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Training Coast Guard’s elite surfmen in the “Graveyard of the Pacific” | 60 Minutes
The mayday call came on graduation day in 2023 for the U.S. Coast Guard’s elite surfmen trainees, but this wasn’t a class exercise.
A boat was taking on water just outside of one of the most dangerous inlets in the U.S. and conditions had gone from mild to mad by the time the students and instructors on three boats, out for one last training run, found it.
“At this point we’re facing 25-, 30-foot, 35-foot breaking seas. Fifty knots of winds. It’s raining, hailing,” said Chief Eric Ceallaigh, who was chief instructor at the Coast Guard’s National Motor Lifeboat School.
Ceallaigh was training students at the spot where the Columbia River spills into the Pacific Ocean, an area with some of the worst weather and highest seas in America. Those trainees come here in search of the coveted surfman certification. If they earn it, they go on to drive lifeboats on the most challenging rescue missions.
“It takes a lot to get there,” Ceallaigh said. “It takes a special type of person, willing to put themselves into those situations where you’re looking up at a 20-foot breaking sea and you’re like, ‘I want to do this. I want to keep training in this.'”
Who are the surfmen?
Becoming a surfman is sometimes compared to being a Navy SEAL or in the Army Special Forces. Of the approximately 40,000 members of the Coast Guard, only around 130 are active duty surfmen, Tim Crochet, commanding officer of the Lifeboat School, said.
To be certified as a surfman means the Coast Guard trusts you to command and drive a lifeboat on crucial missions. A display of every surfman medallion ever earned — they’re called “checks” — is on display at the entrance to the school.
The U.S. Life-Saving Service began rescuing mariners in distress in 1972. Renamed the Coast Guard in 1915, the force now operates 20 Surf Stations around the country and averages more than 5,000 rescues a year.
Crochet’s medallion — his “check” — is number 407 on the wall. Ceallaigh has a tattoo of his surfman number, 545, on his hand.
“This is something that’s very, very important to me,” Ceallaigh said.
At the opening session of the Motor Lifeboat School, Ceallaigh read the Coast Guard’s Surfman’s Creed aloud.
“I will never unnecessarily jeopardize myself, my boat, or my crew, but will do so freely to rescue those in peril,” he said.
Ceallaigh told students they’d be required to memorize the creed before the four-week course was over. This year’s class was all male, but there are nearly a dozen female surfmen.
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Derek Samuelson, Trenton Campbell and Joshua Slaughter were the three trainees on Ceallaigh’s boat for the entire course. Six other trainees in the class were on two other boats with their instructors.
“Most of us are going to be pushing pretty close to four years when we get certified,” Samuelson said. “That’s almost a college degree worth of training in driving these boats.”
Graveyard of the Pacific
Most candidates come here first for a basic course, then to train in heavy weather, and then finally the most challenging of all, the surf class, intentionally scheduled when weather is expected to be the worst.
The area is known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, where the Columbia River spills into the Pacific Ocean at the border between Oregon and Washington.
Up to a million cubic feet of water can pour out of the river’s mouth every second, and run right into waves that have been moving across the Pacific for thousands of miles.
Jeff Smith is the curator of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which has a giant map illustrating how the mouth of the Columbia River has earned the ominous title.
There have been thousands of shipwrecks in the area over the centuries, with at least 700 lives lost. The skeletons of wrecked ships still litter some area beaches.
Training the surfmen
On day one, Ceallaigh and the other instructors took their students out onto the water. The students on Ceallaigh’s 47-foot U.S. Coast Guard motor lifeboat studied his every turn of the wheel and called out approaching swells.
“We expose them to a tremendous amount of surf conditions over four weeks, more so than they’d get over years in their own unit,” Ceallaigh said.
As he drove into ever-stormier seas on that first day of school, it was clear Ceallaigh would rather be at the helm of his lifeboat than just about anywhere else. But Ceallaigh was also deadly serious about teaching his students how to read every swell.
“This is super dynamic out here, waves shooting in every direction,” Ceallaigh said.
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When he couldn’t outrun a wave, Ceallaigh executed what may be the most important maneuver a lifeboat driver must master: squaring up.
