Tropical Storm Isaac Rescues! | Coast Guard Florida | Full Episode

with a tropical storm hurling towards southern florida the coast guard braces for impact i tell you the biggest lesson learned they're very unpredictable in clearwater the team battles the elements to reach a seriously notices injured mariner warning temporary flight restriction is in effect and in miami the boat crew confronts the storm head-on as they attempt to tow a vessel through treacherous seas this is to get some weather the florida peninsula a hotbed for mother nature's fury here every day the brave men and women of the coast guard's busiest boat and air stations vigilantly patrol nearly two million square miles of turbulent waters protecting the public from the dangerous elements and preventing foreign threats and illegal drugs from reaching our shores america's southern waters are protected by coast guard florida [Music] did you get the message to bring o2 i got two extra tanks sir all right cool man my name is randy lopez i'm an aviation survival technician second class and a rescue swimmer at air station clearwater we just got a call uh for a medevac there's a 36 year old male having chest pain off of a freighter it's 180 miles off the coast of jacksonville it's gonna take us three to four hours to get out there it's gonna be a long night [Applause] my name is lieutenant brian hoyt i'm an aircraft commander at air station clearwater weather wasn't bad but there was a there was no moons no illumination so the goggles weren't very helpful hopefully this guy is in fact able to be quick and dirty it's 180 miles offshore so it took us two and a half to three hours to get there that little dot [Applause] do they speak english on the crew oh that's a good call i don't know that's the last boat that i went to they didn't speak english should we try calm yeah please speak english overseas ambrose helicopter we're ready to give you your voice [Applause] is able to walk the captain didn't speak very good english and was kind of having a hard time understanding what we were saying so we didn't have a very clear guidance once we got on scene we're going to send a trail line down you can hold on to the trail line and use that to guide the basket down right now is he saying okay no he doesn't know what you're talking about sir terry don't want to send me down with the trail line there and figure everything out that might be helpful dude actually it's a good idea yeah we could probably do that we didn't want to just throw a line down there and lower a basket to a crew that wasn't proficient which is why i decided hey you know maybe i should go down there and get things settled before we just go into hoisting so it'll be a harness with randy and then we'll retrieve with the trail line i like it there's really not a lot of room on the road there's a lot of obstacles and a lot of platforms not a lot of deck believe it or not i'm a big tanker what do you guys see down there uh best spot he's got a circle painted right there right where it says wind we found a about 10 foot circle on the left side bow that would look like our best opportunity to get the basket in there swimming down you good to go over there carmen's ready let's do it roger i have a target insider's going up in that cab comer's going down seeing such a large boat up close at night with no moon and you got someone dangling from the helicopter and we've also got someone's life here trying to save on deck you can't really even describe it but when you're over that boat it gets it gets real in a hurry attempting to get the rescue swimmer on the boat wasn't successful as we uh thought it might be bringing farmer back up into the cabin uh we worried about uh obstacles there okay [Music] the hoist itself was kind of a challenging hoist because as you'd come up to the very front of the vessel there was really no reference point let's try it again easy forward right [Music] with the darkness and that small hoisting platform they couldn't get me on the on the ship we tried two times we just couldn't make it happen all right let's rethink this i think you have the basket with the trail line to go do you think they'd get trail line i think they'd understand after the second attempt of that we opted to just attempt a basket with trail line from the coast guard yes sir we first spoke to the captain he didn't understand english very well but they put somebody else on who understood better and they were very helpful we're going to send a trail line down with a basket yes sir all right i'm ready i have a target inside trail line's going down roger here hold him right to 40. hold the airline's going down the hoisting platform is so close to the edge of the ship trail line's on deck it's kind of difficult to get into where we wanted to be that's just going outside the cabin [Music] easy forward easy [Music] i was pretty happy that we were able to get that basket down because we really don't want to put the swimmer in harm's way if we don't have to survivors inside the basket take the load and when he was in the basket i took controls i moved off the boat clear the vessel [Music] i heard him being hoisted up so i knew he was safe bringing a survivor inside the