Bing Bing

The following is a work of fiction. It is based on an actual event. Information regarding events described are based on newspaper accounts, television reports and other sources. Names of individuals have not been changed. What happened in this story actually happened. Some events and characters have been compressed and characters combined for the sake of the story. Because this story is not as it actually happened it is not non-fiction, but it is pretty close.

April, 2022

“Oh shit,” Andy says, “That’s not good.”

From the wheelhouse of his tug, the 65’ Towline, Andy sees something’s not right. Crew on the barge rush around trying restart a compressor supplying air used to fill flotation bags. The bags have been placed in the hold and tied to the top of the Bing Bing, a clam boat that rests in 50 feet of water a mile from shore. The plan is to fill the bags with air and let the Bing Bing gently rise from the depths. But something’s wrong and now, just as the tips of the Bing Bing’s rigging, antenna and exhaust pipes have broken the water’s surface, everything seems to be listing to port. The Bing Bing appears headed back to the depths.

February 1

Rich stands at the helm of the Bing Bing, one hand on the wheel and the other on the captain’s chair welded to the floor behind him. He’s alternately looking ahead, where the boat’s going, and back toward the stern, where Joe and Christian work on the deck pushing gear around. They’re about a mile offshore dredging for sea clams, those big fat shellfish used in chowder and clam cakes. There’s not much wind but the seas are choppy and running four to six feet.

At 55 feet, stem to stern, and with a 55-ton displacement, the Bing Bing is a decent-sized fishing boat, solid and tested, but she’s rolling in these seas even in the midst of a drag, which usually smooths thing out. Rich looks at his watch: 2:30. Still early afternoon, but the days are so damn short in February. He’d like to finish this dredge before dark. Even with all the deck lights, everything is harder when the sun goes down.

“Man, I hate this cold,” Christian had complained. “This fishin’ in winter? Man, it sucks. I got two pair of socks, three layers of sweat pants, three shirts and two hoodies and I’m still freezin’ my ass off.”

Rick had to agree. Fishing in winter is tough.

Rich looks back at the map on the computer screen. He turns and yells to the crew “I’m comin’ around to starboard.”

Joe gives Rich a wave without stopping what he’s doing.

Rich gives the wheel a clockwise turn and the boat begins to ease around as they back-haul the dredge. Rich sees the cables off the stern start to pull the outriggers around. The winches labor under the strain of the load as the dredge nears the surface. Rich hopes for a big haul.

But as the dredge breaks the surface, the weight of the load tips the boat hard over. A wave hits the side, most of it splashing over and into the hold. Joe and Christian brace themselves as gear and water slosh across the deck. Rick backs off the winches to lower the dredge back into the water and take advantage of a little buoyancy, but the Bing Bing continues to heel over. Another wave hits the boat broadside, sending more water onto the deck and into the hold. Then Rich hears the big Caterpillar diesel cough. There’s a misfire. A huge belch of black smoke rises from the stacks and then the engine just quits. The Bing Bing rolls. More waves come over the side.

“She’s going over!” Rich yells.

The boat is so far over that Rich falls out of the wheelhouse, catching himself on the railing a few feet above the waves.

“Jump!” he yells. But Joe and Christian are already scrambling over the edge.

Frigid seawater punches the men in the face, taking their breath away. Franticly they swim away from the boat which is now leaning so far over that the highest rigging seems to be reaching out, threatening to take them down with the ship. There’s an awful sucking sound as water cascades into the hold and the ship goes down. A few feet away, Rich sees something floating. He swims for it and grabs it: a big length of heavy hose, usually used to pump seawater to the mouth of the dredge to loosen up the clams, but now inexplicably filled with air and floating right in front of him. He hangs on and turns to see Joe and Christian have found the hose too. They all turn to watch the Bing Bing sink beneath the surface, and then it is gone.

They are alive but only for now. In the rush to get clear of the boat, no one had a chance to grab life jackets, to say nothing of dry suits. And for some reason the lifeboat with the ERB failed to deploy. The men are fucked. Those three layers of shirts and two layers of hoodies were a great idea topside but now they’re in 42-degree water and the clothes are dragging them down.

Rich looks around. They are a mile offshore. Practically invisible to the naked eye.

