Compassion that broke ice

Winter came early to Barrow Point, the northernmost tip of Alaska, in 1988. A freezing wind blew from the east, blizzards covered the area in thick snow, and a sheet of foot-thick ice spread miles out from the sea.

By October most of the 20 000 California grey whales – almost the entire world population – which had spent the summer frolicking in the Arctic waters and feeding on the plentiful supply of crustaceans on the sea bed, sensed the ice closing in above them and began to head south towards Mexico.

By the time three Inupiat Eskimos clambered over the freshly frozen pack-ice looking for heavier Bowhead whales to hunt for winter meat, the greys had long since departed on their 20 100km round trip – the biggest migration by any whale, which takes two to three months.

But then, pausing by a hole in the ice, the Inupiats’ leader, Roy Ahmaogak, watched in surprise as the mottled snouts of three California grey whales pushed through the slush – and kept re-emerging every few minutes, taking it in turns to come up for air.

This young and inexperienced trio – two adolescents and a baby – were trapped, unable to hold their breath long enough to swim the 8km to open water and freedom.

Whalers once dubbed the greys – who can grow up to 15.8m long and weigh as much as 35 tons – the “devil fish” for their ferocity with hunters, but these three were a sorry sight.

They frequently surfaced to breathe, which showed they were scared, and their heads were bloodied from rubbing against the jagged ice every time they pushed through the small hole.

The men could have left them to their fate – after all, the carcasses of trapped young whales turned up every spring, often stripped clean by polar bears. Killing them wasn’t worthwhile as the grey’s meat is dry and tasteless.

Instead, feeling a pang of sympathy for the young whales’ plight, they reported the greys to the captain of a local whaling crew.

Word quickly got around Barrow, a tiny 3 000-strong settlement, and reached the local marine biologist, Geoff Carroll. He alerted the US Coast Guard and Alaska’s media. By chance, US TV anchorman Tom Brokaw of the national network NBC liked “whale stories” and insisted they use this one.

Suddenly, the stranded cetaceans became national news.

Three weeks of nail-biting tension followed, as an extraordinary rescue mission, dubbed Operation Breakthrough, brought together the unlikeliest allies – anti-whaling campaigners at Greenpeace, Eskimo whalers, oil companies, the US military, the White House, the Soviet Union and even a New Age “interspecies communicator” with a guitar – all attempting to save three huge but helpless creatures.

Now, the story has been made into a new Hollywood film, Big Miracle, starring Drew Barrymore and Ted Danson.

Barrymore’s character is based on a plucky Greenpeace activist, Cindy Lowry, then 38, an animal lover who was working in the state at the time. Lowry told reporters they needed an ice-breaking ship to create a series of breathing holes in the 8km expanse of ice between the trapped whales and the open sea.

Greenpeace didn’t have one, and she was desperate to find someone who did. “It was heart-wrenching,” she said. “When we first flew over them I looked down and wanted to be like Superman and just punch a way through the ice to free them.” The US fleet had just two icebreakers and they were not going to change course for three whales, officials told her bluntly.

Then Lowry discovered that a Soviet icebreaker was only 321km away.

The idea of encouraging an enemy superpower – the two regions were still locked in the Cold War – into US waters might have given others pause for thought, but it didn’t bother Lowry for a second.

“It really didn’t matter what government it was at the time,” she said. “We all set aside our agenda; we just wanted to free them.”

Soon, unknown to the US, Greenpeace’s Moscow office had contacted the Soviets, who dispatched not one, but two Soviet icebreakers to help try to free the whales.

But the ice-breakers were still at least 10 days’ sailing away from the whales and temperatures were plunging below -25ºC, which meant the pack ice in which the animals were trapped was getting thicker and wider.

The Inupiats actually had a licence to “harvest” the three whales if they wanted to, and some argued it was kinder to shoot them and put them out of their misery.

But with a small media army gathering in Barrow, the town’s whaling captains decided to try to save them.

A dozen Eskimos now spent their days wielding chainsaws to make sure the ice hole stayed open.

(When they needed a rest, they would crowd into a portable cabin and get something to eat: dried whale meat, naturally).

Extraordinarily for a race who usually only saw whales as food, they had given nicknames to each of the three – Putu, Siku and Kanik (ice, ice hole and snowflake). English-speaking rescuers would later supply their own “Bonnet, Crossbeak and baby Bone”.

Lowry could immediately see that Bone was in a far more desperate state than the older whales. It had to come to the surface more often and its head was a pitiful sight – bloodied and battered. It earned its nickname because sharp ice had rubbed all the skin off its snout.

Lowry was inundated with many not-very-helpful suggestions from members of the public following the story on TV: use napalm or dynamite to clear the way, or hook the whales with bait, like fish.

