On Wednesday, the Coast Guard was looking for 12 people who had gone missing off the coast of Louisiana after discovering one person dead and rescuing six survivors from rough waters after their ship capsized in hurricane winds.
Winds were 80 to 90 mph and waves were 7 to 9 feet when the Seacor Power vessel flipped, according to Coast Guard Captain Will Watson.
“That’s challenging under any circumstance,” Watson said. “We don’t know the degree to which that contributed to what happened, but we do know those are challenging conditions to be out in the maritime environment.”
The heavy vessel, which has three long legs that can be lowered to the seafloor, becoming an offshore platform, overturned Tuesday afternoon miles to the south of Port Fourchon, one of the hugest oil and gas industry base in the United States.
Watson said at a news conference on Wednesday that one worker was found dead on the water’s surface. When he was asked about the lost crew’s chances, he said, “We are hopeful. We can’t do this work if you’re not optimistic, if you’re not hopeful.”
Archie Chaisson III, President of Lafourche Parish, pointed that time is of the essence in the rescue operation because more extreme storms are expected.
“The hope is that we can bring the other 12 home alive,” Chaisson said.
Marion Cuyler, the fiancée of crane operator Chaz Morales, said she talked to him before Chaz left on Tuesday.
“He said that they were jacking down, and they were about to head out, and I’m like, ‘The weather’s too bad. You need to come home.’ And he’s like, ‘I wish I could.’”
Watson said that the bad weather role in the accident is under investigation. He said the ship departed from Port Fourchon at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday on the way to Main Pass off the southeast Louisiana coast.
“We had some weather reports yesterday that there would be some challenging weather. But this level of weather was not necessarily anticipated,” he said.
The National Weather Service in New Orleans released a special maritime warning before 4 p.m. Tuesday, predicting severe waves and winds.
At 4:30 p.m., the Coast Guard received a distress call from a good Samaritan and released an urgent maritime broadcast, prompting several private vessels in the region to respond and save four lives, according to the department. Coast Guard crews saved another two people.
The Coast Guard also said that the ship capsized because of a microburst, a National Weather Service meteorologist stated that the system was more like an offshore derecho.
“This was not a microburst – just a broad straight-line wind event that swept over an enormous area,” said Phil Grigsby, a lead forecaster at the National Weather Service branch in Louisiana.
A low-pressure system known as a wake low, which intensified the winds and extended their duration, according to Grigsby, accompanied the storm system. “It was the strongest wake low I’ve seen in almost 18 years here,” he said.
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A captain of one another vessel that also suffered from the terrible weather, Aaron Callais said that it began with just a brief, rapidly dissipating waterspouts that pummeled his father’s shrimp boat, the Ramblin’ Cajun.
“There was nothing we could do. One minute we were facing north, the next south, then east and west,” he said. “Things were flying in the cabin.”
Callais posted a video on Facebook of the boat being battered by the storm as he spoke to friends and relatives, including his father, “letting him know the situation, that it wasn’t looking good. We didn’t know if we were going to make it out.”
