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Four sailors earn medals for saving shipmates

The fire aboard the carrier George Washington on May 22, 2008, cost the Navy $70 million in damages — and very nearly cost four sailors their lives.

Crew members fought for six hours to free four sailors trapped in an aviation fuel pumping room. Intense heat caused team after team to turn back after battling down the nearly vertical ladders in the trunk space that led to the pump room deep within the hull.

Nearly a year and a half after the fire, the four responsible for finally reaching and saving those sailors have been awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal:

• Senior Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Aircraft Handling) (AW/SW) Keith Hendrickson.

• Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Fuels) (AW/SW) Randy Beck.

• Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class (SW) Daniel Russell.

• Damage Controlman 2nd Class (SW) Stephanie Jeffcoat.

The award is given to sailors who distinguish themselves by heroism not involving conflict with an enemy.

Beck and Russell are now individual augmentees in Iraq, while Hendrickson is onboard the carrier Carl Vinson, in overhaul in Newport News, Va. Jeffcoat is still aboard the George Washington.

“We knew early on in the firefighting that those guys were down there,” Hendrickson said. “There were a number of attempts that got just a deck away but came back empty-handed.”

Separating the rescuers from the trapped sailors was what Jeffcoat calls a “superheated space.” Standard firefighting gear wasn’t enough to protect the sailors from the intense heat, so Hendrickson decided to outfit himself and others in “proximity suits,” designed for fighting aircraft fires on the flight deck and in the hangar bay.

“The outside is highly reflective of heat, and I thought it might make a difference,” Hendrickson said of the suits, which look as if they are made of aluminum foil.

Even with the suits, the heat was nearly unbearable, Jeffcoat said.

Separating the group from the seventh deck was a hatch so hot that the water being poured onto it to cool it was boiling at the rescuer’s feet.

Russell reached into the boiling water time after time with a wrench to unbolt the nuts securing the hatch, Jeffcoat said.

“Once we got the hatch open, I could hear [the trapped sailors] banging on the walls of the control room in the middle of the pump room — getting inside that space and separating themselves from the intense heat is what saved them until we could get there,” Hendrickson said.

With Hendrickson and Jeffcoat holding the hatch, Beck was able to slip through and locate the trapped sailors.

The team had carried emergency breathing devices for the trapped sailors, “but we never got a chance to give them out,” she said. “They moved really fast up that trunk to safety.”