Last-chance lubrication: The topmost, “gravity,” tank can cool the engine for a few minutes at most. The lower, “reserve” (or “storage”) tank is useless in an emergency. Without oil, the engine stops, and the ship lies helpless.
The ocean is so vast, deep, and complex—so infinitely varied in the way its black canyons and pulsing life, its currents and dolphins, rages and calms, moon and weather, all interplay—that no mariner can afford to go to sea while thinking about or trying to fathom such scale and infinite roil. It’s just too big. He or she deals with the unknown inherent in the marine environment by focusing on what can be measured and understood, weighed and manipulated. She or he cuts down the infinity of sea to a smaller, digital view, of ship and crew, task and routine, coffee, food, and cabin; confident in the great likelihood that discipline, tradition, and the sheer scale and strength of a ship such as this will see her safely to harbor.
The wind, though still northerly, has yet more east to it now; blowing probably twenty-five or thirty, gusting to forty. The swells, northerly earlier, are also starting to swing east a bit but El Faro, on her new course of 150 degrees, a little east of south for the channel behind San Salvador, still drives mostly perpendicular to the long ranks of dark rising water. The waves are more than ten feet high, long ridges increasingly driven by the southwest spin of Joaquin approximately 120 miles to the northeast; they are barely visible in the night except for where a porthole’s glint touches froth whipped up by wind or wake or the smash of a wave collapsing, but the wind is starting to draw out the crests into streaks of foam that run like thin groping claws down the combers’ flanks. Ten- to fifteen-foot waves are nothing to a ship this size—as Davidson says, she used to plow through twenty-footers on a routine journey between Tacoma and Anchorage—but waves are not reducible to their official height. They are not, in fact, waves in the sense we imagine them, as serried crests marching like soldiers from horizon to horizon, but rather a heaving of the sea itself, rubbed harshly by wind into humps that rise in a roll of trillions of individual molecules of water, salt, weed, plankton, and amino acids that shift on the vertical, describing a circle that brings them back to the same place, but which shoves at the next stretch of water so that the action itself, the humping up of water, continues in a forward surge of unfurling liquid, a tumbling rhythm of great might—a single storm wave, by some calculations, carries 1.7 megawatts of potential power in its every square meter.I
The varying rhythms of waves, tuned by the strength, direction, and duration of wind, not to mention the area and topography of the ocean they inhabit, can interfere with each other, causing rips and cross seas. Or they can join forces as two oscillations of water, period shrinking to nothing and amplitude rising commensurately, almost double in height to create a rogue wave. The general rule is that one in a hundred waves will be a third higher than the average of higher waves, and one in a thousand will be double the size; thus even now, if the waves average thirteen feet, El Faro will occasionally be riding nineteen-footers, and twenty-six-footers more rarely.
The waves’ rhythm can determine how a vessel will move as it navigates a rough ocean. For container ships, with their relatively high center of gravity—and specifically, container ships heading perpendicularly into or away from the watery ridges—the interval between waves can matter a lot.
A ship moves in six different ways: pitch, as bow and stern alternately lift; the sideways roll; “yaw,” as her direction changes port to starboard and back. “Surge” is a longitudinal movement of the entire vessel; “heave” is the vertical equivalent, and “sway” is a bodily movement sideways. For a ship heading perpendicularly into or away from a wave field the most important motion would probably be pitch, but if the waves’ period, the space between them, is equal to the ship’s length, and if the ship is traveling at more or less the same speed as the waves’ motion, and if the waves are big enough, she can start to roll with great violence. That’s because the waves curling from aft give her stern a shove at the same time as her bow plunges into the next crest forward (or vice versa); the ship’s two extremities being shaped very differently, they react differently to the two humps of water, and that difference twists the hull and causes it to roll hard to one side. Such movement, unless heading and/or speed are changed, can become self-sustaining and self-aggravating to the point of peril. This is known as a synchronous roll.
The ship’s motion can also be affected by parametric roll; basically, a bad tuning between the vessel’s roll period (the time she takes to roll to one side and back) and the rate of encounter with swells; if the period of encounter corresponds exactly to the vessel’s roll period, and she’s traveling at the same speed, the roll can also deepen.
El Faro, right now, moves easily enough. Despite his earlier concern Frank Hamm has cut down worry to the scale of his CDs and likely stashes them carefully in a drawer, or in a box he stows in his closet or under the bunk.
In the galley Lashawn Rivera, Ted Quammie, and assistant steward Lonnie Jordan have put the last of dinner’s dishes in the industrial washer. To prepare for heavy weather—they have been warned several times now, by Davidson, by the mates—they must already have triple-checked that everything loose, including the sauces Davidson particularly worries about, has been stowed; that the lockers holding china and pans are closed and latched tight. They have prepared the usual “night lunch”—sandwich rolls, cheese, roast beef, sliced turkey, mayo, lettuce, tomatoes, and the like—for the crew on watch, maybe less copious than usual so the chow won’t overflow serving trays if the ship rolls hard. The night crew can take more food if they need it from a fridge in the mess. The coffee urn is strapped down. The stewards can’t be sure what the weather will be like tomorrow, but they know the crew will want breakfast, and the galley staff will have pancake batter and scrambled-egg mix ready to go, covered and sealed in the galley fridge.
Back in his cabin Rivera makes sure to put extra towels under a deckhead that always leaks when it rains. As a native Floridian he knows full well that hurricanes, even if they don’t hit you directly, will bring rain, crazy amounts of it. As most mariners do, he has pictures of his family, his girlfriend and son and two daughters. Maybe he gives them a longer look than usual, utters another silent prayer for his people and himself as he makes sure nothing important lies within range of the leak, and that the breakable items in his cabin are as well secured as those in his galley.
Jackie Jones, as a day man, is quite possibly still up; in the crew’s mess maybe, playing dominoes with Carey Hatch or shooting the shit with his cousin James Porter; most likely of all, with this crew of family men all doing their own thing, he’s in his cabin, tending a Crock-Pot of beans and rice, playing video-football games, or watching DVDs of classic Super Bowls, and videos of his sons throwing passes.
Assuming Larry Davis took Randolph’s advice, he is fast asleep, storing up energy for the midnight-to-four watch. Davis is a veteran, not just of the merchant marine but of commercial fishing boats as well, and knowing what rough water is like he will have taken out the bulky orange life jackets stored in his closet with his Gumby suit and wedged them against the bulkhead on one side of his mattress. By narrowing the bunk’s width to that of his own body he ensures that he won’t roll around as the ship moves. If she rolls too hard your body will rattle like popcorn in a hot pan, and you won’t sleep, and sleep is precious at sea. Right now the motion isn’t so bad and anyway, to a sailor, the rock and pitch of a moving ship, like servosystems’ noise to an astronaut, can feel comforting, reassuring. With the rattle and creak of joinery and machines, it says the ship’s world is doing what it’s supposed to do, moving fast and consistently in the direction of shelter.
At the heart of El Faro’s world, however, some of the quantum details that must stay in order, lined up within the spectrum and parameters of safety to work right, instead are starting to skew—to pass from the known quadrant of tolerance, the okay strains and foot-pounds, to the unfathomed, the quantum possibilities of breakdown.
Here’s one example: the gasket between lid and lip in one of the scuttles on 2nd Deck, those hatchways leading from the cargo sections on 2nd to the watertight holds below. It could be that the serial wash of hydrocarbons onto the scuttle, and the ongoing scission or wastage that derives from it, has cut one chain of silicon molecules too many or eroded a wider patch of synthetic rubber on this particular gasket, which has created a tiny void in the seal. Hardly a big problem, or not at first. Except that this deck, though covered, is open to the elements through those fifteen wide ports on each side of the ship, several as big as a car or pickup truck. As soon as the waves reach a certain height they wash through the ports across the decks; and because of the dearth of bulkheads on this deck, they have more room to run. The trailers slow them down inboard, but the scuttles are all set at the deck’s outer edge, an area that, except for the occasional vent housing protruding from the side shell, is as open as it gets in a cargo hold. In heavy weather big waves will find the scuttle, smash against the coaming, build up against a nearby vent housing, and submerge the hatch; they will blast into any void or pocket in the gasket and exert strong pressure there, widening the pocket. In a big enough void this pressure can grow fierce and repetitive enough to shift the dogging mechanism, especially if that mechanism has not been fully engaged—it can even move the bolts themselves, if they’re already worn, just enough so that they barely touch the coaming lip. When that happens, a strong wave jetting against the damaged hatch is enough to flip it open.
And maybe, much deeper in the ship’s structure, beside one of the longitudinal stringers that reinforce the section between ribs 134 and 135—the spot where a section of hull (subsequently named 2A-hold) was inserted between 2- and 3-holds when El Faro was lengthened in 1993—in one of the plates of the hull at that point, here, too, a void has formed. Molecules of steel, their crystalline structure perhaps uneven to begin with because of a faulty weld, have been subjected to repeated and uneven stress. Possibly a crack has branched outward from that void. The crack is tiny, undetectable; it’s not even big enough—assuming it’s within, or affects, a hull join—to allow water through. But it weakens the metal and in an environment of increasing stress, weakness must feed on weakness. This is a classic example of chaos theory, a branch of complexity studies that seeks to understand situations in which a near-infinite, and infinitely complicated, number of elements and physical relationships too small to see or analyze—elements that normally work together within a certain framework and rhythm—start to collapse under stress, one grain of dysfunction weakening the structure and pulse of the next, making it easier for the grain neighboring it in time and space to break or malfunction in turn. When and how the exponentially growing cascade of breakdowns reaches a tipping point at which the whole structure fails, given the endless number of variables, is impossible to determine except in calculations of probability.