cabin survivors inside the cabin most extreme relief that we can just get airborne again and uh head towards the [Applause] u.s coast hospital overseas on burma thank you very much sir uh please take care of our escape engineer and thank you very much sir very welcome once we got him inside the cabin my rescue swimmer started to do all his checks on him to make sure he was okay what happened my heart i feel like [Applause] okay [Music] on the way back to the hospital i just monitored his vitals and put him on some oxygen and just make sure he was stable the whole way back what's our epa to the hospital five zero minutes thank you it always feels good to rescue someone and did it successfully and safely that was exciting i might not sleep tonight [Music] [Applause] he told me thank you like four or five times tell the whole crew thank you because he saw us trying to hoist two or three times and i think he knew like this is pretty dangerous so yeah he was very thankful that's always nice it's a piper arrow white and green we have pretty crappy visibility visibility was so poor it's possible we could have flown past them and not seen [Music] them okay thanks my name is randy lopez i'm an aviation survival technician second class and i'm a rescue swimmer at air station clearwater florida today we're going out to sunshine motocross track in clearwater just to practice for an upcoming race and just have some fun you ready dude high five going with my dad leonard and my son ian and i enjoy spending time with them especially at the dirt bike track just doing guy stuff so it's gonna be a really good time i'm gonna get some snacks together let's see here i'm natasha lopez and i'm randy's wife okay so how's work been man it's been pretty good yeah i had a medevac three nights ago it was really dark out so it was kind of a sketchy hoist yeah ended up just putting a basket with the trail line down the guy got in it and took him to the hospital oh everything worked out good yeah it was good i worry a lot about randy when he's at work be safe no injuries i know that he's really confident in what he does and he loves it but it is nerve-wracking when they're out there in the middle of the night on those rescues but i know he's meant to be doing what he's doing here go dirt bike let's do it [Music] my name is larry lopez and i'm randy's dad we just go out and have a blast every once in a while you know it's good to get out and just do whatever guys do motocross racing that's randy's favorite thing to do and i'm gonna kick back and enjoy it with his son you know just watch him race around the track watch daddy race nice i'm impressed with randy big time you know he got in the special unit he just goes out and does his thing you know and saving people's lives you ready you're up and yet he still has time to go out with his family and stuff like that i'm very proud of him [Music] we just received a call of a possible downed aircraft um do you have the rescue swimmer on board over i do have the swimmer my name is robert nelson aviation survival technician first class here at air station clearwater florida we go on training flights every day and uh we'd just taken off when we were informed that there was an aircraft that had crashed it's a piper arrow white and green they said it's approximately a one nautical mile off shore over [Music] all right roger a good copy i wonder if we got information on a possible [Music] roger great table back in the right places i'm lieutenant junior grade tyler monas i'm an age 60 pod here at air station clearwater we had a lot of bad weather very low ceilings about 500 feet quarter mile visibility rain and thunderstorms we had lightning in the area possibly we could fly into a thunderstorm flying through a storm it can be pretty violent [Applause] what do you think about going over the coast and going up that looks clear yeah i like uh [Applause] [Music] so as we're flying out to scene going through the storms there was some pretty moderate turbines enough that my door actually popped open we had to slow down and get that shut again an area of precipitation off to the right yeah it's also blinding earlier like in the one composition the weather started coming in heavy rain visibility was down to about a quarter mile rescue 6040 sectors ain't been good afternoon hey we're on scene up here uh we're having bad times with sector would you be able to pass to them that we're on scene and conducting a search at when we arrived on scene we didn't see the aircraft so we started impromptu search right now i'd say uh victor sierra over the top of the position actually about uh 300 yards out pretty clear it sounds good for right now all we knew was a downed aircraft we didn't know how many people were on board we really didn't know what happened to the aircraft we didn't know what condition it could be in visibility was so poor it's possible we could have flown past them when i've seen them there's a possibility a large debris field and in pretty bad an island shape out or debris i think it's a shelf i saw that okay i think it's gonna be too tight for any uh nav guys as far as a search pattern goes so i think just doing this naked back and forth [Music] right off