Squaring up is pointing the bow of the boat directly into and through a breaking wave — sometimes a really big breaking wave. In those kinds of conditions, a boat could potentially end up being knocked down, “which is when the boat goes underneath the water, but re-rights in the same direction,” Ceallaigh explained.
For the next four weeks, the students took the helm each day, with Ceallaigh signaling approval when they did something right and correcting them when they didn’t. Students drove in every kind of condition and ran simulated missions, like pulling someone —in this case a dummy— out of the water.
Sometimes a real rescue mission can supplant the simulations, as when the boats were making one last training run on graduation day in 2023.
Graduation day
That day was also graduation day for the Coast Guard’s advanced rescue helicopter school. Rescue swimmer John Walton dropped into the water from a chopper and paddled furiously for the boat taking in water, in what Ceallaigh said was Walton’s first rescue.
“He was able to retrieve that individual off the Sandpiper right as that 30-foot-plus break rolled that boat multiple times,” Ceallaigh said.
The graduation ceremony for the nine surfmen who completed the course in 2024 was far more placid.
They didn’t all certify as surfmen that day; most had to wait to return to their home units for their commanding officer to give them the nod. But two of the nine —Dorian Casey and Trenton Campbell— got a surprise. Their commanding officers were in attendance, ready to bestow the honor then and there.
Campbell accepted hugs from his trainers and fellow classmates, then headed back to his base —Station Quillayute River, on the coast of Washington— ready to do what he joined the Coast Guard to do.
“We’re training for the opportunity to save a human life,” Campbell said. “It’s all the motivation you need.”
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McDonald’s beef patties test negative for E. coli in Colorado, Department of Agriculture says
Colorado has seemingly eliminated one ingredient as a cause for death and illness, as states continue to investigate the source of an E. coli outbreak involving the Quarter Pounder hamburger at dozens of McDonald’s locations. As a result, the Quarter Pounder will begin to return to certain locations.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture announced McDonald’s brand “fresh and frozen beef patties” tested negative for E. coli after its lab analyzed dozens of subsamples.
CDA says it has completed all beef testing and does not anticipate receiving further samples.
Meanwhile, the federal investigation into the deadly E. coli outbreak in Colorado has focused on ground beef patties and onions. There continues to be no evidence that onions grown in Colorado are linked to the outbreak.
According to McDonald’s, The 900 restaurants that historically received slivered onions from Taylor Farms’ Colorado Springs facility will resume sales of Quarter Pounders without slivered onions. Those restaurants are in Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming, as well as portions of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah. The restaurant chain also noted it has stopped getting onions from that facility indefinitely.
“The issue appears to be contained to a particular ingredient and geography, and we remain very confident that any contaminated product related to this outbreak has been removed from our supply chain and is out of all McDonald’s restaurants,” McDonald’s North American Chief Supply Chain Officer Cesar Piña said in a statement Sunday
Since the outbreak was first announced, CBS News Colorado confirmed one older man on the Western Slope died after consuming a Quarter Pounder from a McDonald’s location in the state. Initial information also confirmed more than two dozen people had become ill due to E. coli-affected Quarter Pounders.
Nationwide, this outbreak has sickened 75 people in more than a dozen states, but Colorado remains the only state impacted that has experienced a death due to it.
The Colorado Department of Public Health says there have been 26 cases reported in nine different Colorado counties, and they are located in several different parts of the state:
- Arapahoe County
- Chaffee County
- El Paso County
- Gunnison County
- Larimer County
- Mesa County
- Routt County
- Teller County
- Weld County
The illnesses were reported between the last days of September and through Oct. 11. An investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the outbreak is ongoing.
McDonald’s company leaders previously said they’ve taken Quarter Pounders off the menu in states where there have been outbreaks.
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Puerto Rico comments from speaker at Trump rally draw criticism while Harris’ plan for the island gets Bad Bunny endorsement
With nine days until Election Day, Puerto Rico has been thrust into the spotlight by both campaigns. Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled a plan to assist the island — leading to an endorsement from Bad Bunny — while Puerto Rico was referred to as “a floating island of garbage” by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who spoke at a rally for former President Donald Trump in New York City.
In an effort to court Puerto Rican voters in the U.S. mainland, Harris on Sunday posted a video on her social media platforms pledging to create a Puerto Rican task force to create jobs, cut red tape to ensure disaster recovery funds are used quickly and efficiently and work with leaders across the island to ensure Puerto Ricans have access to reliable and affordable electricity.
