A dramatic sea rescue saved all from a cruise ship fire on Juneau’s 100th birthday; what would happen today?

It was Friday night and Juneau’s 100th birthday party had started early. Revelers were kicking up their heels at area bars and taverns. Suddenly several long blasts from a ship’s horn screamed and echoed off the mountains downtown calling sailors to the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell for immediate departure. A cruise ship 200 miles offshore in the Gulf of Alaska was on fire with more than 500 people aboard, mostly elderly passengers, with a typhoon headed their way.

Juneau was preparing for the party of the century — literally — on Saturday, Oct. 4, 1980. It was the anniversary of 100 years since the town’s founding and the discovery of gold.

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell from Seattle was tied at the downtown military dock for the coming celebration the next morning. Its captain was scheduled to lead the parade as grand marshall. Finishing touches would be frosted onto a 34-foot-tall totem pole-shaped birthday cake that would rise in the atrium of the State Office Building later that day.

Meanwhile, 200 miles west in the Gulf of Alaska things were not as festive aboard the 427-foot luxury liner Prinsendam. Shortly after midnight on Oct. 4 as the passengers and crew were tucked into their bunks, the ship’s fire bell rang. Twelve minutes after a fire started the captain came on the loudspeaker with this message:

“Attention passengers. We have a small fire in the engine room. It is under control and there is no danger, I repeat — there is no danger. However, we ask all passengers to come up to the Promenade Deck while the smoke is being cleared. We are very sorry for this inconvenience.”

Both danger and inconvenience would be considerable during the next few hours.

Dangers and rescue resources at sea — then and now

With a second straight record-level cruise season at its peak in Juneau now, what might happen if a similar disaster — quite possibly aboard a far larger ship with several thousand passengers and crew members — occurred in waters well away from port?

“The best rescue platform for a cruise ship in distress is another cruise ship,” said Jennifer Whitcomb, the U.S. Coast Guard 17th District’s search and rescue program manager, in a June 21 interview.

Whitcomb, in a June 24 follow-up email, noted another cruise ship offers additional lifeboats, significant accommodations for evacuees, food, onboard medical facilities and some weather protection from rough seas and strong winds by positioning its size and bulk to calm rescue conditions.

On the night the Prinsendam caught fire a large vessel in the vicinity — while not a cruise ship — would demonstrate the value of such assistance.

Passengers aboard the Prinsendam were mostly wealthy, older travelers on a long ocean voyage between Vancouver and Asia when a leaky hose sprayed oil onto a hot pipe in the engine room, igniting a fire. Attempts to control the fire failed as smoke and flames began to fill the confined below-deck spaces. Meanwhile, above, passengers moved as directed through the dark, quiet ship — dead in the water without engines — from staterooms to upper deck lounges and the dining room. Thinking they would be able to return for warmer clothing and valuables, many evacuated in nightclothes.

Smoke began to infiltrate the waiting areas. The people moved outside. They emerged on deck into a starry night with calm seas. Green bands of the aurora borealis rippled overhead. Conditions would not remain so idyllic. The only light on the ship came from the bridge deck where a generator provided minimal light and power to the captain.

As they awaited their fate some of the passengers may have thought about the movie “Poseidon Adventure,” a shipwreck disaster film released eight years earlier in 1972. Unknown to them, the cinematic version of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic was not made until 1997 so the popular haunting melody “My Heart Will Go On” would not have been lingering in victims’ very cold ears as they wondered what would happen next. Their answer came soon enough.

The fire had started just after midnight. At 5 a.m. Captain Wabeke made another announcement.

“I regret to inform you that we have lost the battle with the flames. We must now abandon the ship. Please follow the instructions of the crew,” said the captain.

Passengers began to climb aboard six lifeboats. Flames were visible in rooms they had vacated. Meant to accommodate 40 people each, many lifeboats were loaded with as many as 80 passengers in various states of dress. Many were only in nightclothes and bath robes, but most had donned bulky life jackets. One woman wore a mink coat over her nightgown. Some young foreign crew members panicked and leapt into the lifeboats over the elderly guests.

