Lost in Charleston’s Waves: The Tragedy of the Sailing Vessel Morning Dew

LOST IN

CHARLESTON’S

WAVES

(The Tragedy of the Sailing Vessel

Morning Dew)

Captain W. Russell Webster, USCG (Ret.)

Copyright © 2018 by Captain W. Russell Webster, USCG (Ret.).

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018913802

ISBN:              Hardcover                           978-1-9845-6761-1

                        Softcover                              978-1-9845-6760-4

                        eBook                                   978-1-9845-6759-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 11/30/2018

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgment

Timeline To Tragedy

Chapter 1   Mr. Cornett and the Three Amigos

Chapter 2   End of a Fateful Voyage

Chapter 3   Coast Guard Investigations

Chapter 4   The New Commandant’s Challenge: The Curse of

Semper Paratus

Chapter 5   Withholding the Truth

Chapter 6   Too Tired to Tell

Chapter 7   Would-Be Rescuers Can Be Victims Too

Chapter 8   A Layman’s Legal Analysis

Chapter 9   Could Another Morning Dew Tragedy Happen?

Postscript

Afterword

About the Author

FOREWORD

The three most important people in my life—my husband and our two sons—along with a cherished nephew perished in a horrific boating accident off Charleston in 1997. I thought my life was over the night I received the cryptic phone call from a family pastor in Florida, asking me if I knew if more bodies had been found. From that awkward moment forward, I began to live every mother’s and wife’s nightmare.

Compounding my grief was the emerging understanding that the coast guard had missed two opportunities to help my family members and possibly save some of them. Rubbing salt in raw wounds was the method and manner that the coast guard would deliver a recording of my thirteen-year-old son’s last cries for help—seventy-seven days after the sinking.

An all-nighter spent with friends poring over coast guard records and search procedures solidified our intent to dig deeper and hold the government accountable for its actions. The most difficult part of this endeavor was a developing an awareness that my husband, an experienced and capable mariner, had also made some serious mistakes.

The court’s judgment in our favor did nothing to bring my family members back but has provided the means to ensure their legacies will be honored appropriately through foundational work that aligns with their values.

This book, so eloquently crafted by Capt. W. Russell Webster, will honor my family and detail the mistakes that were made and ensure that the many positive changes that have come from this tragedy are memorialized appropriately for future sailors and rescuers alike.

Mary Libby Cornett

PREFACE

The port of Charleston where the thirty-four-foot-long sailing boat Morning Dew sank in 1997 has a rich maritime history. The area became wealthy by 1750 due to the invention of the cotton gin and the bartering and trade of cotton and rice. It was also the first known location to import slaves.

As an important supply depot for the South during the Civil War, the Union blockaded Charleston by sinking several vessels in the harbor channel. The South retaliated by sinking the Union ship Housatonic using the submarine H. L. Hunley. The Hunley, sunk during the attack, was salvaged in 2000, and efforts have continued to carefully restore it and display it in the local area.

After the Civil War, according to Sheila Watson’s South Carolina Ports, The plantation system collapsed, and Charleston struggled with a shattered economy. It wasn’t until the military industrial effort of World Wars I and II that Charleston again began to thrive as a port with the establishment of related naval facilities. In the 1960s, Charleston adapted to the evolving containerization effort to ship goods, and according to Watson, Port Charleston has grown into one busiest ports in the Southeast and one of the largest containerized cargo ports in the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Charleston was the first port in the nation to establish an intermodal forty-seven-agency and port-security project. Established in 2003, Project Seahawk nits together the capabilities and coordinates the plans of many local, state, and federal agencies to ensure the security of the Port of Charleston. In 2005, the coast guard integrated its two major commands (Group Charleston and Marine Safety Office Charleston) and formed a unified single organization, Coast Guard Sector Charleston. The sector performs search and rescue, ports and waterways coastal security, defense readiness, marine environmental protection and safety, law enforcement, and waterways management—all with the cooperation of surrounding agencies.

Unfortunately, no such similar coordination efforts or relationships among agencies, informal or otherwise, existed in 1997 when the sailing vessel Morning Dew struck the north side of Charleston’s jetty. Port security and safety at that time was largely the coast guard’s and US Navy’s responsibility. And the coast guard, according to several key individuals at the time, did not play well together with other agencies.