our nose right now all right our flight mechanic located the aircraft using the sensors onboard the aircraft they're pretty shallow i see nobody moving out there [Music] all we knew was a downed aircraft we didn't know how many people were on board we really didn't know what happened to the aircraft we didn't know what condition it could be in visibility was so poor it's possible we could have flown past them but not seeing them our flight mechanic located the aircraft using the sensors aboard the aircraft i see nobody moving out there the first thing we're doing is we're looking at the aircraft see if there's somebody inside the aircraft just to make sure we're not gonna miss somebody [Music] there [Applause] about a quarter mile to the shoreline we saw a big yellow life raft and standing next to it was the survivor yeah absolutely since the survivor had just been in a crash i wanted to assess and make sure he didn't have any additional injuries all right they're off the nose right now about 20 knots see maybe about one foot shut up are you ready to hoist some people dude oh yeah this will be a harder deployment of the rescue from four feet equipment ready to get the hoist covers going down swimmer is halfway down fight this over in the water [Applause] [Music] the water was very shallow it was about maybe about two feet of water and four feet of mud i walked over to the survivor of course the first question i want to ask is if he's okay he had an unexpected mechanical failure during flight he said he skipped across the water a couple times and was able to settle into the water and that's how he was able to avoid any injury to be able to walk away from playing crash like this in my opinion is pretty slim and to actually be able to crawl out of the aircraft pull his raft out and walk away from it amazing absolutely amazing just caught up a basket [Applause] [Music] he was telling us there was a one survivor from the aircraft the pilot was the only occupant looks good possibly mild hypothermia just being on the rain for 30 or 45 minutes clear the water back dirty fast come in here ride your back just below the camera [Applause] break it back dude [Music] it's in our interest to cut the raft up and ensure that it doesn't end up at sea another aircraft may see it or another boat may see it and there'd be another search and rescue case and it would turn into a very expensive case for an empty rafter point [Music] hey how are you ted how are you doing can you hear me all right yeah i don't i don't need to go to the hospital for a hypothermia i'm fine [Music] he was pretty adamant that he didn't want to go to the hospital [Music] one of the reasons i've really enjoyed this job is being able to be there for somebody if they are in trouble thanks fellas absolutely appreciate the lift it wasn't exactly the way i plan to get here but it was my ultimate destination i appreciate it yeah most time when i meet somebody in a situation like this it's the most dramatic event in their life i need to i need to get him inside get him dry this is a good case it's always a good case to bring somebody back alive [Music] what's this everybody tropical storm isaac as of 1100 it's uh moving at 15 knots towards us the weather tonight it's supposed to get pretty crappy out northeast winds at 32 to 38 knots and becoming 36 to 46 knots gusting around 65 knots seas are 9 to 11 occasional 14s with occasional 18s tomorrow out there mk3 matthew moore united states coast guard stage my beach ood tropical storm is supposed to be coming out of cuba as a cat one now so as we come into a hurricane status so just be prepared if it does take a last minute turn things may shift around crews may be coming in and we may be launched on the boats but as of right now nobody's leaving we're a station we're preparing for heavy winds and heavy seas all the other boats around have left so right now we're just the only people on base holding it down also right now on the way up is marathon with 141 and 133 they should be up here in about two and a half three hours so when they get here all hands will go down there and help them today we have crews from marathon and omorata evacuating to sacramento beach as a safe haven due to the weather and the sea state it's not safe for them to stay at their current units so just stand by for when they get here everybody will be piped down there so everybody please come down help out [Music] the weather outside is deteriorating pretty quick one trip and fall on a boat and you can find yourself in the hurt locker pretty bad [Music] [Applause] well here's the briefing 200-foot research vessel or when the crewmen i guess they fell lacerated and broke their leg they've got protruding bone they're about 48 hours out from medical care right now we're in the medevac before the uh the major storm gets here first bands are just starting to hit now so we'll uh we'll keep an eye on that we'll have to divert as necessary okay my name is lieutenant tom huntley i'm an aircraft commander here at air station clearwater there's about a 200-foot research vessel 70 miles direct offshore but about 110 miles from air station clearwater we want to get out there first before the worsening weather comes