Without ship’s power the lifeboats were lowered manually into the black sea. One by one the lifeboats were cut loose to float away from the burning ship. Smoke filled the air inside the Prinsendam and drifted on deck as more than 40 crew fought back flames. Soon sharp pellets of rain started to slap the exposed lifeboat passengers. As night faded there was “red sky at dawning, and sailors take warning,” according to one historical account.

All over the North Pacific rescuers were mobilizing, but they were all a long distance away. A large C-130 Hercules aircraft launched from Kodiak. First on scene, the plane circled overhead and crew reported later “we saw the ship lose all power and go dark. Then we saw small lights of lifeboats drift away from the ship and get scattered all over the ocean.” The big Hercules would become the aerial on-scene command center witnessing, reporting and guiding rescuers, who came in helicopters and on vessels. The Coast Guard’s Rescue Coordination Center in Juneau’s federal building commanded the operation.

Forty-four years ago communications were extremely limited. Emergency responders relied on radio connections, paper charts, teletype machines and telephone landlines. There were no cell phones, no Internet, no GPS, no digitized maps or instant communications that exist today. And the Prinsendam was burning in the Gulf of Alaska with 519 souls in danger.

U.S. Coast Guard, Air Force, and local and Canadian search-and-rescue teams mobilized immediately. Their training kicked in as they scrambled onto ships and into helicopters.

Key to the rescue was the fortunate positioning of a huge oil tanker that had departed from the TransAlaska Oil Pipeline Terminal in Valdez fully loaded with North Slope crude. The “Williamsburgh” was steaming south to Texas refineries. It was the closest ship to the stranded Prinsendam and would be the first vessel to arrive — eight hours later.

A rescue at dawn amidst wind and waves

As the darkness merged with gray dawn, clouds moved into the Gulf of Alaska kicking up swells to 10 feet and winds up to 35 mph. Lifeboat evacuees grew cold, wet and seasick, but mostly quiet as they huddled together for warmth. Attempts at singing to raise spirits washed away in the storm. The predicted typhoon was moving closer.

Meanwhile in Juneau and Sitka responders were organizing firefighting gear, and gathering as many blankets from hotels, school dormitories and other locations as they could find. Hospitals were alerted and began preparing to receive injured victims. Communities activated their own response teams. Yakutat became a refueling hub for helicopters.

When the “Williamsburgh” arrived it encountered the first of the lifeboat passengers. Some climbed the rope mesh Jacob’s Ladder up the side of the tanker. After hours of cold and early stages of hypothermia, many hands and legs didn’t respond. Helicopters hovered above the lifeboats and lowered metal baskets down to the lifeboats that were rising and dipping in the swells.

Rescuers dropped onto the lifeboats to help move cramped cold elders into the basket or loop their arms and torso through a horse collar harness to be lifted through the rotor wash and hauled into the chopper. When full of 10 to 12 people, the helos headed to the tanker to set down on a landing pad and unload evacuees then return for more victims before fuel ran out or lifeboaters suffered more.

The tanker crew gave their bunks, food and blankets to aid the rescued Prinsendam passengers. Three choppers flew between the pitching and rolling lifeboats to rescue more victims as the sea and wind got worse. Every 10 seconds icy water broke over the lifeboats. People bailed, but feared letting go of the boat could toss them overboard along with the water they bailed.

Airborne refueling sped up evacuations as helicopters drank up fuel from a spigot in a flying gas station. Pilots were instructed to “pick a boat and start hoisting,” but it was more coordinated than that phrase suggests. One helicopter would land, unload people and return to pick up more as a second helicopter touched down on the other landing pad of the huge tanker. Aside from one woman getting dipped into the ocean inadvertently, all arrived safely on a vessel.

One helicopter rescuer later said, “So there we were from 20-30 feet looking directly down into a lifeboat with 50 pairs of eyes staring straight up at us. You know in your heart they were holding onto a desperate hope you would perform a miracle. Our rotor wash was blowing down on them as they tried to huddle together.”

One helicopter pilot was at the controls for 10 hours. Another crew spent 11½ hours flying, made seven tanker landings, three inflight refuelings and 61 hoists retrieving passengers from a lifeboat.

