Sunken tug still stumps Coast Guard
Saturday, January 29, 2005 11:50 PM PST
By Pat Forgey
Printable version
E-mail this articleEditor's note: This is the first in a two-part series that takes a look at the December 2002 sinking of the tug Primo Brusco.
A two-year U.S. Coast Guard investigation has been unable to find a definitive cause of the fatal sinking of the tug Primo Brusco in 2002, despite uncovering two tantalizing leads.
One of them involved an engineer's decision to deliberately let water into one small section of the vessel.
The Cathlamet-based tug was heading from Grays Harbor to Eureka, Calif., on Dec. 30, 2002, towing the barge Lucky Logger and more than 1 million board feet of logs through 30-foot seas and winds of up to 58 mph.
Late at night, according to the investigation, the 100-foot vessel began taking on water and healed over to the right. Capt. Dennis Cooley, a 27-year veteran of the maritime industry, called the Coast Guard at 2:24 a.m. He gave the vessel's location as 19 miles off Florence, Ore., and reported that the crew was donning survival suits as a precaution.
A few minutes later, when the Coast Guard communications officers in North Bend, Ore., called back, they were unable to raise the tug on the radio.
Rescuers saved four members of the five-man crew. The next day they found the body of the fifth, 44-year old Monte C. Nelson of Oroville, Wash.
The Coast Guard concluded its investigation into the sinking late 2004. In January, the agency released heavily-edited copies of its investigation to The Daily News under the Federal Freedom of Information Act.
Neither the Coast Guard nor Longview-based Brusco Tug & Barge would confirm the names of those on board the Primo Brusco and certain other details. The newspaper has confirmed the names of those aboard through other means, including family members.
Brusco president Roland "Bo" Brusco of Longview did not return phone calls.
Statements attributed to the members of the crew, unless otherwise noted, are based on transcripts of interviews with Coast Guard investigators.
During the investigation, the Coast Guard reviewed both the vessel's recent history and how the crew responded when the tug began taking on water.
The report's conclusion was frustratingly inconclusive. A study by the Coast Guard's Marine Casualty Analysis Center found that the Primo Brusco sank after taking on too much water, but it failed to determine why.
Once the tug began riding lower in the water, deck vents wound up under water, and the vessel appears to have flooded rapidly. Searchers looking for the missing crewman reported seeing no sign of the vessel.
"The never found the boat, so they don't really know what flooded," said Lt. Zeke Lyons, a Coast Guard marine casualty investigator.
Lyons did not work on the Primo Brusco investigation, but reviewed it at the request of the Daily News. Lt. Felton Gilmore, the chief investigator, is on leave and unavailable for comment.
The day the Primo Brusco sank, it had already begun leaking in the lazarette, a small compartment in the stern that is sometimes used for storage but which was inaccessible at the time. A flooding alarm had repeatedly sounded in the lazarette during the day. The compartment could only be reached by unbolting a deck hatch, and the crew chose not to check it because the rough seas were sloshing over the deck.
Chief engineer Mitch Russeff told investigators the leaky lazarette wasn't a problem. Pumps could handle the water easily. In fact, they handled it almost too easily.
The pump would quickly drain the water from the lazarette, then lose suction and shut down automatically. The lazarette would then gradually fill up with water, the flooding alarm would again sound, and the pump would have to be restarted from the engine room, the report said.
To deal with that, Russeff opened a sea valve, letting water into the boat from outside. That kept the water level in the lazarette high enough that the pump would run continuously.
"I opened the valve to the lazarette, and I opened the sea water valve to maintain suction in the pump," Russeff said. "It wasn't open all the way, it was just cracked so it would have something to maintain some sort of water seal in the pump so it would suck from the lazarette."
Russeff told Capt. Cooley that maneuver was "routine." Cooley responded by telling Russeff not to go to bed with the valve open.
"He assured me that he'd stay up and keep an eye on it," Cooley said.
When Russeff was later relieved by the next shift he notified his replacement that the valve was open. When he went to bed the valve was still open and the pump was running, he told investigators.
Both Cooley and Russeff were interviewed together, accompanied by Brusco lawyers.
Lyons said it was not unusual for Brusco to have attorneys present during the interviews.
"That is normal that an attorney would be present at an interview. Anybody can have one," he said.
Cooley told investigators the lazarette was so small that even if it had flooded entirely, it would have only made the Primo Brusco ride lower in the water. In fact, he said it might have even improved the vessel's handling in some circumstances.
The Coast Guard's Marine Safety Center in Washington, D.C., confirmed that: "The vessel most likely would have stayed upright and afloat if only the lazarette had flooded."
However, the center also determined that, with a flooded lazarette, the tug's freeboard -- the distance between the deck and the water, would have declined at the stern from 16 inches to 9 inches.
For the Primo Brusco to sink it somehow had to take on 128 tons of water, an amount that would have included the lazarette, ballast tanks and part of the engine room. The Marine Safety Center was unable to determine how that happened, but it said the stern went underwater first and progressively flooded. A fully flooded lazarette would have held 21 tons of water, the center determined.
"We cannot determine exactly how the progressive flooding occurred," the center concluded.
"Based on the vessel's arrangements, heavy weather at the time of the incident and the loss of freeboard from flooding in the lazarette, the vessel most likely progressively flooded as green (ocean) water downflooded through vents and hatches in the main deck into below-deck compartments," the center said.
The Coast Guard also inquired about the recent history of the Primo Brusco. The tug had been built in 1977 by Orange Shipbuilding of Orange, Texas. It has built dozens of tug and tow vessels, and which work mostly on the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico.
On Dec. 23, a week before the Primo Brusco sank, it was in Eureka, waiting to haul a chip barge north. Coast Guard interview transcripts show that investigators inquired why that captain -- it was not Cooley --- refused to make that trip. Investigators had apparently hoped to interview that captain in January 2003, but Brusco representatives said he was on a trip and unavailable. It appears that investigators never got to interview him.
Instead of an interview, Brusco's attorneys provided the Coast Guard with an account of the incident by Brusco officials, who implied that the captain was concerned about his own skills, not the vessel itself.
"He was not comfortable with towing the chip barge to the Columbia River because of the weather forecast," said the unidentified manager, despite the opinion of another Brusco captain there that the trip could be made.
The balking captain then inquired if he'd be fired if he didn't make the trip, but Brusco representatives told him "nobody will be terminated for refusing any job within Brusco Tug & Barge that they are not comfortable with."
Another Brusco captain made the trip without incident, and the tug and barge arrived safely at the Columbia River on Dec. 26. It was on Dec. 30, its next trip south, that the Primo Brusco sank.
Brusco company officials went on to tell the Coast Guard, possibly in response to questions posed by the investigators, of the last captain it fired.
"The last captain terminated from our company was in May of 2002 and that was because he tried to cover up a barge grounding incident from the Coast Guard and our company," said the Brusco representative.
After the sinking of the Primo Brusco, drug and alcohol tests were given to the surviving crew members. The Coast Guard withheld the results of those tests.
An autopsy performed by the Coos County Medical Examiner found no evidence of drug or alcohol usage by Nelson.
Coming Monday: The rescue that saved four of the tug's crewmen
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