippled overhead. Conditions would not remain so idyllic.
The only light on the ship came from the bridge deck where a generator
provided minimal light and power to the captain.

As they awaited their fate some of the passengers may have thought about
the movie “Poseidon Adventure,” a shipwreck disaster film released eight
years earlier in 1972. Unknown to them, the cinematic version of the 1912
sinking of the Titanic was not made until 1997 so the popular haunting
melody “My Heart Will Go On” would not have been lingering in victims’ very
cold ears as they wondered what would happen next. Their answer came soon
enough.

The fire had started just after midnight. At 5 a.m. Captain Wabeke made
another announcement.

“I regret to inform you that we have lost the battle with the flames. We
must now abandon the ship. Please follow the instructions of the crew,”
said the captain.

Passengers began to climb aboard six lifeboats. Flames were visible in
rooms they had vacated. Meant to accommodate 40 people each, many lifeboats
were loaded with as many as 80 passengers in various states of dress. Many
were only in nightclothes and bath robes, but most had donned bulky life
jackets. One woman wore a mink coat over her nightgown. Some young foreign
crew members panicked and leapt into the lifeboats over the elderly guests.

Without ship’s power the lifeboats were lowered manually into the black
sea. One by one the lifeboats were cut loose to float away from the burning
ship. Smoke filled the air inside the Prinsendam and drifted on deck as
more than 40 crew fought back flames. Soon sharp pellets of rain started to
slap the exposed lifeboat passengers. As night faded there was “red sky at
dawning, and sailors take warning,” according to one historical account.

All over the North Pacific rescuers were mobilizing, but they were all a
long distance away. A large C-130 Hercules aircraft launched from Kodiak.
First on scene, the plane circled overhead and crew reported later “we saw
the ship lose all power and go dark. Then we saw small lights of lifeboats
drift away from the ship and get scattered all over the ocean.” The big
Hercules would become the aerial on-scene command center witnessing,
reporting and guiding rescuers, who came in helicopters and on vessels. The
Coast Guard’s Rescue Coordination Center in Juneau’s federal building
commanded the operation.

Forty-four years ago communications were extremely limited. Emergency
responders relied on radio connections, paper charts, teletype machines and
telephone landlines. There were no cell phones, no Internet, no GPS, no
digitized maps or instant communications that exist today. And the
Prinsendam was burning in the Gulf of Alaska with 519 souls in danger.

U.S. Coast Guard, Air Force, and local and Canadian search-and-rescue teams
mobilized immediately. Their training kicked in as they scrambled onto
ships and into helicopters.

Key to the rescue was the fortunate positioning of a huge oil tanker that
had departed from the TransAlaska Oil Pipeline Terminal in Valdez fully
loaded with North Slope crude. The “Williamsburgh” was steaming south to
Texas refineries. It was the closest ship to the stranded Prinsendam and
would be the first vessel to arrive — eight hours later.

A rescue at dawn amidst wind and waves

As the darkness merged with gray dawn, clouds moved into the Gulf of Alaska
kicking up swells to 10 feet and winds up to 35 mph. Lifeboat evacuees grew
cold, wet and seasick, but mostly quiet as they huddled together for
warmth. Attempts at singing to raise spirits washed away in the storm. The
predicted typhoon was moving closer.

Meanwhile in Juneau and Sitka responders were organizing firefighting gear,
and gathering as many blankets from hotels, school dormitories and other
locations as they could find. Hospitals were alerted and began preparing to
receive injured victims. Communities activated their own response teams.
Yakutat became a refueling hub for helicopters.

When the “Williamsburgh” arrived it encountered the first of the lifeboat
passengers. Some climbed the rope mesh Jacob’s Ladder up the side of the
tanker. After hours of cold and early stages of hypothermia, many hands and
legs didn’t respond. Helicopters hovered above the lifeboats and lowered
metal baskets down to the lifeboats that were rising and dipping in the
swells.

[image: 36686935_web1_Prinsendam-JUE-240626-1_3.jpg]
Prinsendam evacuees await hoisting from their lifeboat on Oct. 5, 1980.
(Dave Cook / U.S. Coast Guard)

Rescuers dropped onto the lifeboats to help move cramped cold elders into
the basket or loop their arms and torso through a horse collar harness to
be lifted through the rotor wash and hauled into the chopper. When full of
10 to 12 people, the helos headed to the tanker to set down on a landing
pad and unload evacuees then return for more victims before fuel ran out or
lifeboaters suffered more.

The tanker crew gave their bunks, food and blankets to aid the rescued
Prinsendam passengers. Three choppers flew between the pitching and rolling
lifeboats to rescue more victims as the sea and wind got worse. Every 10
seconds icy water broke over the lifeboats. People bailed, but feared
letting go of the boat could toss them overboard along with the water they
bailed.

