Five Die in Roatan’s Biggest Air Disaster to Date

The Roatan firemen pulled out the crash victims from the wreck, but only one, a passenger sitting with his back towards the front of the plane was still alive when rescued. Despite many attempts to save his life, the victim died at the Roatan public hospital.

While Roatan does have an emergency center at a public hospital in Coxen Hole, the island lacks a trauma center and specialists capable of stabilizing a patient with vast, or complex internal damage. “We have been fooling ourselves with thinking that we can handle an accident with multiple injured where we couldn’t deal with one,” said Dainie Etches, a Canadian warden on the island who has had assisted in dozens of incidents and mishaps that involved Canadians over the years. Etches says that the construction of the new public hospital in Dixon Cove is moving forward too slowly, and the new hospital is no guarantee that government will properly staff it and equip it. “There isn’t a single orthopedist on the island right now,” said Etches.

Piloting the plane was Patrick Forseth, a 32-year-old Canadian pilot and entrepreneur who lived in Trujillo. Forseth flew multiple times that day departing Trujillo, then flying to Roatan and to Guanaja.  A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news news report quoted John Enman, a passenger who flew from Trujillo to Roatan that day, saying that Forseth told him during the flight  that “he had been delayed because of mechanical issues – a broken wire from the ignition to the battery, which a mechanic had fixed.”

Forseth picked up four American passengers who arrived from Houston and booked his plane for a flight to Guanaja. Those passengers were:Bradley Post, Robert Miller, Anthony Dubler and Frederick Tepel. The plane took off at 2:15 pm and flew a kilometer heading east.

Mary Russell, who was just a hundred meters from the crash site, reported hearing two backfires and a loud sound of the plane hitting the water. “It looked like there is a bit of smoke on takeoff. Take off looks hard and it [the plane] lifts slowly, then it looks like the engine stopped and almost at the same time the plane lost its lift on the left wing,” described the footage of the crash Patrice Bellemare, a Roatan Dive Shop owner. A video of crash was recorded by a security camera on a cruise ship in Mahogany Bay. Bellmare assisted with the removal of the plane from the crash site.

The incident is being investigated by Mario Carcamo, Chief of the Honduras Investigative Commission of Air Accidents and Incidents. It is not clear what caused the engine to quit, or what happened after that.

The proper technique after loss of engine power is to immediately tilt the airplane down in order to maintain speed and keep the airplane flying. “You are trained in a failure like this to go straight,” said Mike Boden, a 30-year Delta Airlines veteran pilotand Roatan resident. “Keep control is what you are doing.” Another person who was perplexed why an engine failure in these circumstances became such a fatal crash is Larry Forseth, Patrick’s father and veteran Air Canada pilot. “The situation was survivable” Larry Forseth had told the Canadian media. “It is clear that the plane had stalled out with the tail being broken like that,” said Boden. The plane’s chassis completely disintegrated suggesting a great vertical speed right before impact.

Several friends and family testified of that Patrick Forseth repeated training for loss of engine power in the past. “Patrick reacted quickly and got the plane away from a close-to-stall situation,” remembers Edil Mendez a 2018 emergency landing situation when the plane’s landing gear failed to open. “He was a friend, like a brother,” says Mendez who did several med-evac flights from Roatan with Patrick Forseth.

The reasons for engine failure and subsequent airplane flight are unclear. Not out of the question is passenger interference. In 2010 an accident investigation determined that a passenger interfered with the operating of the airplane during a flight near Vancouver Island when passenger interference caused the pilot to lose control of the aircraft, resulting in a crash and death of all four on board. FAA has no recommendations as far as placing passengers that are pilots next to the pilot. There are reports that two of the four passengers knew how to fly but were seated in the back of the plane. The pilot’s preference in small airplanes is to seat heavier passengers up front to better distribute the plane’s weight.

A Grass Roots Group Takes Up the Never Ending War on Trash

One organization is making a difference. “BICCU [Bay Islands Coastal Clean Up] started at my desk at the Port of Roatan,” says Dawn Hyde, Customer Service manager at the Port of Roatan. It was 2012 and Hyde was wondering why no one was doing a similar effort to the Ocean Conservancy’s 30 year-old world wide effort of International Coastal Cleanup. Since there appeared to be no such local effort, Hyde decided to start one herself.

With seven friends, she started an island-wide clean up that takes place twice each year. BICCU empowers the island community to grow stronger by working on a common goal. It builds community cohesion and provides some relief from the trash problems that increasingly plague Roatan. The Bay Islands clean-up effort has inspired similar programs in Tela, Omoa, and La Ceiba.

Every day rain and sea currents wash hundreds of tons of trash, especially plastics, onto the shores and reefs of the island. To counter that, BICCU organizes two clean-ups a year: there is one clean up before the rainy season and the other before the Holy Week tourist rush.