Crews on the tanker assisted at the two landing pads and helped evacuees navigate the deck obstructions on the 1,092-foot tanker to safe accommodations below. Big Canadian “Buffalo” helicopters (similar to U.S. Chinooks) arrived to help and operated out of Yakutat, more than 100 miles from the burning ship and drifting lifeboats. The small town worried if it would have enough food for more than 500 distressed passengers. Some helicopters flew to Yakutat, but others remained on scene shuttling evacuees on the five-minute flight between lifeboat and tanker. Six lifeboats with many cramped and cold evacuees needed rescue as they drifted farther from burning Prinsendam.

The Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell arrived on scene at 1:45 p.m. Saturday afternoon, 14 hours after the fire began. It had raced 200 miles from Juneau and now faced 30-knot winds and only one-mile visibility. Locating lifeboats was challenging as the small vessels appeared and then disappeared among the big waves. The ship rescued 16 people, one by one, until the helicopter had to depart due to low fuel. By this time weather conditions in the Gulf of Alaska had worsened and darkness was approaching.

Eighteen hours after the fire started rescuers thought all the lifeboats had been found, but one remained unaccounted for: two responders on a lifeboat had not logged in. It was dark now. The Boutwell sent a beam of light straight up. People on the last lifeboat responded with three flares fired rapidly into the stormy sky. The Boutwell found 18 passengers and the two rescuers in the boat. It took an hour to hoist them onto the 378-foot cutter using a horse collar. The 20 passengers had been on board the lifeboat for 17 hours. They were in better shape than others because their lifeboat had two skilled responders, food, water and a cover.

Meanwhile, Sitka prepared to receive the ship’s victims who would need everything from medications, clothing and places to get warm and dry. Shopkeepers opened their doors and the shipping line agreed to pay costs of all purchases made by the evacuees. Victims’ essentials, including passports, were still on the burning ship. Forty hours after the cruise ship caught fire, the Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell arrived in Sitka.

With the rescue completed, the tanker Williamsburgh headed to Valdez with more than 300 people. Valdez was the only port that could accommodate such a large vessel. The tanker had food for its crew for the 42 days required to travel to a Texas refinery. The Prinsendam evacuees ate it all in 24 hours. It was 7:30 p.m. on Sunday. The fire started just after midnight on Saturday.

All 519 souls on the Prinsendam survived.

Historical accounts and lessons learned

Details of this miraculous rescue are documented in a 400-page book compiled by former Boutwell operations officer Stephen J. Corcoran in the aptly named “None Were Lost,” published in 2017. Corcoran reported his eyewitness account, reviewed Coast Guard logs and interviewed survivors.

While the Prinsendam burned in the gulf, little information about the incident was known to local Juneau centennial celebrants. The city proceeded with its centennial parade and a “box lunch social and a kissing booth at Marine Park,” reported the Juneau Empire in its front page story on Oct. 6, 1980. The 34-foot tall totem design cake standing upright in the atrium of the State Office Building was lowered and divided onto three big tables and served to hundreds of attendees. “There was cake and icing all over the place,” said one event leader in the Empire article. The cake, which took four months to plan and create, was devoured in less than three hours.

Another Oct. 4 entertainment for Juneauites was a concert at the high school auditorium featuring nationally known singer Dionne Warwick and comedian Marty Allen. Centennial Hall had not yet been constructed.

One of the reasons locals were unaware of the magnitude of the cruise ship fire was due to limited communication technology. Responders were appropriately focused on the intense rescue operations. In Juneau’s federal building Coast Guard response coordinators issued frequent dispatches to national and international media representatives pressing for details on that frenetic Saturday.

The brief messages were documented in an “Extra” special edition published the day of the Prinsendam fire. At the time, the Juneau Empire published five days a week with hardcopy papers (online publications did not exist) printed Monday through Friday at the paper’s Second Street office. Empire staff scrambled to document the rescue and issued a two-page “Extra” on Oct. 4. By Monday’s regular edition headlines declared, “All safe: Prinsendam passengers ashore.”

The “Extra” as well as the Monday, Oct. 6, 1980, Empires featured a top-of-the-fold aerial photo of the smoldering Prinsendam taken by well-known Juneau photographer Mark Kelley. He had begun working for the newspaper a year earlier after graduating from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks with a degree in photojournalism and northern studies.