As a former rescue commander in the United States Coast Guard, I saw how my former service made some horrific mistakes during and after the Charleston Morning Dew case on December 29, 1997. Key failures included not reviewing audiotapes of a possible distress call, failure to involve and notify seniors in the chain of command at a critical moment, and then deferring search responsibilities to other maritime entities and prematurely ceasing and not aggressively amplifying search actions with more capable coast guard assets readily available in Charleston Harbor. As a result, a father, his two sons, and a nephew were left to their own devices in cold Atlantic waters and eventually perished, suffering horrific pain and seeing and believing help was only minutes away. Making matters far worse, the guard then delayed notifying family members and partner agency, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, for seventy-seven days about the existence of the audiotape of a young thirteen-year-old’s initial early-morning Mayday radio call for help. The latter gaff and the method of how the tape was delivered to the family would expose and amplify the coast guard’s earlier mistakes; recharacterize the case entirely in the public’s eye; incense family members, the media, Congress; and likely influence a South Carolina judge. The facts of the case and the mishandling of information launched an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board into the circumstances of the tragic sinking and the loss of public trust in the coast guard, even though my former service had quickly undertaken a series of very thoughtful and highly critical self-evaluations.

The case haunted me as a (then) sitting field commander with a background in telecommunications and operations research. I strongly suspected my own units shared the technological and human vulnerabilities exposed in the Morning Dew case. As a maritime historian and author, who chronicles contemporary service history, I knew some of those 1997 mistakes smacked of past lessons unlearned that had similarly occurred in my area—the Group Woods Hole, Massachusetts, area—during the 1990 fishing vessel Sol e Mar case. In both the 1990 and 1997 tragedies, coast guard nearshore VHF-FM communications systems failed watch standers miserably.

In both cases, enough information existed to resolve the cases favorably despite insufficient technologies, yet answers were not sought by seasoned coast guard decision makers. The answers would not occur to me until after I had supervised more than ten thousand coast guard rescue cases, retired from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after a forty-two-year public service career, and explored the human factor behind why individuals—sometimes experienced individuals—fail to prepare and respond appropriately during emergency situations. Individuals, professional or otherwise, often seek patterns in their observations that facilitate the status quo, both in their response to disasters and in their watch-standing duties. Even more seasoned veteran coast guard watch standers, especially overly tired watch standers, seek out these patterns unknowingly as a hidden bias and sometimes with tragic consequence.

Both sets of coast guard personnel in the Sol e Mar and Morning Dew cases neglected their duties when they failed to review audiotapes and made huge errors in judgment, succumbing to what psychologists refer to as normalcy bias—a debilitating condition during the initial stages of some emergencies that blocks critical thought processes that would disturb the routine of the watch.

Thanks to a greater understanding of normalcy bias from past colleagues who worked with coast guardsmen affected by post-traumatic stress disorder and my own awareness that was enhanced with my time with the Federal Emergency Management Agency during and after disasters, I have explored the driving phenomenon behind complacency, hoping today’s coast guard invests resources in exploring the phenomenon in the context of operations centers and develops a new countervailing strategy that will further limit the possibility of another Morning Dew tragedy happening.

I chose the title of this book Lost in Charleston’s Waves: The Tragedy of the Sailing Vessel Morning Dew because it is a play on words from a period-specific newspaper article indicating to inform readers that the vessel and crew’s demise were from the cold physical waves that sapped their strength like a car battery on a cold night and the radio waves that carried an unanswered Mayday. The crew was also lost in the radio waves of an antiquated coast guard radio system and a faulty network of communications errors buttressed by insufficient doctrine at the time. If it were it not for the volunteer efforts of a young coast guard commander at the time—who happened to be in the right place, right time and volunteered for an exhaustive eighteen-month supplemental investigation—a road map for a decades-long agency change might not have occurred.

The 1998 requisite changes in the coast guard’s next-of-kin policies as a result of the Morning Dew case were inevitable and long overdue. Finally, family members were placed front and center in the information flow about their loved ones—whether it was good news or bad, regardless of how the service appeared in the media. The changes to the guard’s nearshore radio system, however, would take years to permanently address critical shortfalls in coverage, ease of recording, retrieval and direction-finding capabilities to facilitate radio–watch standers’ duties.

I have also written about the circumstance that caused the coast guard to have just one Charleston radio watch stander with two-and-a-half-month experience acting as the sole trip wire for an entire rescue organization. The indefiniteness of budget battles and lean times that had an experienced senior watch stander pursuing authorized sleep at a moment when he was needed most was not unusual and pervasive throughout the coast guard at that time.

The chapter titled Too Tired to Tell, a period-specific, award-winning article, was adapted to demonstrate concerns that many field commanders shared, including Group Charleston’s commander, Manson Brown. Commander Brown, to his great