No One
Formed: 2000
From:
Chicago,
IL,
United States
Last Known Status: Disbanded
No One Interviews and Features
Below are our features and interviews with No One.
Feature
No One At The Helm
The fog descends quickly on the Cal-Sag, and the barges loom as ghosts.
It’s not supposed to happen this way. The sixteen-mile Calumet-Saganashkee Channel, an industrial canal providing one of several links between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River system, is a narrow thread of murky water snaking through Chicago’s Southside, and when dusk falls and the fog comes creeping, might as well be a smoke-filled gun barrel.
The tugboats are supposed to pull their monstrous loads to the side, lash up, and wait the conditions out. For the Cal-Sag is also a public waterway, and in the summertime, a popular lane for pleasure craft.
The barges are not lit. They move with utter stealth, as brooding, pacing, unstoppable giants. When fully loaded, they sit low enough in the water to reveal the running lights of the erstwhile tug at the rear of the convoy. When empty, the whole outfit is virtually invisible.
An advancing black wall, blended into the night.
Just before 11:00 PM on Friday, June 20, 2014, witnesses near the Worth boat launch heard screams piercing the thick soupy blanket of mist, followed by an awful crunch. Then silence.
The Coast Guard watch in Milwaukee soon received a call from a tug, UTV BILL ARNOLD, reporting a collision. Search and rescue crews were dispatched via boat and helicopter. The chopper proved effectively useless against the lingering fog.
An overturned and horribly mangled 19-foot inboard was eventually discovered. It had been nearing the launch when it collided with one of the BILL ARNOLD’s six empty barges.
Dive teams from the nearby Palos Hills and Lockport Fire Departments, using side-scan sonar, began searching for its missing occupants. The Palos Hills and Worth Police Departments assisted from shore. The two departments quickly linked the wrecked vessel’s identification to that of an unclaimed vehicle in the launch lot. Two other vehicles remained nearby.
Chicago resident and heavy metal musician Rob Rizza approached the launch with trepidation.
He’d been at a nearby bar, having passed on the opportunity to join a close friend for an evening on the water. Now, facing a solemn garrison of police barriers and flashing lights, cordoning off a mission fast shifting from rescue to grim recovery, he knew.
Because of the fog.
Two bodies were recovered from the Cal-Sag the next afternoon. A woman in her late thirties and a man in his early thirties. No life jackets. Drowned, with multiple blunt-force traumatic injuries. Likely they had been passengers.
The boat’s owner, whose vehicle still waited in the launch lot, remained unaccounted for.