Just when things could not get worse, they do. Rich smells it first: diesel fuel bubbling up from Bing Bing’s fuel tanks and out the vents. The smell goes from strong to overpowering – like a wire brush on his sinuses. He can’t help but swallow seawater and fuel.

“So, this is how it ends,” he thinks.

--

Pam sits at a desk in her guest room turned remote office, her laptop open in front of her and a few sheets of printout beside her. This morning’s second cup of coffee, unfinished and now cold, sits at the edge of the desk. It’s past lunch and she’ll head downstairs soon to fix a sandwich, maybe make a salad. Use up the lettuce before it gets totally limp.

All things considered; this whole Covid-work-from-home deal hasn’t been all that bad. Gone is the commute and the need to get dressed for success at the office, though she still maintains a self-imposed rule of wearing work clothes during the day. She won’t be one of those frauds wearing a nice office blouse with sweatpants or pajamas on the lower half, just off camera. Now if she could get rid of some of these Zoom calls, she might actually get some work done.

Someone is making a point about payroll -- “Do you mind if I share my screen?” -- and Pam sighs. He’s been over this issue before. Lifting her eyes from the computer she looks out the window. Yes, working from the home has its benefits. Pam’s house sits on the side of a hill. From her third-story perch she looks east across a small harbor, over a barrier beach, over the tops of a row of beach front summer homes, and to the ocean. A vantage point that allows her to see the comings and goings in the harbor and occasionally boats in the water beyond. On the windowsill sit binoculars for the interesting bird or, once in a while, a whale.

Today a fishing boat she’s seen before is working maybe a mile offshore.

“What I’m concerned about,” she hears, “is this number right here.” She looks back to the computer to make sure she’s not missing anything important. She’s not. She looks to the sea and watches the fishing boat as it works. “Cold day to be a fisherman,” she thinks. Then she sees something that does not seem right. The boat is pitching over. Too far over. She stands and squints. Grabs the binoculars. A puff of smoke.

The Zoom meeting goes on for a minute and then a minute more. With her binoculars Pam can see the boat is no longer there. She expects to see the Harbormaster’s response boat or the new Fire Department boat race out of the harbor. Surely someone else saw what happened. Someone must have radioed for help. Another minute passes.

“Yeah, hey, sorry,” she says to her Zoom meeting. “I gotta go.”

“Everything okay, Pam?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure. I think I just saw a ship go down offshore.”

She hears someone say “Wait, what?” as she clicks off the meeting and picks up her cell phone.

“911. This is a recorded line. What is your emergency?”

Pam tells the dispatcher what she’s seen.

Minutes pass. Five, Ten, Twenty. Too many minutes. With the binoculars Pam sees something black floating, but not people. No lifeboat. Then, finally, from the north, toward Scituate, she sees two boats, one white with blue lights and the other a Fire Department response boat, its red lights flashing.

Later that afternoon the Fire Chief calls Pam, asks a few questions, and thanks her.

“You were the only person who saw it. The only one who called it in,” he says. “You saved their lives.”

That evening Pam watches the evening news. It is the lead story. The ship sinking, the rescue. Three men pulled from the frigid waters, all being treated in the local hospital for extreme hypothermia and exposure. Drone footage from above shows agonizing moments as crew on the response boats throw rescue rings to the men clinging to the floating hose amid red-colored diesel fuel. The men are too hypothermic and afraid to let go of the hose to grab the rings.

The next day, the newspapers and TV news interview the Fire Chief and the crew about the incident. They learn of Pam’s keen eye and her call to 911. “She saved our lives,” Rich says to the reporter. “I’d given up hope. Said goodbye. It was hell. She saved our lives.” The Fire Chief tells the reporters that without that call, it all would have been a very tragic story.

That was the first lucky break.

February 3

Lorraine stands at the boat landing with other members of the spill crew. Waterproof field notebook in hand, she watches from shore as a crew of three from her company come ashore in a thirty-foot metal response boat. She looks at her new boots and her unblemished safety-yellow work coat and is suddenly, painfully aware that there is no hiding the fact that she is the new kid on the team. Maybe in a few months, a few years, there will be the stains and wear of experience, the coat won’t be so bright, but not today. Today she is the newbie and her clean uniform shouts it for all to hear.

Bob from the state Department of Environmental Protection pulls up in his official DEP truck and climbs out. He walks past Lorraine and down to the boat and the crew arriving at the dock. The men exchange familiar greetings.