But however the math of chaos works, breakdown has started. The waves and wind are building relentlessly, water spraying then sloshing then cascading onto 2nd Deck as the ship pitches and rolls, harder and harder. And deep down the hull moves; a hull is a living thing, it flexes and twists, which is right and desirable as long as the welds are healthy. But if there is a flaw, the hull’s torque in heavy weather weakens it further.
2
It should not happen this way.
Because of the Jones Act, which has had a whipsaw effect on American maritime transportation by protecting the coastal US market for American shipowners while also forcing them to build their vessels in expensive stateside yards, El Faro is one of many older ships in service between American ports. Yet she was also well built in that Pennsylvania shipyard—more steel, her crewmen tell each other, heavier steel even than in her sister ship, the El Morro.
US construction and maintenance regulations are among the toughest in the world, another reason El Faro should not suffer the harm she courts; except that she, and other ships of her class, have slipped through loopholes in the laws. The difficulty and cost of maintaining ships beyond their shelf life, or so owners affirm, demands relief in the form of less stringent regulations, and in 1995 they lobbied for and won an exemption in the rules for older ships. It’s called the Alternate Compliance Program, or ACP, and under this regime older vessels are not required to update some of their safety features to current standards. Another loophole superannuated vessels can take advantage of, separately from the ACP, lies in the Coast Guard’s authority to exempt such ships from safety upgrades unless they undergo a “major conversion.” The exact definition of this term became very relevant in 2006, when El Faro was converted from a pure roll-on, roll-off freighter to a Ro-Con, a mixed-container and Ro-Ro ship. The conversion included structural changes to Main Deck and effectively lowered the vessel’s freeboard—the vertical footage between waterline and top watertight deck—by two feet.
The changes were not insignificant. A high load of containers is apt to make a ship—even if she stays within the stability requirements set by regulatory authorities—more top-heavy than a roll-on, roll-off configuration that keeps her cargo below decks. This was the chief factor cited by Jack Hearn, who commanded El Faro when she was a pure Ro-Ro in Alaskan waters, to explain why the vessel became more list-prone after her conversion. Lowering the freeboard also means more water will come aboard in rough seas. But the Coast Guard, on appeal by Tote, went back on its decision and ruled the 2006 changes “minor.” This was the about-face that allowed Tote to keep running El Faro with antiquated lifeboats.
The ACP loophole has further consequences. Thanks to this program, much of the inspection of lifeboats and other features of the ship is now carried out by an independent “classification society” instead of by the Coast Guard. These societies are nonprofit organizations that collect fees for carrying out inspections. This builds a conflict of interest into its operation, since the inspection outfit will have an institutional prejudice against being too hard on a given fleet, so as not to annoy a shipowner to the point where he will switch to another society, thus depriving the first of fees. The classification society can examine ships by the standard of an “equivalent level of safety” to government rules, a benchmark that has left room for interpretation.
The classification society Tote hires is one of the biggest, the American Bureau of Shipping. It also turns out that ABS has been seriously remiss in inspecting El Faro and her sister ships. For example, the society did not advise pressure-testing El Faro’s boiler tubes while the ship was operating, despite their obvious and ongoing problems. And when El Yunque was examined by Coast Guard inspectors following El Faro’s accident, her twenty-two watertight fire dampers and vents were found in many cases to be rusted through or seized up or missing gaskets, and inoperable. The Coast Guard concluded El Faro suffered from the same deficiencies on her last voyage, an assumption clearly corroborated by one AB’s comment on the voyage data recorder: “Vent’s rusted fucking solid, man!”
One reason for the vents’ poor condition is that they have been left permanently open because closing them has never been necessary in the kind of placid weather El Faro usually experiences on the Puerto Rico run. Why they were left open to begin with is due to a regulatory inconsistency: the ship’s “certificate of inspection” allowing her to sail requires that the vents be kept open to disperse gasoline vapors from the cars below deck. Yet the same rules allow El Faro to be loaded deeper on the assumption that closed vents will prevent flooding of the hull in a storm.
After El Faro’s accident ABS will recommend repairs to El Yunque, which will supposedly be carried out before the ship is reassigned to the Alaska route, but a diligent Coast Guard inspector examining the ship in Puget Sound will find that her vents still exhibit “longstanding uncorrected wastage”; Tote will promptly send El Yunque to the junkyard. After El Faro’s last voyage, other ships sailing under the ACP will be inspected; three will be found in such poor condition that they have to be scrapped, two others will be banned from sailing without repairs, and several others exhibit “significant deficiencies,” according to the Coast Guard. One maritime expert, Captain William Doherty of Nexus Consulting Group, says of the ACP, “What they have done over the past twenty years is lower the bar. Their definition of seaworthy gets lower and lower because the ships are getting older and older.”
In 2016, 10 percent of ACP ships were prohibited from sailing by the feds. And all this happened under rules set up after the Marine Electric disaster, which were supposed to make it impossible for vessels with rusted-out working parts to venture seaward at all.
Following what will happen to El Faro, the ACP program as a whole will be judged “not effective” by the NTSB.
3
Shortly before midnight on September 30, Randolph and Davis appear on the bridge to relieve Riehm and Jackson. Riehm shows Randolph a new band of rain and clouds on the radar, then leads her to the back section of the bridge, to the chart table, closing the curtain behind them. Together they look at the ship’s current track, course, and projected stroll around San Salvador Island in relation to the latest forecast, which shows Joaquin bearing down in roughly the direction of that island, though still with that twenty-five-mile error allowing a thin belief they could squeak past. And Randolph starts laughing uncontrollably.
“We would have been better off staying on our old track line,” she says.
“It’s gonna be a party in a few hours,” Jackson tells Davis.
“I know,” Davis agrees. “I just seen a little TV.” (El Faro is at the outer limits of TV broadcast range from South Florida stations; reception will shortly fail.)
The two mates are still leaning over the chart, probably touching the paper as they point out different positions, a finger on Joaquin’s predicted track, another on the ship’s course. “Here you are at zero-four-hundred [October 1],” Riehm says. “All right, so this is twenty-five miles.”
“So you think that’s gonna happen at two?” Randolph asks.
“That’s what I just said.”
“About two hours.”
“Gettin’ my flashlight—life saver—my Gumby suit out,” Jackson tells Davis.
Davis worries about his TV set. “It ain’t tied down or nothin’—but I gotta feelin’ it’s gonna bite the dust.”
“At oh two hundred,” Riehm suggests, “you could head south.”
“This is the second time we’ve changed our route,” Randolph comments, referring to their dip around San Salvador, “and it [just] keeps comin’ for us.”
“Well, anyway,” Jackson says, heading for the stairs, “we’re the only idiots out here.” And like any competent seaman handing off the watch, he repeats the course to his replacement: “One fifty.”
Riehm and Randolph earlier talked about the third mate’s idea, that apparently he will not let go of despite Davidson’s stubborn adherence to plan, to escape down the route behind San Salvador, running a southward gauntlet between the shallows near Crooked and Acklins Islands on one side, Rum Cay and Long Island on the other, to finally rejoin the Old Bahama Channel off Cuba.
Now Randolph fixates on this idea as well. “I was looking at the chart,” she explains to the AB at twenty minutes to one, “we can try to connect with the Old Bahamas Channel if we, I don’t know . . . go due south. . . . We wouldn’t have to worry about it until two o’clock. Our tentative position—our dead reckoning for zero-two-hundred gets us in a good angle, in a good spot that we can alter course south to one eight six, and that course line . . . keeps us five miles away from any kind of shallow area, which is . . . not a lot of wiggle room, but right now where we’re going, we don’t have much wriggle room right now. We got land . . . coming up on either side of us.”
The ship, following the course Davidson and Shultz set out earlier, is now running into the narrow slot of deep water between San Salvador Island, Cat Island, and Rum Cay.
Randolph must take a breath after that long and, so it feels, passionate explanation; yet Joaquin and its perceived obsession with pursuing El Faro has prompted doubts again. “Unless . . . this damn storm goes further south. Can’t win. Every time we come further south the storm keeps trying to follow us.”
“It ain’t gonna do nothin’ but sit down here, growin’ up. Keeps getting stronger and stronger,” Davis agrees.
“Now we’re gonna hit it at four o’clock in the morning.”
“What’s he thinking?” Davis asks rhetorically, about Michael Davidson. “Jack said he had his survival suit ready to go,” he adds, and Randolph chuckles.
One reflex Randolph has in order to deal with tough situations is to laugh. The other is to make coffee, and she does so now. The sound of a coffee grinder takes over the bridge.
“I don’t know if he can sleep, knowing all this,” Randolph says later of the captain. She yawns, adding, “I slept pretty good last night until nine o’clock. I guess that’s when my ZzzQuil wears out. It’s just like, Bing! I’m awake.” She chuckles, and adds, “They were doin’ that work”; she’s referring to the riding gang. “Bangin’ around.”
“Yeah.”
“So I put in my earplugs,” Randolph continues “. . . tossed and turned for a little bit, and fell back to sleep. . . . Earplugs—ZzzQuil. That ZzzQuil knocks me out. I love it.”