Airborne refueling sped up evacuations as helicopters drank up fuel from a
spigot in a flying gas station. Pilots were instructed to “pick a boat and
start hoisting,” but it was more coordinated than that phrase suggests. One
helicopter would land, unload people and return to pick up more as a second
helicopter touched down on the other landing pad of the huge tanker. Aside
from one woman getting dipped into the ocean inadvertently, all arrived
safely on a vessel.

One helicopter rescuer later said, “So there we were from 20-30 feet
looking directly down into a lifeboat with 50 pairs of eyes staring
straight up at us. You know in your heart they were holding onto a
desperate hope you would perform a miracle. Our rotor wash was blowing down
on them as they tried to huddle together.”

One helicopter pilot was at the controls for 10 hours. Another crew spent
11½ hours flying, made seven tanker landings, three inflight refuelings and
61 hoists retrieving passengers from a lifeboat.

Crews on the tanker assisted at the two landing pads and helped evacuees
navigate the deck obstructions on the 1,092-foot tanker to safe
accommodations below. Big Canadian “Buffalo” helicopters (similar to U.S.
Chinooks) arrived to help and operated out of Yakutat, more than 100 miles
from the burning ship and drifting lifeboats. The small town worried if it
would have enough food for more than 500 distressed passengers. Some
helicopters flew to Yakutat, but others remained on scene shuttling
evacuees on the five-minute flight between lifeboat and tanker. Six
lifeboats with many cramped and cold evacuees needed rescue as they drifted
farther from burning Prinsendam.

The Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell arrived on scene at 1:45 p.m. Saturday
afternoon, 14 hours after the fire began. It had raced 200 miles from
Juneau and now faced 30-knot winds and only one-mile visibility. Locating
lifeboats was challenging as the small vessels appeared and then
disappeared among the big waves. The ship rescued 16 people, one by one,
until the helicopter had to depart due to low fuel. By this time weather
conditions in the Gulf of Alaska had worsened and darkness was approaching.

Eighteen hours after the fire started rescuers thought all the lifeboats
had been found, but one remained unaccounted for: two responders on a
lifeboat had not logged in. It was dark now. The Boutwell sent a beam of
light straight up. People on the last lifeboat responded with three flares
fired rapidly into the stormy sky. The Boutwell found 18 passengers and the
two rescuers in the boat. It took an hour to hoist them onto the 378-foot
cutter using a horse collar. The 20 passengers had been on board the
lifeboat for 17 hours. They were in better shape than others because their
lifeboat had two skilled responders, food, water and a cover.

Meanwhile, Sitka prepared to receive the ship’s victims who would need
everything from medications, clothing and places to get warm and dry.
Shopkeepers opened their doors and the shipping line agreed to pay costs of
all purchases made by the evacuees. Victims’ essentials, including
passports, were still on the burning ship. Forty hours after the cruise
ship caught fire, the Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell arrived in Sitka.

With the rescue completed, the tanker Williamsburgh headed to Valdez with
more than 300 people. Valdez was the only port that could accommodate such
a large vessel. The tanker had food for its crew for the 42 days required
to travel to a Texas refinery. The Prinsendam evacuees ate it all in 24
hours. It was 7:30 p.m. on Sunday. The fire started just after midnight on
Saturday.

All 519 souls on the Prinsendam survived.

Historical accounts and lessons learned

Details of this miraculous rescue are documented in a 400-page book
compiled by former Boutwell operations officer Stephen J. Corcoran in the
aptly named “None Were Lost,” published in 2017. Corcoran reported his
eyewitness account, reviewed Coast Guard logs and interviewed survivors.

While the Prinsendam burned in the gulf, little information about the
incident was known to local Juneau centennial celebrants. The city
proceeded with its centennial parade and a “box lunch social and a kissing
booth at Marine Park,” reported the Juneau Empire in its front page story
on Oct. 6, 1980. The 34-foot tall totem design cake standing upright in the
atrium of the State Office Building was lowered and divided onto three big
tables and served to hundreds of attendees. “There was cake and icing all
over the place,” said one event leader in the Empire article. The cake,
which took four months to plan and create, was devoured in less than three
hours,

[image: 36686935_web1_Prinsendam-JUE-240626-1_2-1024x1473.jpg]
The front page Juneau Empire on Monday, Oct. 6, 1980, featuring Mark
Kelley’s photo of the smoldering Prinsendam and a story with a photo of a
34-foot tall totem design cake in the atrium of the State Office Building.
(Laurie Craig / Juneau Empire)

Another Oct. 4 entertainment for Juneauites was a concert at the high
school auditorium featuring nationally known singer Dionne Warwick and
comedian Marty Allen. Centennial Hall had not yet been constructed.