“Hey Bob. Haven’t seen you since that spill on the interstate. What a shit show, huh?”

Bob nods.

“So, which one of you is in charge of this cleanup?”

The men on the boat look at each other and then back to Bob. One of them says “You just walked past her.”

Bob turns to Lorraine and sizes her up.

“I’m Lorraine,” she says, extending her hand which is left hanging as Bob reaches into his pocket for a notepad.

He shares what he knows about the incident. What the Coast Guard reported, the Fire Department, the Harbormaster. Lorraine takes notes. 1,000 to 3,000 gallons of fuel lost. About a mile from the shore. Spill containment booms around the boat. Bob pulls several pieces of stapled paper from a folder.

“It’s a spill report. Predicts where the oil is likely to go. The Coast Guard put it together.”

He flips through pages and then hands it to Lorraine: a map.

“The boat went down about here.” Bob points to an X in the ocean east of a long barrier beach. “We are here.”

eHe points to another spot on a map and Lorraine takes it all in. The boat sunk in open water east of a beach running north / south. The long, linear shoreline interrupted by a channel formed by the confluence of the North River and the South River which meet in a tidal salt marsh before flowing to the sea. Eroding cliffs to the north supply sand that migrate with the waves and current toward the south forming the barrier beaches. The sediment from these cliffs would close off the mouth of the estuary were it not for the natural flow of the river and the twice-daily tides. As it is, the rivers are connected to the ocean through an ever-shifting channel. West, and inland of the barrier beaches, is a large, flat dendritic network of winding tidal creeks and linear mosquito ditches extending over several square miles of marsh and all ultimately connected to either the North or the South River. Bob points to several areas of the map where a red line extends along the beaches and a few points in the estuary.

“This is where the Coast Guard think the oil is gonna go.” Then he points to several other areas farther upriver and indicated as wildlife refuge, conservation land. “And these are other areas I am concerned about. Critical habitat, potential human exposure points.”

Lorraine looks up from the map and toward the water a few yards away. The tide’s coming in and an iridescent sheen of petroleum swirls around the response boat and pilings at the dock. Bob also notices the sheen. He turns to the crew on the response boat and without being asked, one of them says “We tried dragging a sausage boom through it to try to collect what we could. It’s a thin layer. Too thin to get anything.”

Bob scowls and turns back to Lorraine. “We expect rigorous monitoring and inspection. Remediation wherever possible. We want to know about any areas of oil accumulation, oil-soaked wildlife, distressed vegetation. We’ll likely be seeking reimbursement for Environmental Resource Damages.”

Lorraine scribbles in her notebook: Possible ERD claim.

After Bob leaves, the crew give Lorraine a boat tour of the bay. The steel skiff is loaded with oil-absorbent pads and booms – sausages, they call them. There is no place to sit, so she stands, one hand on the center console as the boat glides slowly around the bay. It’s cold, maybe high 30s, with no wind and thick clouds leaving the sky a steel grey and the water a darker shade of the same.

Lorraine scans the surface of the water. Everywhere she looks, she sees a faint, but persistent oily sheen. A fuel odor hangs like fog.

“We tried skimming it up but nothing,” a crew member says. “Even had one of those seals come check us out. Flopped right up on the boom.” He nods to a float moored in the channel, a dozen harbor seals resting on it. As if on cue, one rolls off the float and appears behind the boat. It follows them for a hundred yards or so before swimming away.

After 30 minutes, the crew steer the boat back to the ramp. As they pull up to the dock, she thanks them for the tour and steps onto the wooden decking. Pulling off her life jacket she notices a black smear --grease -- on the shoulder of her new coat. Well, I guess it’s a start, she thinks.

The next four days bring unseasonably cold temperatures, a clear sky and howling winds out of the east. Lorraine walks the shore, stumbling along the rocks and sand as gusts blow the tops off the waves breaking on the shore. She’s doing what DEP asked, looking for evidence of oil on the shore, but knows she’s not likely to see anything. With this wind and the ocean churning as it is, any diesel fuel from the Bing Bing probably evaporated or was dispersed to the point of being undetectable. Probably the best thing for the environment, she thinks. Inside the barrier beach, in the harbor and in the channels, and the creeks and tidal inlets, the story is the same. With the strong winds and twice-a-day tidal flushing there is nothing to see. No sheen. No oil staining. No oil-soaked birds. No nothing. Ducks dive. Seals lounge on floats. Lorraine spots a Snowy Owl. Environmental Disaster? It is as if nothing happened.