Later, Coast Guard investigators will focus on fatigue as a factor in what happens to El Faro. The frenetic pace of loading, in particular for the third mate who has to be on his feet all day in Jacksonville and then take the first navigating watch till midnight, has to be exhausting. Randolph’s usual watch-standing routine is four hours on, eight off, but at sea she is expected to put in an extra couple of hours doing inspection and maintenance chores after her midnight-to-four shift. This works out to six hours on and six off.
International regulations specify a minimum period of rest, for mariners as for air crews, but the inspectors will find serial flouting of these rules on Tote’s Puerto Rico run, as well as deficient keeping of records intended to document and enforce rest periods.II That being said, what constitutes sufficient rest for watch-standing officers at sea—when even a four-hour-on, eight-off routine, not counting time needed for eating or personal chores during break, plays hell with normal biorhythms—is a tricky question. Were consistent and sufficient rest periods enforced consistently, it would still be hard to find an officer to swear he has never stood watch when sleepy or exhausted. That a former chief mate on El Faro was discovered at least thrice to be sleeping on watch and was not reported by the captain possibly speaks to two issues: first, Davidson’s lenient treatment of rule-breaking crew; and second, an empathy, however misplaced, for the stress and fatigue involved in watch-keeping routines, especially for navigating officers. The chief mate, for example, works at least twelve hours unloading and loading cargo; the third works a twelve-hour cargo shift, followed by his four-hour bridge watch; and Randolph has confessed to a Maine Maritime friend that, working under Davidson, she is forced to put in twelve-hour shifts on a regular basis. “She couldn’t stand it,” her roommate testified. “. . . She was always exhausted and tired.”III
One should also bear in mind that, while Davidson is the single officer who appears to get sufficient snooze-time during El Faro’s final voyage, judging by the VDR record he’s also the only navigating officer impervious to the clear peril the ship invites by running so close to a major storm. Meanwhile his mates, Riehm and Randolph, neither of whom benefits from the long stretches of rest Davidson enjoys, display “situational awareness”: they are alert, cautious, and clued in to what’s going on.
This brings up another issue: Why do Riehm and Randolph not challenge Davidson on a question that objectively threatens the safety of every man and woman aboard? Again, the tradition of a captain’s inviolable authority is a sound one, especially in emergency situations, its importance attested to by the severity of punishments reserved for those who infringe it. To defy an order from your superior at sea defines you as a mutineer who, in time of war, would be shot; in the merchant marine you probably won’t get shot, but your career will end.
Yet a precedent exists for opposing a captain’s decision that is considered clearly wrongheaded or dangerous by his junior officers. Merchant marine academies, with their federal funding and strong Navy connection, drill uniformed cadets on the parade ground, encourage enlistment in the naval reserves, and pound into students’ heads the duty to unquestioningly obey orders from a superior.IV It seems likely that for Randolph at least—less so for Riehm, who did not attend an academy—the habit of obedience slammed into her by military-service parents as well as by Maine Maritime prevents the second mate from kicking up the kind of fuss that would at least get Davidson out of bed to deal with her. While the US Navy Code does not condone disobedience on grounds that an action ordered by an officer is perceived as dangerous, it is generally accepted that on commercial ships a mate has the right, not to mutiny, but to disagree with a superior’s order and officially note his or her objection in the ship’s log—before obeying the order anyway.V Such behavior, of course, would have knock-on effects in terms of corporate evaluation, promotion, and overall reputation, and maybe this is where the fatigue factor truly comes into play, because it takes not only great self-confidence but a boatload of energy to butt heads with your commanding officer—especially one who is in bed, rested, and apparently quite convinced of the rightness of his actions.
* * *
El Faro’s motion quieted down to some extent as she approached the channel between Rum Cay and San Salvador. Now she starts to roll and pitch harder. Randolph and Davis sip coffee, watching the radar screens as ghost shadows of land slide by on either side, keeping a close eye on the next waypoint that will swing them around the western arc of San Salvador and back into the Atlantic. One of them turns on the Sirius XM satellite radio. The brash banter of an advertisement fills the bridge, followed by a news bulletin. She, or he, turns up the volume. The announcer speaks of Joaquin. “ . . . Category Three storm . . . expected to pass near the Bahamas before heading toward the East Coast of the US.”
“Oh my God,” Randolph says, “. . . now it’s a Category Three.”
“A hundred and thirty-five miles an hour?” Davis says of the wind speed.
“I have it to a hundred and twenty.”
“Biggest one since I’ve been up here.”
“We’re right between the islands—so-o-o. Wonder why we’re rolling?” Randolph laughs.
“This is fixin’ to get interesting.”
“Mista-a-ake,” Randolph drawls, “yes.” Then, a few minutes later: “I’m gonna give the captain a call and see if he wants to come up and look at it.” She rings Davidson. And waits, phone pressed to her ear. And waits. Finally, Davidson answers.
“We’ll be meeting the storm,” she tells the captain. “. . . It’s up to Category Three.” She then suggests the Crooked Island escape route. “Alter course straight south and then we’ll go through all these shallow areas . . . umm . . . and the next course change gonna be through the Bahamas and then just gonna turn.”
A short pause as the captain replies.
“Okay, thank you,” Randolph says finally, and hangs up the receiver. She turns toward Davis.
“He said to run it. Hold on to your ass, Larry.”
And Randolph laughs.
“So we’re gonna stay on this course?” Davis asks.
“Yeah. The one you see programmed on the radar.”
El Faro is now at the waypoint, after passing San Salvador, at which she is supposed to turn toward the ocean again. Together Randolph and Davis go through the routine of course change, a swerve eastward from 150 to 116 degrees. It’s what professional mariners do, take care of ship’s business no matter what their thoughts or opinions, fears or doubts.
But these few minutes—as Davis turns the wheel leftward, to port, steering El Faro onto her next programmed course and then setting the autopilot for that heading; as Randolph watches the radar picture change, San Salvador the pivot point of the ship’s swerve to east-southeast—mark a passing of the last chance El Faro and her crew have to escape the increasingly powerful, grasping talons of the hurricane advancing on them from the northeast. With the San Salvador feint over, and the one feasible escape route, to the south, finally nixed by Captain Davidson, ship and crew are returning to the track line that brings them back into the domain of storm. Into a trap—of space, for El Faro is reducing, instead of increasing, the distance between her and the storm; of time also, for starting now the effects of the hurricane will only grow until, quite soon, wind and waves will be so powerful that the ship will have no option but to confront them as best she can, in whichever direction causes least harm, because any other direction could sink her. And then the ship will no longer be running the storm, she will have been taken into the hurricane. Escape will no longer be an option, and her only chance for survival will be to ride it out and hope to come out the other end alive.
“Things are fixin’ to change here,” Davis comments as the ship turns onto her new course. “Here we go . . . a little rougher.”
“One-one-six,” Randolph reminds him.
“Wind heel,” Davis announces, shifting his weight as El Faro, coming out of the shelter of San Salvador, shoved by the wind now blowing against her port side, her high wall of containers, leans to starboard. “Yea-a-ah.”
“You can hear it,” Randolph says, looking at the radar screen. “Rain squall comin’ up.”
At 1:33 a.m. the engine rpm dial shows a drop in speed. The ship meets a big wave, staggers. A loud clunk sounds on the bridge wing. “Not too bad,” Randolph jokes. “I can stand up straight.”
Flashes of light briefly light up the clouds dead ahead of the ship. Joaquin’s collection of secondary storms, their lightning and thunder, vortices and rain, is within sight. Randolph asks Davis if he wants more coffee. The ship seems to stumble again.
“Whoa, that was a good one,” Randolph says. “Definitely lost some speed.”
“Damn sure don’t wanna lose the plant.”
“Nah,” Randolph agrees.
“Do a lot of things,” Davis adds, “but you don’t wanna do that.”
More clunks. Some damage is starting to happen. The waves are suddenly a lot bigger; in the light of the forward range light they can see a swell crash over the ship’s Main Deck, water “breaking green” in a muscle of dark motion topped by froths of foam over the railings. The ship’s speed falls again, to sixteen knots. The wind, still mostly from the north, is picking up significantly, Randolph remarks. At 2:47 a.m. she adds, “We’re pretty much committed now.”
“Figured the captain would be up here,” Davis says.
“I thought so, too. I’m surprised.”
“He’ll play hero tomorrow.”
Randolph laughs, then something else breaks.
“Oh!” Davis exclaims.
“Shit, oh, shit,” Randolph groans.
“That was a big wave.”
“She won’t be able to take more of those.”
The waves—no surprise here—keep building; they’re probably approaching fifteen feet much of the time, coming at the ship’s left rear, her port quarter. El Faro may be starting some parametric or synchronous rolling, the period of waves front and back accentuating her rolls port and starboard, but if so she breaks out of it serially and never gets into the self-fueling, lethally increasing cycle of bad rolls characterizing that condition.
In any case the ship reacts gamely, pitching and rolling yet moving steadily forward. “I had to sit down for that one,” Randolph comments, laughing; then the helm alarm goes off. The ringing signals a wave has knocked this 790-foot ship more than three degrees off a course the autopilot is trying to hold. There’s another sound, of something coming loose outside the bridge, and inside, an ashtray, a water bottle, go flying.
Randolph mimics the voice of Scooby-Doo, the dog who is first in his team of ghost-busting cartoon detectives to spot trouble and get the hell out:
“Rhut-row,” the second mate says.
“Yeah, it’s startin’ good,” Davis agrees.
And Randolph greets the hurricane: “Hello, Joaquin!” she says.