in as isaac moves north temporary flight restriction is in effect for the tampa bay area not only do we have the hurricane coming up we also have the republican national convention that's brought some 50 000 people into tampa warm-up for the dark and stormy tonight people you know on both sides tuck and tail running from this thing tell you what you got to watch out in that ocean or catch with your pants down the weather outside is deteriorating pretty quick seas offshore kicking about ten foot you've got boat traffic all over the place it's not like up in alaska where people are always in 20-foot seas they know how to negotiate their situations one trip and fall on a boat and you can find yourself in the hurt locker pretty bad now we got uh about 160 knots which is pretty sweet we're boogie pretty good right now enjoy i have a pretty nice headwind coming back uh flying out there we had a pretty stiff tailwind about 40 knots helping us along further offshore we got the wind and the sea started picking up even more probably definitely do the litter dave if he just kind of tripped and stumbled and hit his knee that's one thing but if he fell from like off a ladder or something we're gonna be looking at putting him uh in the backboard they said he fell and we didn't know how high he may have fell from so he might be looking at having to do some immobilization of his neck and spine we got about 35 knots of wind right now so when we're on scene the hurricane's pressing up the coast we want to get out there and get back before night fall before the hurricane gets any closer [Music] okay so i got the vessel locked up on the flare yes these are definitely kicking off here yeah they are i mean they're taking some serious water over the bow yeah ideally i would like to put jake and the litter uh that 29 there that seems to be the most open spot ready for approach as we come down to 100 foot in a hover really see how the boat's pitching and rolling the sea spray was coming up over the bow i see my landing zone but i'm just hoping that the guys up top my life's in their hands so i'm just hoping they're on their a-game today we're gonna watch out for those stacks that's our primary uh obstacle i don't see any other antennas i plan on coming down to about 80 feet or so and give me a safe 20 foot bubble from anything coast guard six zero four zero yeah we are good from our side uh we are on standby roger getting ready to lower into your deck just go ahead and maintain 80 feet was our target hover altitude for a boat hoist it's a little high but you don't want the helicopter blades coming anywhere near you know the ship's superstructure any sort of antennas smoke stacks right five easy right hold rubber is clamping down off the boxes am i clear is okay the on-scene wins were about 40 knots so i didn't put jake exactly where i planned on putting him but we got them down on top of some boxes that were nice and flat the attack really started pitching a lot more when i got him closer yeah they're shaking and moving that's for sure got down and was able to assess the patient and talk to some people who saw what happened they were doing some small boat ops with another little boat and the waves pushed a little boat up hit him in his knee he didn't actually take a fall [Music] ready for you we will use the trail line with us [Applause] trey line's going out the door trail line's going down in order to stop the trail line from sailing all over the place i used several weight bags on the end of it swimmer has the tray line motor's going down it's easy right glitter's on deck of course disconnecting the litter one thing that i'm thinking about right now is is fuel because of the heavy winds i don't know exactly how long we're gonna be on scene and we're gonna have a headwind on the way back so i'm constantly calculating how much fuel we have what kind of time we have on scene and also where can we take the the survivor once we have them on board they're coming up now really got his leg wrapped up pretty good [Music] pick the survivor looked a little anxious on his way up obviously he was in pain it looked like he had a bone sticking out of his leg getting somebody into the back of the helicopter in a litter can be a little difficult it's a pretty large rescue device and we're in a helicopter it's not that big the patient is inside the cabin your bare hooks go down bear hooks halfway down bare hooks holding about 10 feet off the vessel uh put the hoist [Music] safely the winds are shifting around the storm so we've got uh 35 40 knots sometimes gusting up to 50. fair hooks on deck strummer has it take the lows forward clear the vessel clear back and left 50. inside cabin coast guard 6040 this is falco thank you thank you thank you [Music] we will head now off uh and try to escape still bleed but it slowed down a lot bleeding i monitored his bleeding i was able to to see if the blood was coming through the gauze and it was we got thunderstorms over to the northeast heading west southwest because that storm's getting close oh yeah major light kept all right guys we're about to go over lands as we come into tampa general tyler's got controls in the left seat and there's a pretty significant crosswind