In 2018 things really ramped up when an international corporation became interested in Roatan’s garbage conundrum. Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of Soda Stream saw images of Roatan’s waters being filled with floating plastic and decided to help. “Everything happened in less than three hours,” remembers Michelle Mejilla, a Honduran who moved to Israel 18 years ago and graduated from Tegucigalpa’s Catholic University Environmental Department. SodaStream, an Israel based multinational, decided to locate their annual 2018 worldwide meeting on Roatan with part of their stay dedicated to picking up trash on the island. SodaStream is about to close a deal where it would be purchased for $3.2 billion by PepsiCo and its CEO, Ramon Laguarta, showed up on Roatan.”We can’t clean up all the plastic waste on the planet, but we each need to do whatever we can,” said Birnbaum, whose company makes sparkling water from ordinary tap water. As a result, Roatan got some international media exposure and 151 rooms at Fantasy Islands were filled in the low season.

Bay Islands clean-up effort has inspired similar programs in Tela, Omoa,
and La Ceiba.

In May, Mejilla spent four days scouting the most littered places of Roatan and decided to focus SodaStream’s main trash collection efforts at Jonesville’s Mangrove Point and Celebration Cay just south of Los Fuertes. 150 SodaStream employees and 150 Roatan schoolchildren picked up around 2,000 bags of debris. “We put aluminum and glass in green bags, transparent bags are for plastic,” said Hyde.

Dozens of groups of totaling almost 3,000 people took on the task of picking up garbage not only across Roatan but in Utila and Guanaja as well. “SodaStream added the fizz we needed to get the clean up moving this year,” said Hyde.

On the fifth day of the cleanup, the Mahogany Bay employees took their turn in picking up plastics and trash in the middle of the island. They were assigned one of the more polluted areas on Roatan: the Brick Bay mangrove next to the Brick Bay village. The currents and wind push the debris and garbage from open sea into the cove from the east almost directly into Brick Bay trapping tons of garbage.

There was driftwood, plastic bottles, metal cans and the volunteers even manage to pull out a boiler. The ladies gathered the garbage into bags and men pulled the bags in knee high water to the collection point. By the end of the morning a two meter high pile of bags was awaiting a garbage truck. “When we have the clean-up the Municipal trucks can’t handle the loads,” says Hyde who negotiates with local transport companies and taxis that do business at the Port of Roatan dock. The bags ended up at the Roatan Municipal trash dump where eight families live from recycling. “These ‘pepenadores’ separate the trash and sell it to recycling collectors,” says Zulema Santos, of the BICCU organizers. “There are so few people that value their work.” Mayor Julio Galindo has worked out an agreement with PepsiCo and the Cerveceria to establish an NGO – Island Green that provided a buy-back of recyclables on the island and facilitates free transport to recycling centers on the mainland but this subsidized NGO arrangement only lasts five years.

Inadvertently BICCU has become the islands emergency force. When a major weather emergency takes place on the island it is unlikely the central government would be able to provide fast and large enough support to the islands. It could be BICCU volunteers that will be going to affected areas and providing quick response aid.

Diver inspects the corral tree in Sandy Bay Area (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

Island Divers Plant Underwater Trees to Give Coral a Chance

Thankfully there are a group of passionate environmental scientists leading the charge to preserve, protect and defend the coral reefs of the Bay Islands. As Tripp Funderburk, who runs the coral restoration program at Subway Watersports in Turquoise Bay explains, “we had the worst bleaching event in the history of Roatan last year.” Jennifer Keck, who works as the Education and Research Coordinator for the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) at Anthony’s Key Resort in Sandy Bay says, “we can’t afford to have another bleaching event.”

Coral Restoration initiatives are a planned scientific response that, as Executive Director of the Roatan Marine Park, Francis Lean says, “give hope to the reef.” Both of the restoration programs in Turquoise Bay and Sandy Bay use the same coral trees, the same record keeping and naming conventions so they can work together and collaborate in the future.

A piece of staghorn coral used in the restoration program. (Photo by Jennifer Keck).

The coral restoration programs on Roatan revolve around coral tree nurseries. The nurseries are composed of big, 30 foot tall PVC pipes. Like an underwater Christmas tree fragments of two critically endangered species coral, staghorn and elkhorn, hang from thin filaments of wire attached to the thicker PVC branches. To harvest these fragments, they take 10% of viable, healthy specimens of staghorn and elkhorn coral, cut them into little pieces and try to preserve as much of the genetic diversity of these keystone species as possible.

Funderburk, who previously worked as policy director in for the Coral Restoration Foundation setting up restoration programs across the Caribbean says “I am convinced these are important corals. We can grow them and plant them and we can get better at it. I’ve seen it work in Bonaire, Curacao, Mustique and in the Florida Keys.”