4
Thus in the early hours of October 1 the navigating officers of El Faro are split, mostly between their own doubts as to the wisdom of playing footsy with a hurricane, and the stubborn confidence displayed by their captain that this storm will stick to its predicted track—will hew to timetable as well and by dawn have spun off north and west of El Faro’s track, allowing her to be flicked out of Joaquin’s swirl of winds in the southwest quadrant like a kid slung by centrifugal force off the edge of a merry-go-round.
But Joaquin seems to have no such doubts. Later evaluation of the hurricane’s track shows it continues to resist wind shear and is therefore steadily following the upper-level flow of Atlantic air currents from the northeast, trundling southwest in the direction of the lower Bahamas so single-mindedly as to appear to be driven by its own internal scheme.
The storm has been moving in one direction long enough now that forecasters (other than the European, who were onto it from the start) are starting to catch on. The NWS predictions thirty-six hours out were wrong by a wide margin: this was the early forecast on the twenty-ninth that was 180 miles too far north and sixty knots too low. By the night of September 30 the error had shrunk to twenty-five miles, with wind speed five knots too low. But the predicted direction, twelve and even eighteen hours before, turns out to be about right and is reflected in the NWS and BVS packages El Faro is receiving. With the 4:00 a.m. watch change on October 1, therefore, her officers and ABs poring over weather charts can visualize the vast, circling, blood-hued wound that is the hurricane staining thousands of square miles of Atlantic only slightly north and east of their intended course; they can eyeball the increasingly turgid bands of rain that mark Joaquin’s outskirts, and gauge the narrowing gauntlet between island chain and storm their captain reckons they can safely run.
What they cannot visualize, for none of the people on watch have gone through a full hurricane before, is the raw power of this storm. By now Joaquin, as a Category 3, spins sustained winds of 100 knots, or 115 mph, and gusts far stronger. The huge thirst of this system, the driving force of heat at its core, evaporation at the bottom, condensation on top, the circular plunge of everything the Atlantic—the whole northern hemisphere, it feels like—can gather together into this vast swirling system, this climatic engine gone berserk, continues to intensify: still sucking ever more fuel into itself from beneath by its bulimic consumption of fuel on top, Joaquin’s tearing dearth of pressure generates yet more vacuum from the superheated water it rides.
It is worth remembering that the Central American deity Hurakan, who gave his name to this type of weather, used flood and storm to utterly clear the world of human beings.
An average hurricane, through the energy generated by its changes of state, from water through heat to vapor and back again; by the kinetic force of the resulting winds, over the course of its life unleashes power equivalent to that released by ten thousand to five hundred thousand nuclear bombs. Gauged another way, every day it puts out energy equal to over two hundred times the total electrical power the planet can generate in twenty-four hours. But those numbers are impossible to imagine fully, the gap in understanding is like that between the bad shock you’d get from grounding a car battery, versus being fried to overcooked bacon by the world’s entire voltage. You’re extrapolating Hiroshima from a kitchen fire. “Duck and cover” is a joke, “Kiss your ass good-bye” is all anyone can say trying to imagine such power, shrugging in defeat. The reality is something else—it even looks evil from afar, a towering country of wraithlike clouds reaching well in advance of the storm, a superheated humidity that enfolds you like a sweaty sumo wrestler; then a darkness that takes over the world and rain comes down, hiding the monstrous thunderheads now taking over the sky; a few drops, sheets of it, finally a vertical flood. Lightning sears every which way from the tumbling vapor. And the wind starts up, low rush at first, the 1–10 scale of volume ratcheting up to 11, to a keen, a howl, a million screaming ghouls busting through your ears, your skin, into your very nerves; strong enough to make you fly or slice you in half with the junk it blows around.
Joaquin is all of that, and within its eyewall—the vertical circle of clouds surrounding the storm’s center—as if dissatisfied with this single engine of impossible power, minihurricanes form. The process here is similar to the collision of Coriolis winds that spin a hurricane at its inception; the difference in speed between winds around the outer and inner cores spins smaller vortices that, in a process akin to the larger storm’s, pull warm air upward even faster than through the eye—hot towers they’re called, or heat elevators, zooming a thousand floors up the express bank to condensation—and what this looks like to a person in the middle, at sea, is waves higher than houses, and combined waves twice that size, each tall and wide enough to smash and destroy a village; wind that carves off their tops and hurls the water in what feels like white sheets of salty razor a hundred yards long, at speeds that will turn a truck into an airplane.
But no one is near Joaquin’s center yet. No one in his or her right mind wants to be anywhere close.
5
Not much communication is happening between engine room and bridge, now or at most other times. It’s not clear if some personal tension between captain and chief engineer has a role in this, or if the relative silence is just a function of the usual semi-joking professional rivalry between deck and engine departments. Davidson is not on the bridge when the engine slows at 2:15 a.m. for no discernible reason, but the mate in charge, Randolph, doesn’t call down to ask what’s up, even though reliable operation of the engine, as she and Davis note, is crucial to the ship’s safety in a storm. It can be assumed, and the bridge officers clearly so assume, that the engineer on watch will call the bridge if anything unusual occurs. The senior third engineer, Mike Holland, and the oiler on duty, Joe Hargrove, came on watch at midnight, and one of the first things they’d have done once the changeover was finished, and once they had checked the control console and noted everything in the log, would have been to swap out the fuel strainers again to make sure any sediment stirred up in the tanks by rough waves would not be sucked into the burners. The burner throats are bad enough, they don’t need any clogged fuel lines on the fire side to complicate things further. And God knows what plaques of rust or clouds of sediment from bunker barge or pipelines lurk in the various fuel tanks and are being knocked off by the sloshing of fuel; all would clog the engine’s arteries absent those strainers. Now with filters swapped the bunker flows golden and sweet through the pumps, past the glass bull’s-eye inspection port. The lubricating oil, too, is clean. That system is closed, so there is no need to swap oil filters frequently; the gauges measuring the oil’s flow around different parts of the system, inflow and outflow, show no difference in pressure readings that might indicate a problem.
As for the readings in the minds of the third engineer and the oiler, these must be pegged to the “so far, so good” level. The same is likely true of Chief Pusatere, who has certainly been present, making sure everything works right for the coming watch, which is bound to be rough. So most likely has the other licensed chief, Mathias, who, while charged only with oversight of the riding gang and the retrofit of El Faro for Alaska, is far too experienced and committed an engineer to not leave his cabin and come below to help when the going gets a little hairy. Hell, most of the engine-room gang has probably been down, possibly because sleep is getting harder and harder to come by, even if wedged into your bunk with life jackets. Mitch Kuflik, the third in charge of showing the ropes to the greenhorn, Meklin, would be on duty by choice; and Meklin no doubt feels some excitement, if not heightened concern, radiating like a mild fever from the older men as they walk up and down and around the deep confines of their workplace, holding on to rails and support stanchions for balance, keeping an eye on the wonky hangers across which some steam pipes run; listening harder through the noise. The quality of noise itself is always a tool for diagnosis, and there’s more of it than usual now. Although the engine room is insulated from outside, both by the sound of its own machinery, which takes up auditory wavelengths the storm uses also, as well as by its location, which is largely under the waterline, the ship’s more violent movement as she moves into ever-higher waves boosts the overall sound level as stressed joints and pipes increasingly complain and squeak.
The boom of water slamming against the side shell fills holds forward of the engine room, and those sounds echo in the palace of cargo areas and come through the watertight doors between 3-hold and the engine room, which are pegged open, even in rough weather, to keep a draft going, to help cool the machinery spaces. Should Dylan Meklin, for example, peer forward through those doors he would get a loud dose of echo from the bang of waves as well as the creak of trailers and cars rocking on their springs to the pitch. He’ll also find it a little spooky—the minimal lighting conjures memories of every clichéd movie murder committed in a half-lit underground parking garage; and the massive, serried ribs and girders of the ship’s structure, visible down the narrow corridor between trailers and side shell, twist ever so slightly as El Faro rides over a swell, the vertical beams forward all leaning one degree to port in relation to the ones aft, then reversing that movement, as the ship rides the swell; like a snake sliding over a stick, as Conrad once described it.
Of course no one in the engine room can physically see the waves, but because it’s night and the air is filled with wind-driven spray, nobody on the bridge can either, except when the ship plows bodily into the side of a wave and black-green ocean bleeds briefly under the port light and raises spume against the containers, or when foam smashes in a million gallons of phosphorescence against the ship’s side. The bridge is high, totally enclosed, and fairly quiet despite the wind; the officers’ cabins are well insulated, and even if the navigating officers could see, this is no yacht small enough that everything is perceptible to everyone, rhythm of engine, sea state, wave sound, and wind-feel all up close and personal. The bridge staff are attuned to the ship’s motion, but lacking visuals they cannot describe the sea to the engineering crew, and no one is correlating the relative size of waves to the shimmy of the ship as she moves.
If they were, they might be wondering why El Faro moves as energetically as she does; rolling, as Randolph remarked, even when she is between two islands that should be sheltering her from rougher seas.
6
El Faro now holds close to her course of 116 degrees. She’s heading for an ocean waypoint from which she can resume her track to San Juan—except that the swells are suddenly high enough to make steering by autopilot clumsy, and Randolph and Davis have adjusted course somewhat, from 116 to 114 degrees; and, when a particularly large wave bangs in, to 110. As is typical at this stage of and proximity to a hurricane, the wind, still out of the northeast, is starting to whine, mutter, shriek at times on the lower registers of the banshee opera. The ship’s movement is suddently harsher, the twist of her hull tangible to everyone, to the men in the engine room’s deepest level; to Lashawn Rivera and Jackie Jones, now wedged into their bunks on the unlicensed-personnel deck, four flights up from Main Deck, three down from the bridge.
