GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARBULLETIN.COM Tripler hospital personnel and Navy crewmen transferred an injured tugboat crewman from an SH-60 helicopter yesterday. The sailor was picked up some 700 miles from Oahu.

Pearl Harbor ships respond
to injury at sea

Doctors from Tripler fly by helicopter to
aid an ocean tug sailor suffering head trauma

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By Gregg K. Kakesako
gkakesako@starbulletin.com

Two Pearl Harbor-based warships yesterday came to the rescue of an injured man 700 miles west of Oahu.

A seagoing tugboat, the motorized vessel Pequen, radioed a rescue center in the Netherlands yesterday that a crewman was suffering from a head injury, possibly from a fall.

Responding to the call was the Aegis cruiser USS Lake Erie.

The injured crewman was transferred from the Pequen to the Lake Erie and stabilized by Navy corpsmen.

Two doctors from Tripler Army Medical Center were dispatched via a Navy SH-60B Seahawk helicopter from Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe Bay.

However, because of the extreme distance, the helicopter had to first fly to the destroyer USS O'Kane to refuel before traveling onto the Lake Erie.

The injured seaman, along with the Tripler neurosurgeon and an anesthesiologist, left the Lake Erie about 4 p.m. and then had to make a refueling stop on the O'Kane before finally arriving at Tripler last night.

It has been a busy week for the Lake Erie, which fired an SM-3 missile Thursday that downed a dummy target missile from Kauai as part of the national theater missile defense tests.