CUTTER WHITE ALDER

By Vinny Del Giudice

On Dec. 7, 1968, a Taiwanese freighter sliced into Coast Guard buoy tender White Alder on a mile-wide section of the Mississippi River near White Castle, Louisiana, killing 17 of 20 Coast Guardsmen aboard. 

White Alder, part of the Coast Guard's "Black Hull" fleet of workhorse tenders, barges and tugs, was proceeding down-bound after retrieving buoys. Freighter Helena was upbound and under pilot. The 133-foot cutter sank in about a minute and was swallowed by the Mississippi's muddy bottom. There it remains.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of the wreck was the White Adler's "abrupt change of course across the bow of the Helena for unknown reasons." Neither vessel sounded a danger signal, the board said.

At the scene of the disaster, Sheriff Bo Williams of Iberville Parish said survivors were clinging to a buoy and picked up by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers boat, the Associated Press reported. "They were freezing," Williams said, with temperatures in the low 40s and a sharp wind.

For hours, a Coast Guard helicopter hovered about 10 feet over the river surface, its searchlight trained on the muddy water, AP said.

"Divers recovered the bodies of three of the dead but river sediment buried the cutter so quickly that continued recovery and salvage operations proved impractical," according to the website of the U.S. Coast Guard Enlisted Memorial.

White Alder's designation was WLM/WAGL-541. It was a built as a Navy lighter, according to Wikipedia, with the Coast Guard acquiring a total of eight in 1947 and 1948. The hull design incorporated a shallow draft. Each was named with the prefix “White” for a plant, shrub or tree. An alder is a type of birch tree.

LIGHTSHIPS

Frying Pans Shoals, North Carolina

Ambrose Channel, off Sandy Hook, New Jersey

Entrance to Boston Harbor

By Vinny Del Giudice

The U.S. Lighthouse Service, which merged with the Coast Guard in 1939, guided mariners along reefs and through channels with a fleet of rugged little floating lighthouses - the lightship fleet.

With handles like "Frying Pan," "Hen and Chicken," "Nantucket" and "Ambrose," the stout vessels were considered "essential partners with America's lighthouses," according to the National Park Service, and posted in the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico.

Their lamps atop masts burned bright and their horns blared loudly and continuously in fog. Their hulls were painted red with their names - signifying shoals etc. that they marked - emblazoned in giant white letters. Radio beacons transmitted positions.

``Moored over treacherous reefs, or marking the narrow approaches to a channel or harbor entrance where lighthouses could not be built or placed in areas too far offshore for a shore-side lighthouse's lens to reach, lightships were fewer in number than the estimated 1,500 lighthouses built in the United States," the park service said.

Records show 179 lightships were built between 1820 and the 1952. In the early 20th Century, the Lighthouse Service operated 51 lightships - 46 on the eastern seaboard and five on the Pacific Coast. Eleven guided ships plying the Great Lakes over the decades. A small force was also posted in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Port Huron Museums in Michigan, where the retired Huron Lightship is moored: "The fog signals used over the years consisted of bells, whistles, trumpets, sirens, and horns. Early fog horns were powered by steam and later by air compressors." 

Danger was part of the job though watches were, by and large, uneventful and lonely. 

A November 1913 storm on the Great Lakes sank 19 vessels including the Buffalo Lightship with all hand. During World War I, a German U-boat attacked the Diamond Shoal Lightship off North Carolina. In 1944, a hurricane sank the Vineyard Lightship with all hands off Massachusetts. 

The great liner RMS Olympic, sister of Titanic, hit the Nantucket Lightship in heavy fog in May 1934. Seven of the lightship crew perished. There were close calls earlier in the day. "Fog warnings were sounded continuously and still blew their ominous warning even as the lightship plunged to the ocean depths," according to a dispatch published in a Canadian newspaper.

Off New Jersey, the Ambrose Lightship (LV-111, WAL-533)  was rammed by the Grace Liner Santa Barbara in September 1935, brushed in heavy fog by an unidentified vessel in January 1950 and rammed by the Grace Line's in March 1950, according to Wikipedia.

America's lightships kept the watch for another 40 years. As automation increased and navigational technology matured, the lightships were withdrawn from duty with the final lightship - Nantucket I - going dark in March 1985.

PHOTO GALLERY No. 2

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

A U.S. Coast Guard boat patrols Main Street in Melville, Louisiana, during 1927 Mississippi River flood.

Image: U.S. Coast Guard
On April 24, 1943, the freighter SS El Estero caught fire after loading a cargo of ammunition at Bayonne, New Jersey, threatening a catastrophic explosion in New York Harbor. Two Coast Guard fireboats responded along with New York City fireboats and shore-based firefighters. As the fire raged out of control, the Coast Guard decided to scuttle the ship but the seacocks were inaccessible. Tugs then towed the burning freighter to deeper water where it listed to starboard and sank. The fire was ruled as accidental.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
On March 17, 1902, seven members of the Monomoy Life-Saving Station on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, drowned trying to reach the wrecked coal barge Wadena in a gale. "Capt. Marshall N. Eldredge, one of the oldest lifesavers on the coast, went down with his men," The New York Times reported at the time. "There is no Government pension for those whose husbands and fathers are lost in the lifesaving service. so that the lot of the families who are left is a hard one." Five men on the Wadena also died, the Times said.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

It was a World War Two mystery. The Coast Guard-manned weather ship USS Muskeget vanished in the North Atlantic with a crew of 120 in September 1942. It later emerged that the ship had been torpedoed by U-boat  U-755.

Photos: Wikipedia, NOAA
U.S. Revenue Cutter Hugh McCulloch participated in the 1898 Spanish-American War, joining the naval fleet at the Battle of Manila in the Philippines. It moved onto other assignments in the Pacific Ocean and Alaska. McCulloch met a tragic end, sinking June 13, 1917 near Point Conception, California, after a collision with the steamer Governor in fog. The wreck of the McCulloch was located in 2016, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The crew evacuated but one man later succumbed to injuries.