That was the second lucky break.

April 2

Lorraine stands just outside the open door of the tug boat’s wheelhouse, chatting easily with Andy, the Towline’s captain, who sits in an elevated chair at the boat’s helm. It’s sunny but a ten-knot breeze from the south lends a distinct chill to the morning and Lorraine is grateful for the windbreak that the wheelhouse provides. She hears, and in her feet can feel, the low rumble of the diesel engine idling as the big tug sways gently. The seas are confused. A two-foot swell comes in from the east but with this wind there are whitecaps developing from the south. Lorraine is happy to be on a boat with some mass and not on the smaller, flat-bottomed recovery boat which, even piled high with oil-absorbent booms, pitches and rolls, slapping down on every wave. Its three-man crew looks miserable.

From where she stands, she, Andy, Bob from the DEP, and two Coast Guard seamen watch as a hundred yards away a salvage team, working from a second tug and a barge, try to raise the Bing Bing to the surface. The salvage team needs two days of fair weather, not a lot of wind, and seas under three feet, and this is the first favorable weather window they’ve had. But the wind is picking and there’s an urgency on the barge as men run back and forth.

“What exactly are they doing?” Lorraine asks.

“Well, you see that big grey thing? Looks like a tarp?” Andy nods toward the barge where two men lower something into the water. “That’s an air bag. I imagine the plan is to stuff a couple of those into the hold, strap some onto whatever they can, maybe loop a line under the boat, fill them with air and try to float the boat to the surface. She’ll pop up like a cork if you have enough air and the bags hold.”

Jody, Andy’s Mate, laughs. “Yeah. Pop up like a cork if that’s what you call fifty tons of fishing boat.”

“That’s the tricky part, right?” says Andy. “You got to add enough air to get the boat unstuck from whatever mud it’s sitting in but once it’s free you can’t just have it pop up to the surface uncontrolled. Gets under the barge and you got a real mess.”

“A real mess,” adds Jody.

They watch a diver step off the barge and into the ocean.

“You think he’s got one of those heated suits?” Jody asks.

“Sure hope so,” says Andy.

Lorraine shivers. “No thanks.”

The men turn to her and chuckle. “No shit,” says Andy.

Lorraine turns to the west. A mile away, she can make out waves crashing on a rocky beach, and just beyond that, a row of beachfront cottages boarded up for the winter. She swam on the high school swim team and for a year in college. A mile to shore. If she had to do it, right now, if she fell overboard, could she make it to shore? She thinks of the men on the Bing Bing. February. Forty-degree water. No life jackets. Hold onto a piece of hose that’s floating but connected to the boat? Pray that someone comes? Or try to swim for shore without a life jacket and weighed down by layers and layers of heavy clothes. What an awful decision.

An hour passes. And then another. Their small talk exhausted, the two Coast Guard seamen start scrolling through messages on their phones. Bob leans on a railing, occasionally lifting his binoculars and then putting them down. Lorraine bullshits with Andy and Jody, both of whom have kids just younger than her. They compare notes – college now, college twenty years ago. An easy conversation that leads to stories.

Then there is some action at the barge. Andy lifts his binoculars; Bob does the same. But even with the naked eye, Lorraine can see something’s going on.

“Well, here she comes,” says Jody.

There’s a bubbling of water beside the barge and the salvage crew is racing around grabbing tools and line. What appears to be a giant grey beach ball starts to break the surface, and then another.

“There’re the air bags,” Jody says, leaning forward, toward the barge, as if by his will he can bring the Bing Bing up.

The top of a third airbag breaks the surface and then something else, an exhaust port, an antenna, rigging extending three, now four feet above the waves.

“C’mon baby.”

Suddenly there is a popping sound and a surge of bubbles from an airbag beneath the surface.

“Oh shit,” Andy says, “That’s not good.”

The exhaust port, antennas and rigging all start to dip to the side. Men scramble about the barge, grabbing hose, restarting a compressor.

“Shit.” Andy says. “They’re gonna lose her.”

