Coast Guard admits flaws in rescue try

The Coast Guard acknowledged yesterday that its aircraft did not take off until an hour after rescuers received a distress call from a New Bedford-based scallop boat and that a series of weather and mechanical problems further delayed their response after the Northern Edge sank in frigid seas.

Three out of four Coast Guard helicopters and a jet were forced to abort their search during the first critical hours of Monday's sinking, highlighting an aging Coast Guard infrastructure and raising questions about the service's ability to respond quickly to maritime crises.

The five crew members who died may not have been saved, even with an instantaneous response, according to a description of the sinking by the lone survivor. A specialist on hypothermia also expressed doubt that the crew members could have survived long enough for the Coast Guard to arrive.

But grieving family members and loved ones of the lost crew reacted angrily to news of delays in the response.

''I don't think our tax money is going where it should be," said Maria Tremblay, the former wife of Carlos Lopes, , the vessel's captain, who was presumed dead. ''There should have been someone else waiting to get out. The minute they knew there was a mechanical failure there should have been something waiting to head right out. Two hours is way too long. You mean to tell me they couldn't dispatch anybody from anywhere? I just don't get that."

Commander Tom Maine -- chief of operations at the Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod, which coordinated the aerial response -- said the breakdowns were ''an incredibly unlucky confluence of factors that caused us to struggle that night."

The 22-year Coast Guard veteran added: ''This was the most frustrating, unusual night I've seen in terms of aircraft having problems, to be frank."

Maine said the public may misunderstand just how quickly the Coast Guard is expected to respond even when it is at its most urgent Bravo-Zero status, as it was Monday night.

''Ninety percent of the time," he said, the service is ready to have an aircraft launch within 30 minutes.

''I guess what the layman has to understand is that a 30-minute response posture . . . does not equate to, 'We'll be there in 30 minutes,' " Maine said. ''In this case, it was a reasonably significant distance from our station, there's always a transit time involved, there's always uncertainties of weather and position, and depending on where an incident occurs, it may take us a time to get there. That's just physics, I guess."

The Northern Edge sent its first distress signal at 4:44 p.m. Monday, via an automatic radio beacon the ship carried, as recommended by the Coast Guard. That signal, relayed by a passing satellite, was received at First District Coast Guard headquarters in Boston. But it was not confirmed until 5:12 p.m., when a second pass by another satellite made it possible to pinpoint the beacon's position.

In the meantime, a second fishing vessel in the area, the Diane Marie, called the Coast Guard station in Woods Hole to report the sinking. Officials at headquarters also traced the signal's registration number and called the owner of the Northern Edge to ensure that the signal was legitimate, since most signals are triggered accidentally.

At 5:12 p.m., the First District headquarters issued orders to the Air Station in Cape Cod to launch an aircraft, but the first Coast Guard aircraft at the scene, a high-flying HU-25 Falcon Jet, did not arrive until 6:45 p.m., according to Coast Guard logs Maine read to the Globe.

The plane was dispatched after a previous Coast Guard aircraft, an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, had to return to base when a warning light indicated problems with its de-icing equipment. That helicopter, which had been on alert status, did not get airborne until 5:45 p.m., just over an hour after the vessel overturned in 40-degree water.

The logs show a replacement helicopter -- the first to reach the scene of the sinking and the one most capable of making a rescue, because it could hover and lower a rescue basket to any survivors -- did not arrive until 7:10 p.m., nearly 2 hours after the initial distress call.

Overnight, a second Falcon jet assigned to the search was grounded after its nose wheel steering froze in 7-degree temperatures. A third Jayhawk helicopter could not fly because of a frozen fuel-control switch, and a fourth helicopter had to return to base after developing major problems in one of its engines.

Two Coast Guard cutters reached the scene at 1 a.m., nearly four hours after aircraft from Air Station Cape Cod left the scene.

The Falcon jets are due to be replaced, and the Jayhawk helicopters are supposed to be overhauled as part of a massive Coast Guard plan to upgrade its equipment, known as the Deepwater program. The Bush administration has approved the plan, which is estimated to cost more than $17 billion. But congressional critics have argued that the administration has been slow to provide funding, which has pushed the completion date to the year 2026.

Whether a speedier response could have saved the fishermen is debatable. The Diane Marie called the Woods Hole station a second time at 5:21 p.m. and reported rescuing the lone survivor, Pedro Furtado. He would later describe his struggle to pull himself onto a lifeboat and to coax his shipmates to join him before the ship succumbed to 8-to-10-foot seas.

Dr. Eric A. Weiss, a professor of emergency medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine and the author of books on wilderness medicine, said, ''When individuals are suddenly thrown into very cold water like this, there's a high probability they could die within 5-10 minutes of what I call the 'cold-shock response.' "

Yesterday, Carolyn Latti, a Boston lawyer representing Furtado, said she planned to file two multimillion-dollar lawsuits in federal court next week, one against the boat's owner and the other against the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The suit against the owner, K&R Fishing Enterprises Inc., would seek damages for the boat's lack of seaworthiness and the crew's lack of access to survival suits, which she alleged were improperly stowed in the engine room.

The suit against the Fisheries Service would claim damages for the regulations that compelled the Northern Edge's crew to stay out in bad weather, she said.

Maine described a night of constantly changing missions 80 miles to the northwest at the air station, where the staff and flight crews had been enjoying dinner when the first call came from headquarters in the early evening darkness.

He said the first Jayhawk took off at 5:45 p.m., three minutes after the 30-minute mandated launch time, because the crew had taken extra time to evaluate the weather conditions. The pilots climbed into a standard hover to check their flight instruments when they noticed a warning light indicating a failure of the de-icing system on the tail rotor. The pilots were concerned that snow squalls or sea spray from a low hover could cover their rotors in ice, and they decided to land and take off in a backup helicopter.

During the delay, Maine decided to launch a Falcon jet, even though the high-flying aircraft are not typically used in the type of search conducted Monday night.

The helicopter crew transferred to a second Jayhawk, while a ground crew moved over a huge spotlight dubbed Night Sun from the first helicopter. The aircraft took off at 6:38 p.m., arriving on scene at 7:10 p.m. There were more than eight private ships already at the site.

The Jayhawk crew dropped a buoy marker to start tracking the drift of the wreckage, which was still visible from the surface.

The helicopter departed the scene at 8:40 p.m. and arrived at the Air Station exactly an hour later, according to the logs. The jet departed about 9:20 p.m.

The helicopter's pilots had discovered problems with the craft's high-frequency radios. Ground crews readied their third helicopter of the evening so the returning crew could switch aircraft again when they landed. But Maine said the crew discovered that a lever used to switch between fuel tanks was frozen on the third helicopter.

''None of us could believe that actually happened," Maine said. At that time, Maine decided to again launch the Falcon jet. About 25 minutes later, the pilots discovered their nose-wheel steering lever was frozen. By then it was about 11:15 p.m. The fourth and final Jayhawk at the base took off, piloted by the same crew.

But 10 miles outside the Air Station, the crew noticed a malfunction in one of the helicopter's two jet engines. They declared an emergency and landed back at the base at 12:24 a.m.

At that point, Maine decided to send the jet crew off to bed, so it would be ready to fly again in the morning and reach the search area at first light. He also grounded the weary helicopter crew.

''With all the bad things that happened to us that night, with all the unfortunate weather-related, maintenance-related things that happened to us, we were still able to get aircraft on scene, searching, relatively quickly," Maine said.

Globe staff writers Raja Mishra, Sarah Schweitzer, and David Abel, as well as Globe correspondent Jack Encarnacao, contributed to this story. Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.