Kelley is one of many residents who remember the early morning of the centennial day Saturday, Oct. 4. As a volunteer firefighter living in the downtown fire hall he was alerted by the ship’s horn blasts. He helped round up crew members from the Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell who were celebrating in local drinking establishments. At that early time the details of the emergency were unknown. Simultaneously, Kelley knew the importance of the city’s big centennial plans later in the day. He was prepared to photograph town festivities for the paper. He never got them. His attention was on the Prinsendam’s fire.

Kelley also knew he was in the perfect place to get color photos for the Associated Press and other news outlets. He alerted the national press. He and other local media staff hopped on a Channel Flying plane at the company’s three-mile Glacier Highway floatplane base. By the time they arrived at the Prinsendam, the weather was “rough, there was hardly any smoke and the wind was so stiff it was difficult to hold the camera still,” Kelley recalled in a June 14, 2024, interview. Those are the conditions of the front page photo, taken as the plane had to turn back to Juneau because its fuel ran low. The next day other national media staff converged on Alaska and flew to the ship. They got images of black smoke billowing from the ship and photos of bedraggled evacuees arriving safely in other locations. Cameras at the time only used rolls of film; digital cameras were a dream of the future. The film rolls were flown out of town for processing and delivery to official media sources.

By Tuesday, Oct. 7, the ship fire appeared to be out with only light smoke rising. The Prinsendam lay at a slight list, but the interior temperature was 300 degrees. The sea was still rolling with swells as a professional firefighting crew was put aboard to extinguish the flames. A tow line hauser was affixed and ready for a large tug to tow the cruise ship to shore. The Coast Guard nixed that option and insisted Prinsendam get no closer than 50 miles from Alaska’s coast. An estimate of the 188,000 gallons of oil — if released — would be a smothering slick that could spread into Cross Sound and Sitka Sound. Whales, sea lions, fish and waterfront businesses were at risk if oil escaped from the ship. Meanwhile, the rescued passengers — in new clothes — boarded chartered jets and flew home.

On Oct. 9 fire erupted again and the nine onboard firefighters needed to escape. Helicopters had gone back to their bases. The Coast Guard requested immediate help and a chopper “lifts off from Yakutat in the wind and storm and dark,” according to reports. Water was flooding into the Prinsendam through its portholes. The ship had become difficult to tow in its flooded, listing state. It was listing 40-45 degrees.

A few days later Kelley tried again to get photos of the Prinsendam. All the passengers were safe, but the ship was now heeled over hard and smoke still poured out. A delay from the planned departure time added two hours to accommodate the exhausted helicopter pilot so he could eat some breakfast. It resulted in the ultimate frustration for Kelley. Partway on the flight to the Prinsendam, the pilot listened through his headset then announced, “Well, Mark, I’m sorry. The Prinsendam just sank.” When they arrived at the spot where the ship had been there was empty ocean. The photo shoot was a bust. “There was nothing to photograph,” Kelley said.

The Prinsendam sank bow-first in just moments in nearly 9,000 feet of ocean 79 miles offshore of Sitka. There was little surface oil visible. The cold water at that depth would likely solidify the oil where it was predicted to remain.

In retrospect nearly a half-century later, observers note that the elderly passengers had a mindset forged by growing up in the Great Depression of the 1930s and sacrificing as a nation in the 1940s during World War II. Their collective attitude was serving a higher purpose so all could survive. That may have been crucial to living through an icy night in the Gulf of Alaska in October 1980.

For present-day rescuers, lessons were learned from the Prinsendam fire and evacuation, as well as from other global events, Whitcomb wrote in her email earlier this month. In addition to studying other “mass-rescue” incidents, the Coast Guard, cruise industry companies, and other military entities conduct scenario training together and separately.

Air stations in Sitka and Kodiak — including those with seasonal presence in Cordova, Cold Bay and Kotzebue — make helicopter and fixed-wing responses available from various locations. As with Prinsendam, the Coast Guard continues to maintain a relationship with the Royal Canadian Air Force, Whitcomb wrote.

Most notable is the vastly improved communications and navigation capacity since 1980, she added. Satellite phones and ship position monitoring — often in real-time — allow accurate positioning information. Internet service has boosted communications significantly, but “old-school high frequency [HF] and VHF radio channels” are still monitored by the Coast Guard.

• Contact Laurie Craig at laurie.craig@juneauempire.com.###