But then the bustling stops. All eyes watch the same little bit of ocean where the uppermost portions of a fishing boat have just broken the surface. The Bing Bing seems to have stabilized itself. Lorraine realizes she’s holding her breath.

For another hour the salvage crew installs more air bags but the Bing Bing exposes no more of herself than her uppermost extremities. Andy’s cellphone rings. It’s Conrad, the foreman on the salvage barge. He needs to talk to the DEP and the Coast Guard guys. Andy calls them over and puts his phone on speaker.

“Yeah, you see we can’t raise the boat any farther than where we are. The stern is off the bottom but she’s bow-heavy. We want to drag her into the harbor. Are you okay with us towing her in and salvaging her there?”

Bob and the seamen look at each other and then to Andy.

Andy shrugs. “That’s a new one on me,” he says.

The process takes three hours. The salvage company’s tug pulls the barge, which pulls the semi-submerged Bing Bing. They follow the shoreline, trying to maintain a depth of thirty feet. Shallow enough that the Bing Bing can bump along the ocean floor and deep enough so it does not drag too hard. The Towline follows the procession and Lorraine and Bob stand at the bow. Behind the Bing Bing a trail of muddy water marks the path as the boat’s bow bounces along the ocean floor, but thankfully that’s all they see. There’s no petroleum and no oil bubbling to the surface.

Eventually they make it to the mouth of the harbor. Lorraine finds herself again standing outside the wheelhouse as Andy motors slowly, several hundred yards behind the barge.

“This will be interesting,” Andy says.

From the map on the computer, Lorraine can see the problem. The channel is narrow and much shallower than the thirty feet of water they’ve been in. As the depth decreases it will be harder to pull the Bing Bing behind the barge. What if they get stuck in the harbor? The two seamen seem to realize the concern as well and are now standing on Towline’s bow, watching the progress with increased interest. Halfway through the channel Lorraine notices an increase in the prop wash behind the salvage tug. Its stern sits lower and the strain on the tow cable increases as the propellers dig deeper. They’re in 25 feet of water. The water behind the barge and surrounding the Towline is brown with sediment.

Thirty minutes later they are still at it, though they’ve moved only a couple tens of yards. The salvage tug is working hard and not making headway. Then there is an all-stop. They’re not going any farther.

Andy idles the Towline and waits. Bob and the two seamen stand at the bow, watching. Andy’s phone rings and he immediately puts it on speaker.

“We’re gonna try to work on it right here.”

“I’ll let them know,” Andy says, nodding to Bob and the seamen.

Later that evening, when Andy drops Lorraine and Bob off at the dock, daylight is fading. The salvage crew hasn’t made much progress, but no one’s seen any oil on the water, so that much is good. Sitting in the middle of the channel, the salvage of the Bing Bing might be a navigational concern, but the environmental problems seem to be over. For the moment it is a headache for the Harbormaster and the Coast Guard, both of whom continue to watch the operation at a distance from their boats.

The next morning, Lorraine gets a text from the spill response crew. Somehow the salvage team was able to float the Bing Bing overnight and they’ve towed it to a salvage yard forty miles south.

Lorraine drives to an industrial marina where she sees the Bing Bing tied to a rusting barge and surrounded by other rusting hulks – a floating maritime junkyard. The boat appears eerily normal. Lorraine shudders. An evening rain shower and the waves it obviously saw in transit have washed much of the mud and sand from the hull. The Bing Bing’s exterior actually appears clean.

She steps onto the deck and looks around. The clam cages are still in the hold. Heavy cables and winches are still on deck. Inside the cabin, though, there is a layer of mud and sand on everything. In the small galley a refrigerator door swings open. The electric stove top and counter, the cabinets, all covered in a drab olive mud. She steps up into the wheelhouse. She stands behind the captain’s chair and looks out the front windows and toward the two computer screens to the left. But for the mud everything looks so normal. She looks through a small window toward the stern and wonders what the captain saw just before the Bing Bing went down. It all happened so fast. How did the captain even get out? She turns back and looks out the front window again and down to a small desk surface the captain probably used for maps, notes, maybe a place for a dinner plate. Everything coated with that mud.

She notices a phone and picks it up. Covered with the same thin layer of mud. She thinks of something she’d heard one of the fishermen say from their hospital bed. “We didn’t have time to grab anything! Not life jackets. Not even our phones.”