One of the reasons locals were unaware of the magnitude of the cruise ship
fire was due to limited communication technology. Responders were
appropriately focused on the intense rescue operations. In Juneau’s federal
building Coast Guard response coordinators issued frequent dispatches to
national and international media representatives pressing for details on
that frenetic Saturday.

The brief messages were documented in an “Extra” special edition published
the day of the Prinsendam fire. At the time, the Juneau Empire published
five days a week with hardcopy papers (online publications did not exist)
printed Monday through Friday at the paper’s Second Street office. Empire
staff scrambled to document the rescue and issued a two-page “Extra” on
Oct. 4. By Monday’s regular edition headlines declared, “All safe:
Prinsendam passengers ashore.”

The “Extra” as well as the Monday, Oct. 6, 1980, Empires featured a
top-of-the-fold aerial photo of the smoldering Prinsendam taken by
well-known Juneau photographer Mark Kelley. He had begun working for the
newspaper a year earlier after graduating from the University of Alaska in
Fairbanks with a degree in photojournalism and northern studies.

Kelley is one of many residents who remember the early morning of the
centennial day Saturday, Oct. 4. As a volunteer firefighter living in the
downtown fire hall he was alerted by the ship’s horn blasts. He helped
round up crew members from the Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell who were
celebrating in local drinking establishments. At that early time the
details of the emergency were unknown. Simultaneously, Kelley knew the
importance of the city’s big centennial plans later in the day. He was
prepared to photograph town festivities for the paper. He never got them.
His attention was on the Prinsendam’s fire.

Kelley also knew he was in the perfect place to get color photos for the
Associated Press and other news outlets. He alerted the national press. He
and other local media staff hopped on a Channel Flying plane at the
company’s three-mile Glacier Highway floatplane base. By the time they
arrived at the Prinsendam, the weather was “rough, there was hardly any
smoke and the wind was so stiff it was difficult to hold the camera still,”
Kelley recalled in a June 14, 2024, interview. Those are the conditions of
the front page photo, taken as the plane had to turn back to Juneau because
its fuel ran low. The next day other national media staff converged on
Alaska and flew to the ship. They got images of black smoke billowing from
the ship and photos of bedraggled evacuees arriving safely in other
locations. Cameras at the time only used rolls of film; digital cameras
were a dream of the future. The film rolls were flown out of town for
processing and delivery to official media sources.

By Tuesday, Oct. 7, the ship fire appeared to be out with only light smoke
rising. The Prinsendam lay at a slight list, but the interior temperature
was 300 degrees. The sea was still rolling with swells as a professional
firefighting crew was put aboard to extinguish the flames. A tow line
hauser was affixed and ready for a large tug to tow the cruise ship to
shore. The Coast Guard nixed that option and insisted Prinsendam get no
closer than 50 miles from Alaska’s coast. An estimate of the 188,000
gallons of oil — if released — would be a smothering slick that could
spread into Cross Sound and Sitka Sound. Whales, sea lions, fish and
waterfront businesses were at risk if oil escaped from the ship. Meanwhile,
the rescued passengers — in new clothes — boarded chartered jets and flew
home.

On Oct. 9 fire erupted again and the nine onboard firefighters needed to
escape. Helicopters had gone back to their bases. The Coast Guard requested
immediate help and a chopper “lifts off from Yakutat in the wind and storm
and dark,” according to reports. Water was flooding into the Prinsendam
through its portholes. The ship had become difficult to tow in its flooded,
listing state. It was listing 40-45 degrees.

A few days later Kelley tried again to get photos of the Prinsendam. All
the passengers were safe, but the ship was now heeled over hard and smoke
still poured out. A delay from the planned departure time added two hours
to accommodate the exhausted helicopter pilot so he could eat some
breakfast. It resulted in the ultimate frustration for Kelley. Partway on
the flight to the Prinsendam, the pilot listened through his headset then
announced, “Well, Mark, I’m sorry. The Prinsendam just sank.” When they
arrived at the spot where the ship had been there was empty ocean. The
photo shoot was a bust. “There was nothing to photograph,” Kelley said.

The Prinsendam sank bow-first in just moments in nearly 9,000 feet of ocean
79 miles offshore of Sitka. There was little surface oil visible. The cold
water at that depth would likely solidify the oil where it was predicted to
remain.

In retrospect nearly a half-century later, observers note that the elderly
passengers had a mindset forged by growing up in the Great Depression of
the 1930s and sacrificing as a nation in the 1940s during World War II.
Their collective attitude was serving a higher purpose so all could
survive. That may have been crucial to living through an icy night in the
Gulf of Alaska in October 1980.