If some divine observer, some Poseidon with a nightscope, could see El Faro now, he would observe a shape massively long and dark, the edges of which are defined by the ghost-pale crash of waves smashing at her bow and from behind and to the side, faint spray blasting off the rows of containers, the white, green, and red shine of her navigation lights arcing slowly but considerably up and down, left and right; blurred pinpoints of yellow from the lounge windows on mess deck, from a cabin on the deck above where one of the crew lies sleepless; pinkish glow of bridge windows high up; occasional shine of lightning on metal enameled by rain and blasting wind and more spume from the ranks of rearing waves.
Her speed has come down further. From 3:45 a.m. on, this ship that can move at twenty-two knots, that desperately needs power to escape the storm, will never go faster than eleven or twelve. As she moves she wobbles a bit, causing the helm alarm to ring again on the bridge; lifting to one swell, aft first with port side surging higher, starboard thus lower as well, and water washing solid through the starboard side-shell openings on 2nd Deck, bathing the trailers lashed there. The wind blasts from the north and east and, with the ship running a little south of east, heaps more water against her port side. Then the stern dips down and the swell now lifts her bow and she leans to port, but not as much due to the ongoing shove of wind from that direction. Because of the wind, when she rolls back to starboard, she sags perceptibly deeper on that side. At reduced speed she’s still slugging it out, gamely crushing into the backs of storm waves, and overall this Poseidon-type, assuming he’s a mariner, would not find much amiss, except perhaps her heading: a big ship moving strong, confidently steered into darkness.
But disaster, and we have seen signs of this already, starts as small as it gets, and as El Faro edges back into the Atlantic, what starts to kill her most likely begins on 2nd Deck, at those big openings through which the avid ocean slurps. The ports are fifteen-odd feet above the waterline, two feet closer to the sea than they were before the ship’s “minor” conversion. The waves still average between ten and fifteen but the foaming commotion they make when hitting the ship drives them higher; those higher than average reach eighteen, even twenty feet, tall enough to reach the ports when the ship is level. When she rolls, bringing ports on the lower side close to the waves, even average swells can smash in bodily, pouring and white-watering on 2nd Deck to a depth of four or five feet.
Given the pressure of the strengthening northeast wind, the roll to starboard must now be consistently deeper, and the slices of solid North Atlantic water wash that much fatter through the starboard ports. Black and monstrous in the sparse neon, glinting evil, the waves crash against the chained trailers, make surf against the steel baffles and half bulkheads built on 2nd Deck to shelter the many vents against seas that normally wash in, then wash out again via the same ports they came in through; the waves don’t care, they come back, outflank the bulkheads and throw themselves bodily against more trailers and curl against the scuttles leading down to 3rd Deck; roar hard and strong as if shot through a fire hose, swirl in grins of froth around the lashings, slop into the angle between the hull’s starboard side and a vent housing where the scuttle leading to 3-hold is located, deepening and churning there against the scuttle’s coaming, deflecting upward: the jetting water will hit any void where rubber rotted, peeling away the rest of the gasket with power strong enough to move a car, which the waves most likely are starting to do as well—and now that gap, that chink between gasket and lip, is wide enough that hundreds of foot-pounds of pressure are pushing through it against the scuttle’s lid.
Or it could be that the hatch was not dogged to begin with; given the frenetic rhythm of loading work, and the amount of maintenance the day crew have to do on this old ship, and the fatigue the ABs working overtime experience, who the hell knows for sure if they remembered to dog down that particular scuttle or just assumed they had?
Which wave doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter what the original conditions were, which added ounce of pressure was needed to edge the bolt that extra millimeter or jet between lid and gasket lip; what molecule was first or last to break the gasket’s synthetic chain. If the hatch was undogged to begin with, it happens more directly. But one last, big comber coming aboard finally does it, this one: crashing upward against the hatch cover’s edge and popping the cover like a church key prying off the cap of a beer bottle—slamming it up, over, and back.
Now water from each wave coming through the ports pours down the open scuttle into the dark booming cave system of 3rd Deck. Cascades of warm salt water, thick with foam and the occasional sea-nettle jellyfish, gush down every time a wave surges into the deck above; thinning to a stream, spray, or fan of drips as the ship rolls away, till the next wave comes aboard and rushes in turn down the open wound in El Faro’s gut.
The water now in 3-hold roils around the trailers there, rocking them hard. Following the basic rules of gravity, it finds the open ramps and companionways from 3-hold to the lowest deck, the Tank Top.
It has no visible effect at first. Seawater sloshes back and forth with the ship’s motion on 3rd and Tank Top Decks, a great, broad puddle of ebony liquid, laced with salty drool, reflecting the lights; becoming, as the sea continues surging down scuttle ramps and hatchways, a deepening and sloshy pond. The waves outside grow taller yet, easily fourteen feet high on average now with occasional twenty-footers. The flow becomes more consistent and eventually a near-steady pour of ocean invades the vessel’s lowest level. And no one is around to see, watch standers are either high up on the bridge or standing at the engine-room console, while everyone else is sleeping or at least resting in his or her cabin or the lounge.
El Faro is barely wounded. A hatch three feet in diameter, above the waterline, in a ship almost eight hundred feet long and ninety broad, is no big deal in normal circumstances. But the water accumulates steadily at the ship’s lowest level, in the depths of 3rd and Tank Top Decks. Now free-surface effect starts to come into play because the liquid, washing in the direction the ship rolls—this was taken into account in calculations for bunker fuel sloshing around the fuel tanks, but not for this—adds weight to the downhill side, making the roll worse by that amount of tonnage. Which is cause enough for concern if the ship is rolling evenly back and forth, but when the ship rolls deeper and more often to one side, then the ship will start to lean more in that direction, and the weight of accumulated water there will make it harder for her to roll back, and water from the next roll will also run to the lower side. On the bridge El Faro’s officers are keeping her heading as close to 116 degrees as possible, with the wind well on her port side, so the hull is rolling ever harder, deeper, to starboard.
It’s impossible to know for sure if the scuttle’s opening will be the chief contributing factor to what is going to happen. The total continuous flow of water through a hatch three feet in diameter is enormous, but there’s no way of ascertaining how often or consistently waves cover the hatch, at least at first.VI The time is 3:45 a.m., and on the bridge Randolph and Davis are getting ready to switch watches with Shultz and Hamm. The slosh of water in the ship’s belly has not affected her movement or balance enough for her crew, whose vestibular systems are fully occupied keeping their bodies upright, to notice; feet splayed on the wheelhouse deck against pitch and roll, hands grasping the engine console’s railing, the crew tend to the usual duties of their station.
7
Shultz and Hamm get to the bridge at a quarter to four to relieve Randolph and Davis. The second mate tells Shultz they’ve adjusted course again to make steering easier through the swells. She cracks a joke about “crawling” to her cabin, and leaves.
The helm alarm rings again, but Davis reassures Shultz, “She’ll come back. She did that a couple of times because, uh, she pitched so bad. When you get, uh, the good slams and the good pitches she might lose it a little bit but overall she’s been holdin’ good, knock on wood.”
Shultz stares out the bridge windows at the invisible storm. One of the windows has a clear-view screen, a rotating disc of glass that keeps rain off by centrifugal force, but it is useless against the night, the volume of water. “It’s hard to tell which way the wind’s blowin’, huh?” he comments. “I assume we’re heeling to starboard because the wind must be blowing port to starboard.”
Davis wishes his relief “a good one,” and disappears down the companionway.
“Don’t like this,” Shultz says, almost to himself.
“What’s the gusts out there?” Hamm asks. “I don’t have any idea,” Shultz says, “we don’t have any instrument that can measure it.”
One deck below, sitting at the public computer terminal in the ship’s office, Danielle Randolph taps out an email to her mother, Laurie Bobillot: “Not sure if you’ve been following the weather at all, but there is a hurricane out here and we are heading straight into it. Winds are super bad and seas are not great.” Then the normally undemonstrative second mate types the sign-off that will strike panic in her mother’s heart: “Love to everyone.”
Captain Davidson must be awake in his stateroom, sitting at his own computer; emails from the ship’s other workstations collect in a file on that computer and don’t get shunted to the Inmarsat satellite transmitter until he clicks on the “send” icon. While they sit in his terminal, the captain could theoretically read or delete crew emails at will, and some family members will later voice suspicion that the captain read and censored messages voicing doubts about his decisions; their relatives or spouses say the crew usually send several a day, but not on this trip. No evidence exists to prove this one way or another. Davidson clicks the send icon now. Still at the workstation he downloads the BVS forecast package that came in at 11:00 p.m. the previous evening. It’s an enhancement of the same forecast, on the SAT-C terminal, that Riehm told Davidson about, but given Davidson’s reliance on the BVS version it’s surprising that he has waited so long to download it.
Then Davidson climbs to the bridge. It is 4:09 a.m.
“There’s nothing bad about this ride,” he tells Shultz and Hamm cheerfully, and adds that he’s been “sleepin’ like a baby.”
Others aren’t sleeping that well, Shultz remarks.
“Well, this is every day in Alaska, this is what it’s like . . . a typical winter day in Alaska.”
