How Not to Hit a Bridge with Your Ship

Here’s a close call I had a long time ago in Philadelphia

The Heroic Tugs of the Delaware River

By Robert R. Frump

Inquirer Staff Writer

The freighter Lefthero drifted powerless in the Schuylkill with the inertia of a glacier directly toward the supports of the busy Girard Point Bridge. On the ship, Capt. Cho Yung Yun stood helplessly by the engine room control.

He cranked the big control lever once, twice, with no response from the massive engine below. Then Cho moved the lever to and fro, pumping it as if he were desperately throwing a switch to divert a speeding freight train. His eyes grew wide, then riveted directly on tugboat captain and pilot Clark Cain standing beside him.

Cain turned to the Korean officer and calmly said, in distinct English: ”Captain – find out what is wrong. Use your phone. Your phone. Call the engine room.” Inside, he recalled later, there was another voice saying over and over, “Oh, God. We’re going to hit the bridge. . . . “

It was not a typical day in the life of a Philadelphia tugboat captain.

For every second of sheer terror on the water, there are days and weeks of mind-numbing routine mingled with interludes of pleasant inaction. But as days and weeks pass on the river, the veteran tugboat man and pilot always holds in a corner of his brain the possibility that disaster may lie just around the bend.

The simplest docking of ships the length of two football fields requires precision measured in inches. One mistake in jockeying the immense vessels can rip out a pier, squash a tug, or send thigh-thick lines snapping back like whips toward deckhands.

But this day and this moment of fear on the Lefthero were in a class all their own.

The Lefthero, a good-size freighter at 60,000 tons, was adrift and gaining momentum, without the ability to change its course, heading straight for the supports of the bridge that carries Interstate 95 traffic over the Schuylkill.

The situation was not Cain’s fault. The old, rust-covered bulk carrier – Greek-owned, flying a Panamanian flag, crewed by Koreans – was at an age at which most vessels are scrapped.

But suddenly, it had become Cain’s responsibility. He had scrambled up the side of the Lefthero from the tiny tug the Dorothy McAllister about 10 a.m. Dec. 7 to show the ship captain how to dock, and to direct the harbor tugs below. A reporter seeking to chronicle a day in the life of a tugboat captain had followed him on board.

Life on the river

Cain, 55, is a native Philadelphian. Raised at 23d and Morris Streets in South Philadelphia, he now lives in Glenolden. He first went to sea as a youth on a ship carrying horses to France. In 1952 he began work on the tugs to stay closer to home.

Always, Cain had said, there was at least a little strain in his job. And always, he had said earlier in the day, it was important to remain calm. If the ship‘s captain sees that you are upset, Cain had said before climbing aboard the Lefthero, . . . well, it would be better not to let that happen.

On the Lefthero, as he saw the bridge looming larger and larger, Captain Cain’s stomach seemed to just fall away toward the floor, he would recall later.

Dead ahead, the commuters on the bridge over the Schuylkill were unaware of the Lefthero passing below, just as commuters on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge spanning Tampa Bay in Florida had been oblivious of the passage beneath of the Summit Venture on May 9, 1980.

That ship rammed the bridge in Florida. Half the double span fell, and 35 men, women and children on that bridge tumbled to their deaths.

The Lefthero had just turned off the wide Delaware into the narrow channel of the Schuylkill when its engines failed. The wind, always the worst enemy of tugmen, was strong. Empty ships such as the Lefthero ride high on the water, all surface and sail. With no engine and no power for steering, the wind could blow the Lefthero as it would a Styrofoam cup on a pond.

Near-irresistible

Now, the Lefthero was a near-irresistible force, moving in a slack tide at about 5 m.p.h. toward the concrete pillars of the bridge. It had been precisely the wrong time for the old ship to lose its power, and now, at less than a hundred yards from the pillars, it had no way to stop the forward momentum generated by its huge screws.

There were only a few options, Cain thought: Use the tugs to run the ship aground. Run the risk of another Tampa disaster. Or call in the tugs, threading the ship through the narrow channel beneath the bridge to reach the safe water on the other side and the Tidewater pier.