into tampa general [Music] we all do this job because we want to help people and anytime you get to go do the thing that you love to do it's something that i enjoy being able to help patient transfer is complete we're airborne again we'll be back on deck in about five minutes well the storm really has just begun and nighttime's fallen and there's a good chance that there's one just like it waiting for us so we'll just see what happens overnight oh look how rough it is out there as soon as i saw that i knew it was going to be bad juju out there [Music] wow [Music] [Applause] all right let's help them get these boats cleaned up and uh get them secured okay i'm lieutenant commander joe abeda i'm the commanding officer of station miami beach and we are here in preparation for hurricane isaac [Music] welcome to miami thank you very much today we have a boat crew from coast guard station marathon florida keys and we also have two boat crews from coast guard station island mirada in the florida keys let's go ahead and grab that other crew hey can you guys holler down to that other crew and have him come down real quick if it looks like a coast guard unit is going to take the brunt of the storm we will do everything we need to make sure that we move our assets out so they're safe and secure welcome to miami beach my house is your house so if you need anything at all let us know okay is your families and all your personal effects squared away back home okay that's priority one for us okay the latest on the storm it has turned so we have decided to stay put all right we are not gonna evacuate but um i don't know what's gonna happen between now and uh tomorrow so we'll just stand by this is probably i would say my 12th hurricane and there's a lot of good lessons learned but i tell you the biggest lesson learned has been they're very unpredictable one slight turn over the course of six hours to the north can have a huge impact on how we respond all right no questions everybody's good all right anything let us know so we we've really spent months and months really in preparation for this event [Music] station being six month beach coast guard 4563 station 3a once i get offshore and see how rough it is i'll see my speed and i'll give you uh an epa give me an updated position [Music] i've got a disabled vessel with one man on it about 25 miles offshore it's a little rough out there we've got about 30 35 knot winds he's estimated at four to six so it might take us a little while to get out there all right coming up [Music] oh look how rough it is out there you guys it's going to be rough all right so hold on we could already see before we even left our boat basin that the weather was definitely going to be an issue had to prepare for the worst hope for the best [Music] we noticed at the turning basin in front of the base that there was white cops and as soon as i saw that i knew it was going to be bad juju out there once we got past the cut things were getting a little bit hairy [Music] wow it was pretty bad out there eight to ten foot seas maybe a few 12 foot swells coming through it was choppy real real choppy this is the get some weather the thing about the waves here is that they're real steep so we were at a few points getting the boat completely out of the water hold on it was it was definitely a sticky situation that might be him out there on the radar you see that blip right there at about 15 miles yeah that's probably him my worry was the more time he spent out there the rougher the seas was gonna get and the less chances of us finding him luckily he had good communications with sector when we get this everybody have each other's back you know when we're tossing the line everything out safety dude it's going to be nasty once we got out there it was nighttime the sun had set which made it that more dangerous and seeing the seas at night times not that easy station 3a we're going to raise the environment to a 7. hey gibson gibson you're gonna you're going to stand till watch with murphy once we finally located the guy it was a definitely a difficult challenge section three we are on scene with the vessel at position two five five three decimal six three one north when we arrived on scene we saw a cuddy cabin one guy on board he was trying to uh beat the storm to head out to bimini his fuel pump went out so he was diw start getting the line already and captain all right listen i'm gonna get my boat ready i'm gonna put some fenders out you don't have to do anything i'm gonna come out next to your boat you're gonna come on my boat and then i'm gonna put your boat in tow okay all right guys i'm gonna make my approach to get him on board i wanted to get the guy on our boat i didn't want to tow him on his boat as heavy the weather was out there i didn't want him on on that boat once we got him on board the other crew members were hooking up the the tow with the skiff hook hey we're ready when you are big all right seaman gibson got on a skiff hook and i almost took it from him just because i knew he hadn't been out there when he got it first try [Music] that was incredible i was pretty impressed by that you good go ahead and make a round turn on it turn that bow [Music] once