For present-day rescuers, lessons were learned from the Prinsendam fire and
evacuation, as well as from other global events, Whitcomb wrote in her
email earlier this month. In addition to studying other “mass-rescue”
incidents, the Coast Guard, cruise industry companies, and other military
entities conduct scenario training together and separately.

Air stations in Sitka and Kodiak — including those with seasonal presence
in Cordova, Cold Bay and Kotzebue — make helicopter and fixed-wing
responses available from various locations. As with Prinsendam, the Coast
Guard continues to maintain a relationship with the Royal Canadian Air
Force, Whitcomb wrote.

Most notable is the vastly improved communications and navigation capacity
since 1980, she added. Satellite phones and ship position monitoring —
often in real-time — allow accurate positioning information. Internet
service has boosted communications significantly, but “old-school high
frequency [HF] and VHF radio channels” are still monitored by the Coast
Guard.

• Contact Laurie Craig at laurie.craig at juneauempire.com.###

======================================

The author, Laurie Craig, gets one thing wrong in her excellent article. We
did have instantaneous communication capabilities but the deficiency was in
networking. The long range Morse code transmissions from my ship TT
WILLIAMSBURGH, the two long range Hamilton class USCG cutters Mellon and
Boutwell, USCG Communications Station Kodiak Island, Alaska were
instantaneous.

Surprisingly, due to a USCG Radioman being assigned to USCG Marine Rescue
Coordination Center (MRCC) 17th District Sector Southeast Alaska in Juneau
had instantaneous one-way (receive only) communication because MRCC Juneau
had a communications radio receiver and suitable antenna capable of
receiving all the communications on 500 kHz Morse from PRINSENDAM/PJTA, TT
WILLIAMSBURGH/WGOA, USCGC BOUTWELL/NYCQ (WHEC-719), USCGC MELLON/NMEL and
USCG COMMUNICATIONS STATION KODIAK/NOJ who were all coordinating the
rescue. The only delays were that each communications circuit wasn't
networked together: The Morse received from MV PRINSENDAM, TT
WILLIAMSBURGH, and other on-scene ships was received immediately by the
duty radioman at USCG Communications Station Kodiak, who typed it into his
radio log with his typewriter, the supervisor Radioman Chief (RMC) of the
watch took what was copied on that typewriter and retyped it onto the USCG
Rescue Coordination teleprinter network which according to my recollection
was connected to all the USCG points in Alaska District 17. If the message
dispatches on that network had to be sent on another network circuit, it
had to be retyped on a baudot paper tape perforator then transmitted
onwards using a baudot paper tape reader on a networked teletype machine.
The USCG teletype circuits were private loops each with its own subscriber
stations who received everything sent on the private loop. The teletype
circuits of Associated Press, United Press International worked in the same
way: messages input by one subscriber station were instantaneously
transmitted to all of the stations on the teletype circuit. It was the
retyping onto paper tape then retransmission using a paper tape reader from
network to network that introduced delays. Even when teletype started using
computer type video terminals the delays still existed, but there was the
capability of storing messages and exporting them using floppy disks and
manually bringing those disks to another terminal on a different network.
Once on each network, communications were instantaneous, but transferring
the messages from network to network was what took time because all the
networks were not connected together. Private companies like Associated
Press and United Press International didn't want to pass news information
to their competitors.  All the teleprinter networks were five level (five
holes in the paper tape) Baudot code, The same Baudot code was used on
Telex networks of Western Union Domestic (WUD), Western Union International
(WUI), French Telegraph Company (FTC) Tropical Radio Telegraph (TRT) and
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), Florists' Transworld Delivery
(FTD) - we radio officers remember the registered cable address "FLORDER
NYK'.  Each of these was a separate network but they did interconnect - for
a fee - there was a crossover charge if you dialed a RCA Telex number from
an ITT machine, and so forth.  All the teleprinter circuits used baudot
five level code  except AT&T's Teletype Writer Exchange (TWX) which used
eight level ASCII code - the same code that computers use today.

The baudot teletype code was a five level (five holes) code, that means it
would be capable of storing 2 to the 5th power (2^5=32) or 32 characters -
that's not even enough for 26 Roman letters plus 10 numerals (36
characters), so two non-printing shift characters were used: FIGS or Figure
Shift and LTRS Letters Shift.  Conveniently the LTRS shift punched all five
holes this was used with a backspace key to obliterate errors on the paper
tape.

In 1980 there was only paper tape (or a typewriter and paper) for storage.
An operator inputted a message with a baudot paper tape punch.  If he made
an error, there was a manual backspace that pulled the paper tape backwards
one position for each push of the backspace button.  Then the
operator would push the LTRS (Letters shift key).

See: https://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/info/baudot.html
and
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2008-09/colossus/baudot.html#:~:text=The%20Baudot%20code%20or%20International,%5E5%3D32%20characters%20efficiently
.
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