The tugs played like porpoises on the water near the freighter. Cute little boats of dark maroon and black – overpowered and undersized, all torque and growl, like Volkswagen “beetles” loaded with truck engines – the tugboats Dorothy, Donal and Eric McAllister spun, backed, throbbed, pivoted, circled, hooted, tooted and turned in the Delaware 70 feet under the ship’s bridge.

It was up to them to guide the ship to safety.

In the old days they were powered by steam, and 80 or more of them would

ply the Delaware. In the 1920s, the Port Richmond community of Philadelphia would declare a holiday just to see them help one of the big barges dock.

Grain was big, coal was king and the tugs pushed the barges down river and up the coast to New England. Louis Szalejko, a retired captain now, remembered coastal runs where, if conditions were right past Cape May, N.J., a tug crew would unfurl a sail and ride the wind.

Captains usually ended up owning portions of their tugs outright. And sometimes the captains would form their own companies, as the Taylor and Anderson families did in 1931 to form Taylor & Anderson Towing and Lighterage Co., Philadelphia’s one locally owned survivor in these days of shrinking trade through the ports along the Delaware.

Two other companies, McAllister Brothers Inc. and Curtis Bay Towing Co., operate harbor tug companies here, but are not locally owned.

A diminished fleet

The ranks of the harbor tugs – the small, powerful boats that push freighters and tankers to dockside, not the barge pushers and tow boats – have been thinned. Decimated, the old hands would say. Of the 80 boats active in 1948, only 13 or 14 remain.

“Today, there’s nothing,” said Anthony J. Clark, 72, a semi-retired tug captain. He was a dispatcher the day in 1925 that the five-masted schooner Edna Hoyt got towed down river – one of the last commercial sailing ships to trade out of Philadelphia. “It’s a rarity to see action out my window now.”

“The business is dramatically down today,” said George Anderson, 64, a second-generation partner in Taylor & Anderson and the father of a third- generation tugman, Bruce, 30, his son.

“The tonnage of shipping is still there,” George Anderson continued. ”But the ships are larger, and where you used to have three ships yesterday carrying what one does today, now you have one ship for three.”

Hardy traditions

The traditions are still there, though. At the three major, unionized companies, the tugs carry a complement of six: a captain, a mate, an engineer, an oiler, a deckhand and the cook.

The men who operate the tugs make good money: a captain about $50,000 a year, and crew members can make $30,000. The work is irregular, though, and the hours are often long. Help a ship dock at Delaware City in Delaware, another at the old Sun Ship yard in Chester and one more at the Northern Metals yard north of Philadelphia, and you’ve put in for 18-hour days. And then there may be a week-long wait for another ship.

Nor should one look to get a start on tugs these days, either. Anderson’s father was a tugman. So was Tony Clark’s. Cain cannot find work for his sons in the tug business.

On board the Lefthero, Cain prepared to call in the tugs and thread the freighter through the bridge.

”Uh, hello Eric and Dorothy,” he said into a walkie-talkie cradled to his shoulder as if it were a baby in need of a burp. He looked over at the phone where Captain Cho was desperately pumping the receiver of the engine- room phone. The phone was not working, either.

“We have no motor here. Uh, the captain does not really seem to know what’s wrong,” Cain said, adding, after a pause, “or what he is doing.

“Uh, warn that barge and other traffic in the vicinity that we have a dead motor in the Schuylkill, please.

“Let’s see what we can do here,” Cain said into the radio.

The freighter’s horn sounded a basso profundo warning. Then, as if on cue, it malfunctioned, too, and began emitting quarter-note blasts. Whhomp, whhomp, whhomp, whhompa, whhomp, whhomp, whhompa came the sound of the horn, like the suspenseful soundtrack of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Past panic

Captain Cho was way past panic at the phone. His right hand fanned the receiver. He alternately banged the phone on the wall and shouted into its mouthpiece. His glistening eyes stared wide, and he locked a slightly hurt look on Captain Cain, who was dressed in a blue, quilted jacket and black pants. A dark blue baseball cap with five stars on the front covered a full head of gray hair.

