Take by storm: 'Wire Strike' delivers drama inside and outside the courtroom

“Wire Strike,” the title of Jerry Roehl’s debut novel, is filled with dramatic, compelling scenes inside and outside the courtroom.

Drama blankets the prologue. The character of Tim Bradbury, a flight nurse, is told that he’s got an assignment. He climbs onto a helicopter at University of New Mexico Hospital with the pilot and another flight nurse. They’re headed for Taos on an emergency call to pick up a cardiac patient. It is Super Bowl Sunday 1985.

Take by storm: 'Wire Strike' delivers drama inside and outside the courtroom

Tim thinks he hears a strange twitching sound in the helicopter’s turbine engine. It’s a sound he noticed ever since the same helicopter had collided with a high-power line near Moriarty a few months earlier.

The phrase “wire strike” refers to the collision of a helicopter with a power line.

Tim thinks maybe he shouldn’t worry about the sound, if the copter company’s head mechanic had recommended necessary repairs to the damaged turbine-pinion coupling. What Tim didn’t know was that the company’s owner had refused to pay for the repairs.

When the helicopter leaves Albuquerque en route to Taos’ Holy Cross Hospital, there’s a weather report of a slow-moving front approaching Taos. As they flew north past Santa Fe, snow began falling heavier and heavier.

Thirty-five minutes from Taos’ Holy Cross Hospital, the storm worsens.

It’s now blizzard conditions and the pilot can barely see past the snowflakes in front of the windshield.

Tim figured if he takes his mind off the weather he wouldn’t be so anxious. He thought of his fiancee, Sally, now pregnant with her first child. They plan to move up their wedding date.

Tim hears that annoying twitching again. The sound gets louder and louder.

“Sam (the pilot) was cursing at the front of the bird. They were now flying it about 50 feet off the ground and even then, they could barely see the lights on the ground.”

Minutes later, Sam yelled out, “Look at how low those power lines are.”

At that point, the lines were about 40 feet below the copter.

Then Sam turned the throttle on high, asking the copter to give him all of the power it had. It had none. The turbine uttered a semi-growl and began to lose altitude, “… the bird failed to clear the power lines and was too far committed to fly any lower.” Sam took the copter into a hard right turn. As he did, the turbine growled louder, followed by a grinding noise.

The copter continued to drop.

The scene ends. The pilot and the two flight nurses die in the helicopter’s crash.

The story shifts back to Albuquerque.

Sally hires civil litigation attorney Scott Clark to represent her in seeking damages from the helicopter’s owner-operator. Whatever funds she receives in the lawsuit will go to Tiffany, their child.

The novel carefully takes the reader through the steps Clark and lead defense attorney C.B. Lansley take in preparing for the trial in federal court.

Clark believes the owner-operator is liable for damages because he refused to pay to fix the turbine-pinion coupling after the helicopter’s flight back from Moriarty to Albuquerque several months before.

Lansley, however, claimed that no one was responsible for the Taos crash. Not the pilot, not the helicopter owner. The blizzard — an act of God — was to blame for the accident.

The novel portrays Lansley as a successful, arrogant attorney. He’s supremely confident he will easily win the case against the lesser experienced Clark.

A key point in the trial are photographs Clark shows the jury of the broken turbine-pinion coupling. The copter company’s chief mechanic took the photos the day after the Taos crash.

Lansley did not address the mechanic’s photos of the coupling. Instead, he relied on the National Transportation Safety Board’s photographs of the engine. The NTSB’s photos, taken a day after the mechanic’s, did not show the coupling, cracked or otherwise. It had apparently been removed from the copter.

Lansley endorsed the conclusion of the NTSB that the crash was caused by severe weather.

“I always thought it would be fun to write a book. As it turned out, it was. But it took a long time writing it,” said the 78-year-old Roehl, an attorney in Albuquerque for 53 years. “The hardest part was to continue to grind it out. There were times I didn’t feel I was making progress.”

Roehl said he thought the book as a work of fiction would be more enjoyable for the general reader. Otherwise, the story would be filled with legalese “that is sort of boring … It becomes very technical. And I wanted this book to be something that everyone could enjoy, not just lawyers,” he said.

“Wire Strike” is based on an actual case of a helicopter crash near Taos in which Roehl was the plaintiff’s lead attorney.

Roehl is thinking of writing a second book. It would also draw on a case of another helicopter crash.