As it turned out, these brainwaves were only marginally less crazy than the things the rescue alliance actually did try. First was a huge hover barge – an industrial vessel able to lift loads of up to 2 500 tons – owned by oil drilling giant Veco.

The company’s boss, Bill Allen, played in the film by Ted Danson, was keen to influence a vote in Congress on whether to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Saving some whales might help convince politicians he cared about the environment.

The hover barge could crack ice with its weight alone, but it was 434kms away and not in working order. Allen had a spare part flown in by private jet to fix it – one of many extravagances on this mission.

Meanwhile, his friend, Alaska senator Ted Stevens, leant on the state’s National Guard to call out two huge transport helicopters, called Skycranes, to drag the barge to the whales.

Any doubts about the seriousness of the operation – which had already cost millions – were dispelled when the commander of the National Guard found himself taking a call from the White House.

President Ronald Reagan wanted to offer encouragement, and their six-minute chat was recorded and made available to the media (it was an election year and a show of White House compassion might help his deputy and intended successor George Bush Sr).

But despite all these attentions, the plight of the whales worsened. Bone was now so sickly it could barely lift its head out of the water to breathe, and the hover barge became stuck in ice miles from the stranded trio – so Allen pulled out another of the oil company’s expensive toys.

The Archimedean Screw Tractor was an 11-ton amphibious ice-breaking tractor, but it, too, was in mothballs and far away.

With money seemingly no object, the National Guard diverted a huge Lockheed Galaxy cargo plane from a mission flying from California to Japan to pick up the tractor and bring it to Barrow.

In the event, it proved as useless as the hover barge.

The 11 ton ice-breaking tractor made it to the whales but, in breaking the ice, left too much floating debris for the creatures to push their heads through.

Equally short-lived was a gift from a helpful oil company: the “ice bullet”. This five-ton concrete spike was dangled from a helicopter and dropped on to the ice with spectacular force, but again left too much ice debris for the whales to rise and breathe in safety.

Ironically, it was the little solutions that proved useful.

Two small businessmen from Minnesota rushed up to Barrow with their own invention, a small “water bubbler” they sold as a way of keeping ice off yacht hulls.

This underwater fan kept the water circulating – preventing it from forming ice. It worked brilliantly in keeping the ice holes from freezing over. Things were looking up.

Fourteen days into the operation, the hard-working Eskimos – and hundreds of townspeople – had gouged out a line of around 50 breathing holes stretching 3km towards the sea, leaving the whales 5km from open water.

But the whales wouldn’t budge from the original hole. And the longer they lingered around it, the weaker and more listless Bone became.

The baby whale had a habit of surfacing wherever Lowry was standing on the ice, like an infant instinctively able to locate its mother. What could move them on towards the sea?

Cindy Lowry had come armed with a selection of sound recordings designed to do this, including killer whale noises to trick them into thinking predators were near.

These were relayed to the whales with a hydrophone, an underwater loudspeaker, by whale expert Jim Nollman, who persuaded Greenpeace to send him to Barrow as an “interspecies communicator”.

The hippyish Nollman also spoke to the trapped whales and even played his guitar to them.

Nobody knows what made the whales finally start moving along the holes towards the sea, but when they did, the watching humans noticed with horror that the baby had stopped surfacing at all.

Bone had been breathing weakly in recent days and was thought to have pneumonia.

The little creature was never seen again. Lowry broke down in tears and had to helped away by friends.

Fortunately for the other two whales – it wasn’t too long before the Russian icebreakers arrived. Towering over proceedings, the huge vessels made short work of the remaining ice wall, much to the dismay of patriotic US onlookers, who feared the Soviets would turn the rescue into a neat propaganda coup.

As the Soviets battered down the ice separating the now exhausted whales from freedom, Lowry could sense the creatures’ growing excitement.

Then on one of the last nights of their captivity, she finally got her reward for everything she had done. “The whales were getting really frisky, swimming very fast between the ice holes,” she recalled. “I think they really could smell open water. I went over and knelt down by the ice. This whale came up and blew water over me, frosting my hair.

“And then it just rested its chin on the ice for a minute and we had the most amazing eye contact. I said: ‘Oh my gosh, you guys are going home’.

“It was such an amazing moment. I really felt it knew we were trying to help them and they were going to get out.”

On October 28 – three weeks after first being spotted, the whales finally swam out into clear water.

More than 20 years have passed since the rescue, but given that California grey whales can live to 80, Lowry believes the two who escaped are still alive somewhere.

The “miracle” of the film’s title wasn’t just that two whales survived against the odds, it was also that humanity put aside such considerations as politics, nationality and money to accomplish “something really quite noble”. Harder-hearted souls have pointed to the total cost, estimated at up to $5.8 million and, predictably, asked: was it worth it?

For Lowry – and the millions of people around the world who watched at home on TV, rooting for the three struggling whales – there is no doubt. – Daily Mail

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