Cain turned to the reporter. His words landed with dull thuds, bitten off with the same cadence as a John Wayne monologue: “Well, you sure picked the day to see what tugboat work is about.”

He would not look up again for the next 15 minutes, during which took place a graceful water ballet of tugboats directed by a nonstop stream of orders radioed from Cain.

He spoke quietly into the walkie-talkie, his slightly doughy face creased but implacable, his manner calm, and his stomach, by his estimate, somewhere far below his ankles.

The tugs moved below, churning up huge torrents of white water behind them, roaring with torque and power. The trick was to break the big ship’s forward motion enough to keep it from hitting the bridge, while turning it into the Schuylkill’s channel.

A walkie-talkie had replaced the whistle Cain still carried on his jacket. But the tugs acknowledged directions by tooting their whistles or blowing their horns. The Dorothy peeped. The Eric bawped.

As the tug whistles tooted to acknowledge Cain’s orders and the ship’s siren wailed, the river was awash in sound and confusion.

Threading the needle

”Back, Dorothy, one-half full. (Peep, peep, bawp.) One bell, one bell. Eaaassssy, Dorothy, easy. (To Captain Cho) Hard astarboard!

“Bring up, Donald. Fall Dorothy idle. (Bawp, bawp, peep, bawp.) Stop, Dorothy. Back, Dorothy. Easy. . . . Hard right, Eric. Back, Dorothy. Easy, Eric. Midships! Midships!

Cain went on as the Dorothy, the Donald and the Eric spun in response to the orders. The ship turned away from the massive bridge supports and more toward the channel.

Now what? Run aground? “That would be better than trapping a tug or brushing the pillars,” Cain recalled thinking.

But then it looked as if the freighter and its escorts might all make it through the bridge, too.

“Back Dorothy, one-half. Back Dorothy, full. (Peep, peep, bawp.) Easy on the Eric. Easy on the Dorothy. (Peep, peep. Bawp, bawp, bawp. Peep.)”

The ship turned and pivoted again with the dignity of a glacier as the tugs frantically pushed and pulled, little vectors of force and leverage. The white water that churned up behind them sometimes turned dark, warning that the water was too shallow.

An extra push here? The Eric put its shoulder to the Dorothy, which already had its shoulder to the big ship, and both engines rrrrrmmmmmm’ed and churned.

Bells and sirens

The world was all bells, sirens, peeps, roars and surges of revving tug engines and the incredible torque, as the tugs fought wind, tide, current and momentum.

Then they were through it. The Girard Point Bridge was above. The Lefthero was square and true in the channel. The tugs tucked in their tails, like high jumpers pulling in their legs, to clear the pillars.

Cain signaled all was well when he let out a long breath and looked down at Mate Joe Powers in the window of the Dorothy. They shook their heads together.

When Captain Cho came out onto the wing of the bridge, eyes down, Cain turned away for a second, as if not wanting to talk to him.

But he swung around almost immediately and fluttered his hand over his heart. He smiled wryly and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Real close, huh?” Cho, a stocky man in his late 40s whose straight, black hair contained a few strands of gray, seemed grateful for the sympathetic gesture.

Flustered

Still flustered, he fluttered his hand over his heart, too, but then walked quickly away.

Minutes later, as lines were being thrown to the Tidewater terminal, Cho came back, composed, and said to Cain in a formal tone as their eyes met:

“Captain. Thank you. You can see. The air compressor failed. I could do nothing, captain. I am very sorry.”

“Oh, you are very welcome,” Cain said, shaking Cho’s extended hand.

A few minutes later, though, as Cain and the visitor walked through the bridge area, preparing to leave, Cho was standing slumped over on the rail of the bridge, head cradled in his elbow, eyes buried in his arm, silently sobbing.

Cain made a sort of “hey, c’mon,” gesture with his shoulders, and then walked over to the Korean. The tug captain put an arm around the shoulders of Cho and then gave him a hug with one big, bearlike arm.

“It’s all right now, huh?” Cain said with a smile. He was thumping the Korean on the back. “These things happen, now. It’s over, huh?”