POWERGRAMS

12 SAFETY W hen Gardendale Line Crew Foreman Robert Hollis was bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico 7 miles from shore next to a capsized fishing boat, he didn't have a fear of sharks. "I was thinking about swallowing too much water to think about sharks," he quipped. So did the man floating next to him. "People asked me if y'all were worried about sharks. I was worried about drowning," said retired Gardendale Line Crew Foreman Danny Marbu. But different people respond differently when tragedy is looming. "I prayed if I made it back to my family to never leave them," said Hollis' son, Chris, who works in the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Operations Center. "Even though never leaving them again is impossible, it did put a lot of things in perspective in my life." The drama began Memorial Day 2015 with a deep-sea fishing trip six friends took; five of whom were current or retired Alabama Power employees. Jerry Gober, a retired Materials coordinator, reserved a 28-foot, center-console Sailfish from Legacy Boating Club at Zeke's Landing Marina on Coon Bayou in Orange Beach. They were forced to take a half-day trip that Saturday since someone had rented the boat for the aernoon. "The camaraderie was beer than the fishing that day," Chris recalled. "We were looking forward to Sunday when we would have enough time to travel the full 30 miles offshore to fishing beds over sunken military tanks." Instead, they went out about 15 miles and got in what fishing they could. As they made their way in, the back of the boat got clobbered by a big wave, which is nothing unusual in the Gulf. "It knocked some people loose from where they were standing," said Jason Perkins, a lead lineman at 12th Street Headquarters in Birmingham. What they didn't know was something else got knocked loose: two inspection plates, where the engines are aached, which allowed water to flow into the hull of the boat. Marbu immediately noticed the engines sat lower in the water than normal. "I said to myself, 'We're gonna be in trouble.'" "We idled the boat aer the wave hit," Perkins said. "When everybody was back in place, we took back off. But the boat wouldn't come up on plane." "A lot of water started pooling in the rear of the boat," Chris recalled. Perkins said the bilge pumps weren't successful, so he and Chris started bailing, while the engines sank lower and lower in the water. Their bailing couldn't keep up with the water inflow. Gober, meanwhile, was calling the boat club owner on his cellphone. "I said, 'We're 4 miles south of the (Perdido) Pass and sinking. Send help.' He asked what were our coordinates. Just as I was about to tell him the boat rolled over that quickly." A quick-thinking Marbu grabbed life jackets and everyone jumped in the water less than 3 minutes aer the big wave hit. The younger Hollis concedes he was overcome with fear "for a brief moment" but had motivation to dismiss it and get going on a solution. "I knew we had to react fast to bring everyone together because we would be safer working as a team to survive." Then he noticed his dad and Marbu driing away. "Both were struggling and barely staying above the water," Chris said. "I had one of those lile orange life jackets, and I weigh 230 pounds. It wasn't holding up very well," his dad recalled. "I was bobbing up and down out there. It was prey rough seas. I panicked. I wasn't real calm. I was swallowing water." Marbu felt assured someone would stumble Marine Police photographer captured the scene from a helicopter.

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