Silence for a while on the bridge. Everyone is leaning, compensating now for the ship’s tilt to starboard. The windows are utterly blank with night and rain and spray. The mate states the obvious, which is that the wind’s on the port side, and Davidson says, “The only way to do a counter on this heel is to fill the portside ramp tank up. Heel is not so bad.” He adds, “Oh, it’s howlin’ out there,” and the chief mate says the wind should come around to hit the starboard side later, which is what the forecast implies could occur once the storm has passed as its lower arc of counterclockwise wind swipes from north and west of El Faro. Davidson agrees.
A 4:15 the engine revolutions slow. Davidson calls down to the engine room. Second Engineer Schoenly, who has just come on watch, picks up. “How you guys doin’ down there?” Davidson asks, and Schoenly explains that he’s doing the usual on his watch, blowing tubes, which accounts for the drop in speed.VII
The barometer stands at 970 millibars at 4:24. At Joaquin’s center, according to weather reports, the pressure is around 950. “It’s gonna go down before it goes up,” Shultz says. But Davidson is still convinced they are already on the back side of the storm. “We won’t be going through the eye,” he comments at one point, and a few minutes later, “From here it’s all downhill as far as the low.”
Now Davidson says to the mate, “Sounds a lot worse up here than in the cabin,” but it sounds more as if he’s musing to himself. “Right now we’re poundin’ a little bit because we’re goin’ more easterly . . . gotta let her get up to speed, get a little more toward our course . . . need the rpms.”
He decides to check on the galley and disappears down the companionway. Two minutes later the bridge telephone rings. Shultz answers. It’s one of the engineers, probably Schoenly, with news that a container on 2nd Deck has come loose from its lashings and is leaning over. “I’ll pass it on to the captain,” the chief mate says, adding that Davidson is in the galley.
Two minutes later the telephone rings again.
“Bridge, Chief Mate.”
It’s the chief engineer. He wants to talk to the captain.
Shultz listens for a while, then says, “I understand you.” He hangs up and calls down to the galley. “Captain—Chief Mate. The chief engineer just called, and they called back again, something about the list and oil levels.”
Davidson comes straight up to the bridge, calls the engine room; he listens, then hangs up.
“The chief wants to take the list off,” he tells Shultz, “so let’s put it in hand steering.”
“Mr. Hamm,” Shultz says, and maybe he’s making a joking alliteration, and maybe he’s taking refuge from worry, as is not uncommon, in the formality of address he’s been taught in the academy, “go into hand.”
And Frank Hamm, whose height is on a par with his girth, flicks the switch that turns off the Iron Mike, hunches over the small metal wheel set low on the forward console of El Faro’s bridge, takes a solid grip on the wheel with his large fists—maybe looks automatically at the windows in front of him, the clear-view spinning, wipers swiping uselessly back and forth as the wind drives rain at them in a smush of twisting drafts and vortices and water—and finally looks lower, in front of the wheel, at the glowing compass and gyroscope dials that tell him in which direction to steer.
8
Even if someone was aware of the busted scuttle and looking at it on 2nd Deck, in the swirl and froth of waves coming in, washing out, it would be hard to tell how much is pouring into the lower decks. But it’s sure that by now tons of water must have come in, and thanks to free-surface motion, the ensuing list is bad enough that it’s having an effect in the engine room.
Conceivably, the scuttle is not the only culprit in the flooding. Trouble continues to occur in the way chain reactions and accidents happen, through a complicated system in which every part, to some extent, is reliant for its efficient functioning on every other, so that one initial fault puts extra strain on the next, which because of the strain fails in turn, starting a chain of breakdowns that exponentially increases in speed and scope—and so it might be that the list itself is the final stressor that causes the crack in hull plates to creep that extra nanometer, that almost infinitely small subunit of analogue change. For a ship is built to ride, on average, on an even keel; if listing to one side, the bow’s curve will capture more waves under that side, which will push the front part of the ship sideways, exerting uneven force down the hull’s length. This is never a problem when the stress is regularly relieved as a ship rolls the other way. But if she doesn’t, and if the waves are big, the strain can damage an already wounded hull. It might be that two corners of plate between 2A- and 3-holds, right at the turn of bilge, the curve where the ship’s vertical side meets her horizontal bottom, were incompletely welded in a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard in 1993. Since then fatigue would have weakened them to the extent that they are held together at this point by a scant nanometer of steel. When that nanometer lets go, the plates start to separate, only a millimeter or two at first; but through that void the sea streams in.
Another actor in this theater of dysfunction is the cargo. Already, according to one engineer, who likely saw it happening through a porthole in his stateroom, a container has busted partly free of its lashings, whether twist-locks or rod-and-chain tie-downs or both.
Some of the trailers on 2nd and 3rd Decks are off-button, and the lashing manual specifies that, if stored off-button, they be secured by six rod-chain lashings to whatever’s available; however, the kind of pounding El Faro is starting to experience, plus the constant and egregious stress on port lashings as the list to starboard pulls trailers the other way, inevitably loosens the tie-downs. With more play and bigger waves the heavier off-button trailers start to slide. They are brought up short by their lashings, but forty thousand pounds of trailer busting on a chain rated only to twenty-six thousand will create intolerable “shock load,” and a link inevitably will snap, and this will increase stress on other chains till the trailer breaks entirely free on one end or both and slams into the trailer it’s moored beside, initiating a similar sequence there.
The same is true of the cars, mostly loaded on the Tank Top Deck, many of which are not individually secured but are instead fastened to those long chains running across the ship, port and starboard; in this case there might be more play for cars to work against, especially as the waves reduce the tires’ grip on the wet deck. And if a central chain should break, a number of cars would be set free at the same time, skidding around together in a nightmare version of crack the whip.
The density of trailers parked on a fully loaded ship means that they cannot move far individually, cannot pile on weight to one side of the ship the way the free-surface effect works with a liquid. The same is true of cars. Automobiles might have a different effect, however, in the lowest part of the ship, starboard and aft on Tank Top Deck, where the main inlet pipe for the firefighting system rises out of the seabox; the latter being the manifold through which El Faro lets in seawater from outside the hull to quench flames or draw ballast. The inlet pipe is partially shielded by a protective bracket made of six-inch-diameter piping, but the possibility exists that a loose car, weighing a ton and a half, will gain enough momentum to break through the protective steel and bust the pipe; and if that happens, pressurized seawater will pour into El Faro’s hold at a volume sufficient to explain by itself how the ship takes on so much water so fast.
If this is what happens, the flow rate of seawater from the firefighting pipe will be greater than the bilge pumps’ ability to gush it back into the ocean.
9
Schoenly and his oiler, Thomas, have been checking the lubrication system as a matter of routine, and, to begin with, the oil pressures were okay with no loss of lubricant or anything else to report.
Then the alarm sounded at the control console, piercingly loud to catch everyone’s attention amid the machinery noise. Most likely it keeps sounding, sporadically, and a light flashes also next to the lubricating-oil-pump pressure gauges. Low-suction pressure on the inlet side, low-discharge pressure at the outlet, trouble by any other name would look and sound this way.
It’s not consistent, and for now the interval between the low-pressure events triggering the alarms must be long enough that the primary pump can regain suction and bring the pressure back up quickly, thus avoiding the automatic trip that brings the second pump into operation, let alone more dramatic emergency moves to cope with the problem.
Probably a small crowd is in the engine room by this time. Griffin, the first engineer, told his wife in an earlier email that he would be up all night because of heavy weather. Schoenly and Shawn Thomas are on watch; the chief, Richard Pusatere, is not the sort of officer to let his subordinates take care of problems when they’re apt to occur, as in a storm; the same is true of Jeff Mathias, the other licensed chief aboard.
Thomas and Schoenly might be assigned to keep an eye on the rest of the plant, but Pusatere, Mathias, and Griffin will be taking inventory of all the gauges to make sure they’ve pinned down the problem. The oil-temperature alarms at turbine and bearings have not been set off. One of the officers certainly moves fast to the lower level to look at the screw pump itself, but it, too, appears to be working well, at least when there’s enough oil. Nothing sweats from the seal, no discernible leaks plague the system, so the most likely culprit, the engineers agree, is the one they blamed initially: this list to starboard.
That’s when Pusatere gets on the phone to the bridge to tell the captain the list is affecting his oil levels.
The pumps have not been opened up in a long time, and even the engineers probably don’t know by heart the exact specs of this lubricating system—how the intake, an eight-inch steel pipe with a flared mouth, hangs ten inches above, and twenty-two inches to starboard of, the V-shaped bottom of the reduction-gear sump. They wouldn’t know by rote but could look up the amount of lube oil currently in the system: 1,225 gallons, which corresponds to a depth of oil in the sump of 24.6 inches. This theoretically means the pipe’s suction end plunges 14.6 inches below the surface of the oil, more than sufficient depth for normal uptake.
But a serious, chronic list will reduce that depth by spreading oil to the port or starboard sides of the sump, shallowing its depth near the center. Possibly, if the list is severe enough, consistent enough, especially when combined with a lot of roll and pitch, the oil level will shallow sufficiently for the pipe no longer to touch the liquid. The pipe’s end will pull out of the oil and the pump will suck dry, if only for a while, creating air bubbles that reduce or even gag off the flow of oil to turbine and gears.
A former chief on El Faro will testify that he normally keeps the oil level between twenty-nine and thirty-two inches, and higher for rough weather. The sump can hold 2,020 gallons, which works out to a thirty-three-inch level, enough to ensure suction at any conceivable degree of tilt. Because El Faro carries only 1,225 gallons this trip, the oil level in the sump lies well below that mark.