Rapper and singer Bad Bunny, a global superstar from Puerto Rico, shared the vice president’s video on his Instagram account with his 45 million followers and later posted a clipped portion of the video in which Harris slammed Trump for his response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017.
“I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and a competent leader,” Harris said in the video. “He abandoned the island, tried to block aid after back-to-back devastating hurricanes, and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults.”
In 2017, Trump visited the island to survey damage after Hurricane Maria struck as a major Category 4 storm. While visiting with survivors, the former president at one point threw paper towels into the crowd when distributing supplies, a move that was criticized as callous amid widespread frustration over the federal response to the hurricane that left much of the island without power and food.
A source close to Bad Bunny confirmed to CBS News that the Instagram post represents an endorsement of the vice president, breaking from Bad Bunny’s longstanding tradition to not weigh in on national politics. It’s a coveted endorsement with weight that both political parties have long hoped to achieve to strengthen inroads with Latino voters, given Bad Bunny’s global popularity.
Moments before Bad Bunny’s endorsement, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe targeted Puerto Rico during a set of disparaging jokes while speaking at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden.
“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Trump senior advisor Danielle Alvarez told CBS News, “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign” adding that the jokes were not reviewed or pre-approved.
Hinchcliffe’s remarks, which also included offensive jokes about Black people and Latinos, were met with swift backlash, with several celebrities coming out in defense of Puerto Rico, Latinos in the U.S. and voicing their support for Harris’ plan for the island. Among those who weighed in were Jennifer Lopez, Ariana DeBose and Ricky Martin. Martin, with over 18 million followers, took to Instagram and posted, “Puerto Rico, this is what they think of us, vote for Kamala Harris.”
Several Democratic and Republican politicians were also among those to denounce Hinchcliffe’s swing at Puerto Ricans, who make up a crucial voting group.
Harris’ running mate Gov. Tim Walz said during a livestream with Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “There are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans across battleground states. They need to vote.”
Ocasio-Cortez agreed with Walz and directed her comments toward Puerto Ricans in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. “If you’re in Reading, if you’re in Philly, look at that trash,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to Hinchcliffe’s joke. “What is trash is people actually just thinking of other human beings that way.”
Pennsylvania is home to over 579,000 eligible Latino voters with roughly 50% residing within the “222 Corridor” — a stretch of small cities west and north of Philadelphia including Reading, Allentown and Bethlehem.
With Trump winning the Keystone State in 2016 by 44,000 votes and Biden taking it by 81,000 in 2020, slim margins are again expected to determine the outcome of the presidential election.
Harris on Sunday spoke directly to Latino voters while visiting a local Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia. “When I was in the Senate, knowing Puerto Rico doesn’t have a senator, I always felt a need and an obligation to do what I could as a senator to make sure that Puerto Rico’s needs were met,” Harris said.
Harris campaign spokesperson Kevin Muñoz said Sunday in a statement, “A reminder: Pennsylvania is home to more than 1 million Latinos who are primarily of Puerto Rican backgrounds, and today, Vice President Harris campaigned in the heart of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community talking not just about her vision for the island, but how she will lower costs and create opportunity in their communities on the mainland.”
On Tuesday, Trump is expected to campaign in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Latinos make up 54% of the population, the majority being of Puerto Rican descent.
Republican Florida Senator Rick Scott, an ally of Trump’s, also denounced Hinchcliffe’s comments.
“This joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true,” Scott said. “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans! I’ve been to the island many times. It’s a beautiful place. Everyone should visit! I will always do whatever I can to help any Puerto Rican in Florida or on the island.”
Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar called the comments “racist.”
The island’s Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón, a Republican running for governor of the island, said the comments were “despicable, inappropriate and disgusting.”
and
contributed to this report.
McDonald’s beef patties test negative for E. coli in Colorado, Department of Agriculture says
10/27: CBS Weekend News – CBS News
Puerto Rico comments from speaker at Trump rally draw criticism while Harris’ plan for the island gets Bad Bunny endorsement
McDonald’s beef patties test negative for E. coli in Colorado, Department of Agriculture says
10/27: CBS Weekend News – CBS News