THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 28, 1996 TAG: 9608270324
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 75 lines
Its crew had just finished mapping entrances to New York Harbor and turned the Rude north when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship got the call for help over the radio.
The federal hydrographic survey vessel made a U-turn and was at the crash site of TWA Flight 800, in Long Island Sound, less than 12 hours after the July 17 explosion.
So began four days in which the Rude and its 11-member crew stood sentry over the downed airliner, making sonar scans of the ocean floor before the Navy joined the search for clues to the disaster.
Looking for natural and man-made obstacles to shipping, then mapping those obstacles, is what the Rude - pronounced ``Rude-ee'' - does 220 days of every year.
And after the Navy and other agencies arrived on the scene, that map-making skill became vital to the around-the-clock effort to retrieve wreckage and victims from the waters off the Long Island coast.
What searchers needed was detailed maps of the ocean floor, the sort of map only NOAA - which maintains charts of all the coastal waters of the United States and its territories - could produce.
``Nobody does what we do better,'' said Cmdr. Nick Perugini, chief of NOAA's Atlantic hydrographic section and the officer in charge of the shore base near the TWA crash site.
``Everyone was running on adrenalin to produce charts in as little as a half-hour,'' he said. ``The Navy, the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration were all coming to us with specialized needs.''
Using two sonar scanning systems, which produce pictures of the ocean's bottom by bouncing sound waves off of it, the Rude was able to choose the best mooring sites for the Navy's salvage and rescue ships, the Grasp and the Grapple.
More importantly, the Rude scanned a 50-square-mile area of ocean floor, sending shadowy images of objects there to NOAA's tiny headquarters at the Moriches Coast Guard Station.
``Our priority was supporting the divers,'' said Lt. David Haines, operations officer onboard the Rude at the crash site. ``When you're diving at a depth of 120 feet, the maximum time down for a scuba dive is 15 minutes.
``We needed to locate the wreckage as accurately as possible so divers could go right to it and make the best use of their dive time.''
Perguini and four technicians, working in an eight-foot-wide camping trailer, translated raw sonar data transmitted from the Rude into detailed color charts that gave exact positions and descriptions of every object, or ``contact,'' found in the scanned area.
``The ship would scan and transmit all day, then the Navy would come into our trailer at about 11 p.m. and tell us they were going to dive on say, 30 contacts the next day,'' Perguini said.
``We would work through the night to give them the specifics they needed.''
Specifics might include not only the precise position of objects, but also the size and location of any nearby ocean features. NOAA relayed to divers the size of contacts, how far they rose from the ocean floor and whether or not they were man-made.
At the height of the salvage operation a few days after the July 17 crash, the agency was providing critical information to more than 60 Navy and civilian divers per day.
The Rude left the crash site Aug. 2, returning to its normal duties. A contract vessel, the Pirouette, took over scanning the wreckage, using a remote-control submersible. NOAA's shore command left the Moriches Coast Guard Station four days later.
``After two weeks the Rude had pretty well mapped out, to everyone's knowledge, where all the wreckage was located,'' Perguini said.
``We went to New York because what was required in the early days is what we do 10 months out of the year, and we were able to hit the ground running.
``We're surveyors,'' he said. ``Accuracy in making nautical charts is our business.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo courtesy of NOAA
The crew of the Rude helped map the site of the TWA Flight 800 crash
in July. Their charts helped divers make pinpoint recovery plans. by CNB