Everyone in the engine room knows what actions to take if oil pressure suddenly falls. The flow of oil must be brought back to normal levels, and if not enough oil is in the sump to maintain suction, the sole remedy is to add oil from the gravity-fed storage tank inside the boiler casing at Main Deck level. From that height a head of pressure will drive spare oil directly to the sump. The gravity tank holds sufficient oil to maintain lubrication for those two-to-ten minutes of respite. And likely this is what the engineers do now, bleeding enough extra oil into the system for the pump to suck normally again, sufficient to restore regular flow and quiet the alarms.
These men are used to little crises in the engine room, especially old engine rooms; they happen often enough. They are trained to think in terms of engine systems, all of whose unitary parts depend on smooth functioning of the other parts, and they are aware of what can happen if one part fails. Especially under Pusatere’s regime they have gone through numerous drills; they instinctively follow the engineer’s rule of rushing to “the last thing you touched, the last alarm you heard” in an emergency; they know in their bones how the chain reaction works, moving at scary speed from a small fail to a minor malfunction to a malfunction that slows or stops the plant. In this case, if the oil pumps fail, and they can’t fix the problem, they’ll have those two to ten minutes of grace while the gravity-tank oil bathes turbine, gears, and bearings on its own.VIII But that oil won’t come close to filling up the sump and when it’s gone, as one former chief puts it, “You’re shit out of luck.” The throttle, whose valve itself is held open by oil pressure, will close automatically when the pressure drops. The turbines will slow and stop to save the spinning blades, the precise gears and shafts, from melting down. The engine room will grow quiet. The propeller will slow, and still. And El Faro, eventually, will come to a stop as well.
Last-chance lubrication: The topmost, “gravity,” tank can cool the engine for a few minutes at most. The lower, “reserve” (or “storage”) tank is useless in an emergency. Without oil, the engine stops, and the ship lies helpless.
The danger to a ship if the plant fails in a hurricane is something no one who goes to sea for a living needs to analyze or think much about. Their job is to keep the plant working, and they will do everything in their power to achieve that end.
10
Davidson decides to head the ship into the wind and tells the helmsman to change course accordingly. Looking forward into the blackness, lacking the visual information he needs, a captain tries to get a feel for where the wind and waves are coming from by sensing how the ship moves beneath his feet. If she’s rolling and being thrown mostly rightward, the wind and waves are coming mostly from the left and that starboard list continues. If they bring the ship around so the wind now comes from the other side—in this case, from starboard, from the right—the list should switch to the port side, which won’t solve the problem either. As far as Davidson knows, the list causing the oil problems is due only to the “sail effect” of wind, which has been screeching from the port side of their regular course, against the hull’s side and the containers stacked on Main Deck. If he can get the ship to head straight into the wind, she would only be pitching, bow up, stern down, and vice-versa; the wind would blow from dead ahead, the list should vanish.
“Just the list,” he tells the chief mate. “The sumps are actin’ up, to be expected.” Davidson then directs his attention back to Frank Hamm, at the wheel. Keeping the ship on one heading in heavy seas is tricky enough with visual information or an anemometer to tell you where the weather’s coming from; doing so at night entirely by feel requires constant adjustments. “Just steer that heading right there the best you can,” he tells Hamm and Shultz. “That’ll work for us.”
“Okay, steer zero six five,” the chief mate says. The wind, as far as they can tell on the bridge, has continued veering easterly and is now coming more or less out of the northeast.
“Zero six five,” Hamm repeats—and a few seconds later, as a big wave hits: “Wo-o-o.”
“Now swingin’ right pretty fast,” Shultz says.
Hamm is working hard at the wheel. The position is awkward, he is standing at the bridge console, bending over the wheel while keeping his head lifted to watch the compass or gyroscope. He is probably sweating in the iffy air-conditioning and despite the stream of air coming from the fan.
It might also be that, as the one person on El Faro in semidirect contact with the sea’s forces, through the wheel’s turn, even though mediated by hydraulics to the rudder; by feeling through muscles of arm and shoulder and stomach just how hard it is for her to hold course, how tortured her movements are, Frank Hamm more than anyone aboard right now is conscious of the true might of the waves, the power of this wind the ship is fighting. More than anyone else he may understand in his gut the extent of murder Joaquin holds in its heart, how great is the danger they all face.
The captain does his best to make Hamm’s job easier and relieve the helmsman’s tension. Though Davidson only occasionally puts his hand to the ship’s wheel, he directs Hamm and is thus somewhat conscious of the level of storm and the state of his ship within the storm; and the relationship between the two men will only grow tighter, more intense, as El Faro moves deeper into the hurricane’s embrace.
“Take your time and relax,” Davidson says now, “don’t worry about it. Stand up straight and relax.” “I’m relaxed, Captain,” Hamm replies, which doesn’t convince the skipper, who repeats, “Relax—steer the direction we’re goin’.”
Later the officers will fetch Hamm a chair to ease his back, get him a cup of coffee as he wrestles the wheel.
The barometer is still dropping: it now reads 960 millibars.
Hamm and Davidson adjust the course toward where the wind seems to be coming from now: fifty degrees, almost due northeast.
Someone relays a message: a trailer has busted its lashings and is leaning over on 2nd Deck.
Jeff Mathias shows up on the bridge at 5:10 a.m. “Things are slappin’ around,” he says, “down on Second Deck.”
“There’s not much to see,” Davidson says. “You know that’s our biggest enemy. We have no visibility, ya know. Generally try to steer in the direction we need to go.”
“Yeah,” Mathias agrees. “I’ve never seen it list like this—you gotta be takin’ more than a container stack. I’ve never seen it hang like this.”
The Coast Guard will later conclude that El Faro must by now have been filling with water for some time, and possibly in more than one hold. The extra purchase afforded the wind by high container stacks also plays into how officers perceive the problem, since the ship didn’t carry containers in Alaska, and thus they might in their minds exaggerate what percentage of list can be ascribed to wind, versus what could be the result of other factors.
Davidson’s rough weather experience, the NTSB will later note, has been largely confined to deep-riding tankers or Ro-Ro freighters, which are less affected by wind heel than container ships. Otherwise he might be aware that, even on a container ship, a sixty- to eighty-knot wind blowing against the ship’s side will only lean the vessel over by eight degrees or so—and El Faro does not have the wind on her beam, which means that the sail effect should be a lot less, implying in turn that something else is affecting stability. This possible overemphasis on wind effect informs the captain’s next comment.
“Yeah, you got a lot of sail area,” he says.
“It’s like whiteout out there,” Mathias remarks, looking at the windows.
“Yeah, just all this spray and rain, you get lightning,” Davidson says, and a few minutes later to Hamm: “Put your rudder left ten, we’re gonna steer up into it a little bit more.” Right now they are still steering fifty degrees.
The ship’s barometer now reads 950 millibars. Pressure at Joaquin’s center at that hour stands at 948, only two millibars lower. This indicates the ship is now close to the eye of the storm.
“We’re on the back side of it . . . only gonna get better from here,” Davidson says to Mathias, still clinging to his notion that the hurricane is doing what the forecasts predicted, sliding out of range northwest of El Faro. The extent to which the captain repeats himself on this subject and others: on the similarity between these storm waves and normal conditions in Alaska, on getting permission from Tote to take the Old Bahama Channel north; must in part be a function of the responsibility he feels to keep the crew informed of his decisions and reassured as to their good sense.
But it also seems like the behavior of someone torn between what he hopes will happen and what he fears will occur—trying to believe that Joaquin is indeed moving away, that the vessel is fine even in these conditions; that his preparations will suffice to avert the End of Days.
Shultz is watching the inclinometer, a simple device, similar to a curved carpenter’s level, that hangs above the bridge windows. “Yeah, eighteen-degree list on,” he remarks.
“Waitin’ for that wind to shift,” Davidson says. If the wind shifts to the west, it will indicate that El Faro has finally punched her way south of the hurricane—
At 5:43 the bridge telephone rings.
“Bridge, Captain.” Davidson listens for a few minutes: “We got a pro-o-o-blem . . . . Three-hold? . . . Okay. I’ll send the mate down.
“Watch your step,” he tells Shultz. “Go down to three-hold. Probably just water . . .”
“Suspected leak?” Shultz says.
“I would tend to concur.”
“. . . ’specially the scuttle.”
It’s the first acknowledgment by anyone on the bridge that El Faro’s list is not due only to wind pushing against the containers, tilting the ship; that the sea is somehow getting into her hull and sapping her stability. When the bridge telephone rings again, Shultz picks it up; the engineers are getting the bilge pumps running to pull water out of 3-hold.
The captain takes the phone and suggests transferring water from the starboard ballast tank to the port, to help compensate for the list.
Then Shultz picks up a walkie-talkie and goes below to check.
11
The ballast and bilge-pump system is nowhere near the oil pumps. It’s located on the engine room’s lowest level, all the way forward, against the bulkhead separating machinery from 3-hold. Apart from the pumps themselves—man-size metal insects with suckers poking in different directions—it’s a bewildering puzzle of manifolds, junctions, and valves, painted in different colors; when some valves are closed off and others opened, the pumps will move water from port ramp tank to starboard ramp tank (or the other way around) or will suck it from the ship’s bilges and shoot it out of an outlet in the hull’s side. The oiler, Shawn Thomas, knows the system well and most of the time does this kind of work alone; given the urgency now, one of the officers, maybe the senior third engineer, Holland, whose standard responsibilities include tanks and ballast, comes along to help.