Starting in early 2016, the Bay Islands Reef Restoration program installed ten coral trees in Turquoise Bay and another ten in Mahogany Bay. Once the fragments of coral have sufficiently grown, they are planted back onto the reef, tagged, and monitored at regular intervals. Since January, the program in Turquoise Bay has out-planted more than 260 corals onto the reef with a success rate of more than 92%. Funderburk says that the program relies on volunteers, using an “ecotourism” model that doesn’t depend on “government grants or charity,” but provides their guests with “unique opportunities to learn about coral.”

Tripp Funderburk talking to a group of students at Turquoise Bay Resort. (Photo by Robert Herb).

Renee Setter, who recently completed her PADI Dive Master internship at Turquoise Bay, explains what makes working on the restoration program so special, saying, “ it’s such a unique and fulfilling experience to be able to give back to the reef. It makes divers feel satisfied and rewarded knowing that they gave back to the beautiful underwater world.”

Keck, who oversees a coral restoration program with 24 coral trees with more than 2,000 corals on them agrees that, “the whole idea of citizen science is just growing. People want to be more useful. There has been so much interest among recreational divers.”

While the programs in Sandy Bay and Turquoise Bay have been successful, the ultimate goal as Keck understands it is to “get the techniques down so we can start another nursery in the West End/West Bay area that the Marine Park will manage that would allow local dive shops to get involved and engage the community and make everyone feel like they are contributing.”

Lean agrees that cooperation is critical, saying “communication between all projects is essential to improve the effectiveness of coral restoration.”

While these coral restoration programs are not a fix for the rising temperatures and acidity in the ocean, they do help point the way forward towards a better future. Funderburk stresses that we need to “do as much smart conservation as we can on a local level” with programs that are “effective but also educational.”

Keck also ultimately sounds a positive note, saying that, “We might not have the answer today, but we might next month. We have a seed bank in Norway. We need a coral bank and that’s sort of what these nurseries are becoming.”

Sink boat at Tulum.

Dixon Cove Is Home To Two Most Photographs Wrecks In The Caribbean

Tulum rests in the channel entrance to Dixon Cove, the biggest tonnage harbor in Honduras, just a stone’s throw from Harris Stamp Cay, a hundred meters west of Mahogany Bay Cruise Ship Terminal, and two hundred meters from Galaxy Wave Ferry Terminal.

Tulum’s story goes back to 1979 when Roatan was a little known luscious green island.  Islander Luey McLaughlin was at work as one of the managers at Anthony’s Key Resort [AKR] when he spotted a vessel in distress. Tulum was on her way from Puerto Cortez to the Dominican Republic, she was loaded top to bottom with pine lumber and leaning heavy to her side. “The locals were jumping in, fishing out all the lumber that was floating,” says Julio Galindo, who was also an AKR manager at the time.

“I drove to Allan Hyde as he had a boat capable of towing such a big vessel,” said McLaughlin. There were no phones on the island and driving to deliver a message was the quickest way to communicate in a situation like this.

“She was leaning very heavy,” remembers Shawn Hyde who was a teenager at the time of the incident. Shawn is a son of Allan Hyde, who ended up salvaging Tulum. Capt. Denny Jones went out with one of Allan Hyde’s shrimp boats and towed Tulum to Coxen Hole harbor. There she remained for many months before being towed to French Harbour.

In the 1980s and 1990s most of the paint rusted away

Tulum’s cargo of Honduran pine lumber was unloaded in French Harbour and sold on the mainland. The money was put into an escrow account to pay for salvage and other claims. Some people say that the Tulum’s owners botched an insurance scam and that the captain just opened the wrong ballast valves.

“A bad storm was on its way and it was decided to tow Tulum to a safe harbor in Dixon Cove,” said McLaughlin. Back then Dixon Cove was a secluded place, filled with mangrove with almost no one living there. “There was nothing here, just mangroves.”  The towing operation got complicated and the boat drifted onto the reef. “The way she sunk caused no hazard as far as entrance to the harbor,” said McLaughlin. “The Honduran Naval came and discharged the bunker fuel in her tank.” Once the bunker fuel was drained the ship no longer caused a danger to the reef or waters.

A couple of years later, US Navy special forces came to see if it was worth it for them to practice salvage operations on Tulum. The early 1980s was the time of the Nicaraguan Contra war and the US military was running many covert operations out of Honduras. “The hull was already fractured and they decided against it,” said McLaughlin. Ultimately, the Navy Seals did  their training with a boat named Wendy that was floated from Coxen Hole and towed away into deep waters south of the island.

In the 1980s and 1990s most of the paint rusted away and by the early 2000s a hull was still visible and its metal crane still standing high. One could swim inside the hull like it was a gothic cathedral. The hull bent and collapsed under its own weight around 2006. “If people didn’t cut the hull up for scrap metal she would still be there,” said Shawn Hyde. A few times over the years locals boarded Tulum to salvage scrap metal for resale.

The strongest part of the ship, and the part most resistant to salt water, storms, and scavengers,  was the engine.  It remains intact, still visible to passengers entering Dixon Cove.