we hooked up the skiff hook line went ahead and paid out 500 to 600 feet of line and the reason we do that is in heavy seas it stabilizes the towed vessel a lot better about 100 feet out all right because it's such a long toe we have to put chem lights on the bow of the toad vessel and also on the line so we could see what the vessel was doing the waves were so big that the boat was disappearing behind the waves [Music] when we arrived on scene we saw the cuddy cabin one guy on board he was trying to uh beat the storm to head out to bimini his fuel pump went out so he was diw about 350 out once we let out the line i'll pick up my speed so it doesn't y'all make it up it's me hi uh for now we're setting the tow watch we're gonna be out here on that deck with a knife just in case if that boat starts taking on water from a swell going over the stern of it then um we're gonna have to pry cut the line the likelihood's pretty high of that happening with the swells we got [Music] driving into a storm [Music] this is just a warm up the weather actually picked up we had some pretty good rain you know a good storm come through i don't think you could even see maybe six inches in front of you it's raining pretty good right now station 3a we are in restricted visibility we have zero visibility [Music] you know it just looked like you're you know at warp speed kind of with the rain hitting the window and the light and everything where's uh my tow watch where where am i sitting because it's about 6 30 5 30 it's kind of bouncing back started pouring rain and you literally couldn't see about five feet in front of you so that made the whole situation just that much worse the winds picked up even more now there was gusts of probably 60 knots the seas picked up to about 12 feet it was really choppy and i had a few guys on the boat that got seasick it was rough enough basically to get a couple of crew members sick you can always say you don't get seasick but you know usually somebody does in that type of conditions it doesn't really matter [Music] i just wanted to make sure that they were safe so i had a guy standing throw up watch and i had a guy standing toe watch so we all took care of each other and basically we took them to miami beach marina after what was about a four or five hour tow hey if you guys want you can start setting up for a side sale once we got closer inland uh the sea started calming down a little bit the weather had kind of gave us a little bit of a break we're gonna need to put lines on his boat can you go ahead and uh grab a couple lines i can't really stress enough how important preparations are for going out on the boat you need to have your safety equipment we also need to know what the weather is going to be doing this guy obviously took a gamble trying to beat the storm to get over to bimini and unfortunately it didn't pay off for him if we couldn't have got out there if things didn't go smoothly as they did you know he'd probably be at the bottom of the sea with a boat my crew did an awesome job they were on point the whole entire time yeah make them up we train a lot here and it's good to see it pay off at the end of the day it was a safe evolution nobody got hurt we were able to save the boat all right man well good luck with everything all right you're always going to have one person out there and and we're able to get them this time there's never a dull moment down here in station miami beach [Music] all right good afternoon so the storm didn't turn out to be too big of a deal but we exercised our plan we uh we got some lessons learned and uh good job to everybody now that storm has passed we're gonna have a quick meeting with all hands at the station to discuss how we dealt with it matt was the od this weekend third class petty officer running a uh a large station like miami beach during a tropical storm hurricane event everybody think you did a pretty good job awesome job good job matt i'm extremely proud of what petty officer warren was able to accomplish he just recently qualified as an officer of the day for us everything went smooth there was no hiccups and when there was pressure situations matt morton performed well that's what it's all about right there just because of your collar devices doesn't mean you can't step up if you're a junior person and take a leadership position and be in charge so keep up the good work all right everybody worked extremely great as a team to prepare for hurricane isaac and it was just really great as the commanding officer to see that that network come together

Channel: DangerTV

Views: 371,174

Rating: 4.9055834 out of 5

Keywords: Tropical Storm Isaac, tropical storm isaac, tropical storm isaac rescue, rescue, coast guard florida, coast guard florida full episode, coast guard florida season 1 episode 5, coast guard florida season 1, us coast guard, us coast guard florida, united states coast guard, united states coast guard florida, coast guard rescue, coast guard battle tropical storm isaac, isaac, danger, dangertv, danger tv, Danger, DangerTV, Danger TV, dangertv coast guard series, florida, series, search, us

Id: SnvMBuHz_Xs

Length: 42min 33sec (2553 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020