Though the VDR gives no indication, it’s near certain someone took a gander through one of the two watertight doors between the engine room and the aft section of 3-hold that are normally hooked open to allow cooler air in; this is why one of the engineers would be first to discover the water in the hold. He would have shut and dogged the door immediately. The temperature in the engine room would have started creeping upward at once.
The bilge pump’s job is straightforward: pull water from the lowest part of El Faro, between the bottom plates and the ballast, fuel, and fructose tanks, and through the rose boxes—big steel colanders, located at the bottom of metal wells, that filter out the kind of junk that accumulates in bilges. The water then flows through the pump and out the discharge pipe to the ocean. In this ship, as in others of her age, the rose boxes tend to clog with rust from all the steel decaying around, but this time apparently the bilge pump draws fine and hundreds of gallons a minute are pulled from 3-hold and dumped back into the Atlantic. Now the engineers, sweating, open the valve on the suction pipe leading from the starboard ramp tank; they crack the discharge valve on the pipe leading to the port tank, and the pump whines, sucking water from starboard to port, right to left, transferring weight from downhill to uphill, which must help correct the list.
At the control console a lube-oil pressure alarm sounds again. The chief engineer picks up the telephone and calls the bridge. He and the captain both know that, even if the pumps can gain on the water in 3-hold, and even if shifting weight to the port ramp tank helps in the long run, they have no “long run” right now, both processes will take time, and the way the oil pumps are acting they don’t have time to wait; something must be done now to get rid of the list that causes the pump to suck air.
Pusatere listens intently as Davidson says, “Okay—what I’m gonna do—I’m gonna turn the ship and get the wind . . . on the starboard side, give us a port list, and, um, see if we’ll have a better look at it.” “It” means the scuttle, but both men also realize that during the time the ship changes direction and heads into the wind; during the time the water in the hold takes to change sides, the ship will straighten up and the lack of tilt will give the lubricating system a breather.
The captain asks for more speed: “More rpm available?” The ship, laboring into the growing swells, is still going half her normal speed, because of the energy it takes to fight the storm.
12
As El Faro, rolling badly to starboard, starts to wrestle her way to port—pitching harder now as her bow starts to smash more directly into the dragon wind and the maelstrom of waves themselves—Shultz makes his way down to 3rd Deck, enters the engine-room main level, makes his way around the boilers, through a storeroom, and opens the heavy steel door to 3-hold. Water runs against the coaming in front of him, around the Rolocs and chains of the ranked trailers. The mate steps into the water. Closing the door behind him he inches forward and to the right, holding on to lashings, trailer to trailer, and, when he gets to the outermost starboard trailer looks forward and sees water gushing from overhead, out of the starboard scuttle leading to 2nd Deck, a pulsing Niagara down the steel side-shell that makes it impossible to climb the ladder and shut the hatch from below. His pant legs must be soaked to the knees, seawater is pooling deeply on that side of the ship.
He climbs back up to 2nd Deck, to a watertight door in the after bulkhead of the house, and finds seawater rampaging also on the deck in front of him. Dogging the door, he leaves the shelter of the companionway and boiler casing and sloshes out onto 2nd Deck, around the house, all the way starboard. The water’s up to his knees here, too; he hangs on to something, another trailer, lashings, on the starboard edge of 3-hold. In the long space between trailers and the side shell he sees waves flooding through the side-shell ports, washing over the scuttle, which yawns open when the waves clear it for an instant, its hatch thrown back. He retraces his steps to the breezeway door and keys the transmit button on his walkie-talkie.
“Ya got water against the side . . . just enough to pour over the edge of the scuttle . . . about knee-deep water, rolls right over.”
The captain tells him they’re turning the ship to port to pull water away from the scuttle. He asks the mate if he’s alone, if he needs help. “I’m by myself,” Shultz replies.
“Don’t move,” Davidson says, “stay right there, don’t move.”
“Standing by.”
The ship, pitching harder now, is turning slowly against the wind. Water starts to swirl and rush from the starboard side to port, making surf against the trailers, the chained automobiles. For a couple of minutes, maybe more, as the water shifts in El Faro’s holds, the ship is roughly on an even keel, and oil must be pumping normally. Jeff Mathias shows up on 2nd Deck and finds Shultz staring forward as seawater in 3-hold starts to eddy toward his left.
“I got Jeff Mathias with me here,” Shultz radios the bridge, his words partially drowned in wind. “We’re ready to go . . . starboard scuttle.” Shultz and Mathias confer, yelling over the noise. Mathias volunteers to venture out onto the deck and shut the scuttle.
“The worst area’s already dried out,” Shultz yells into the walkie-talkie.
“All right, Chief Mate. You got a lifeline on him or anything? Is there any chance of him going over?”
“I think it’s okay.”
El Faro has completed her turn to port, chopping and pitching, water on 2nd Deck now cascading massively toward that side. Her heading is almost due north, 350 degrees. Slowly, soggily, she is leaning more and more heavily to port. After a few minutes she is listing in that direction at just as deep an angle as she did before to starboard.
Mathias, one arm crooked around trailers, lashings, anything he can find as the sea plucks at his legs, starts making his way along the starboard side of the house to the starboard scuttle. By the time he gets there, that side of the deck is almost free of water, as Davidson anticipated. The cover on the scuttle is still thrown back; the opening gapes, black and dripping. Mathias moves quickly, heaves the cover up and over, closing the hatch. He turns the locking wheel clockwise as hard and fast as it will go, then hurries back to the house.
“Okay, Captain, it’s done,” Shultz yells into the walkie-talkie.
“It’s done.”
It is one minute before six in the morning of October 1.
13
Just before 6:00 a.m. Danielle Randolph appears at the bridge companionway.
“Hi, how are you, Captain?” she says brightly.
“How are you?” Davidson replies. He sounds happy to see her, but his question, like hers, is ritual. Both officers know how they are, and it’s not so hot. Davidson, as always, puts a bright face on the situation: “A scuttle popped open and there’s a little bit of water in three-hold. They’re pumping it out now.”
The bridge telephone rings. The chief engineer now asks the captain to reverse his earlier move and turn the ship back to starboard, bringing the wind on the port side again to resume the starboard list. Apparently the list to port causes worse problems than a tilt the other way.
Once again, it’s not clear if any of the engineers, who have probably never seen the sump housing opened, are aware either of the ten-inch vertical gap between the sump’s bottom and the mouth of the oil intake pipe, or of the twenty-two-inch horizontal distance by which the flared mouth is offset to starboard of the sump’s center. Oil lines coil back and forth under the deck plates, so it’s hard to figure out just by looking at them where the lubricant is going. It’s not certain, either, if the engine-room crew can immediately consult the pump’s specs and diagrams to troubleshoot the issue. Tote has not provided the ship with a manual to guide engineers through this or similar problems.
What is pretty certain is that, either by studying general diagrams or through a basic understanding of how intake pipes are always set higher to avoid sucking in dregs collected in the lowest parts of a sump, Pusatere and his crew have a good idea of what must be going on. They understand that, with a strong list, any vertical gap between intake and sump bottom will shallow the pool of available oil; and that a pipe offset to one side means that a list the other way will slosh the oil even farther away from the intake, compounding the problem. Since the intake pipe is set to starboard, they need to turn the ship back in that direction, put waves and wind to port again, to regain a starboard list.
Offset oil: A cross-section view shows how a list to one side (left, or port) pulls oil away from an intake pipe set twenty-two inches to starboard, and ten inches above, the sump’s center line. If the oil pump sucks air, it will stop the engine. Though the sump could contain 2,020 gallons, it only held 1,225 on October 1, 2015.
“Bring it back, roll back over to starboard,” Davidson tells the helmsman. “Keep her right twenty.”
“Rudder right twenty,” says Hamm.
Shultz comes back from 2nd Deck, confirms the scuttle is secured. He volunteers to return to the cargo holds.
Davidson agrees. “We need eyes and ears down there.”
One of the radars has crapped out. Randolph bends over the set, adjusting, rebooting. Soon the screen glows with the image of the islands the ship has left behind. She plots the ship’s position off San Salvador.
The wind, changing angles as El Faro turns slowly to starboard, rips something else loose.
“There goes the lawn furniture,” Randolph says.
“Let’s hope that’s all.” It’s the first time Davidson’s words have betrayed any glumness.
Randolph quickly offers, “If you don’t need me, you want me to stay with you?”
“Please,” Davidson replies.
“It’s just,” he continues, “it’s just the—” But he’s interrupted by the walkie-talkie’s call-up tone. Shultz has gone down to the engine room and is checking in from there, and Davidson asks him to tell the engineers to reverse the ballast procedure, fill the starboard ramp tank now to help with the general aim of bringing the ship’s tilt back to starboard.
The chief mate confirms, “Port to starboard ramp tank.”
“I’m not liking this list,” Davidson tells the bridge at large.
And at that moment the world changes.
The ongoing pulse of engines deep below, the sempiternal tremble of deck and joinery that is the sign, tactile as much as auditory, that El Faro’s heart is beating, her engines driving her and all her people in the direction they’re supposed to go in, begins to falter.
Slows in rhythm.
Fades, at last, to nothing.
In the alien, deadly silence that follows, the shriek of Joaquin against the windows, against the hull, grows to deafening volume by contrast.
“I think we just lost the plant,” Davidson says.