In researching this book, I was fortunate to have access to a wealth of information made public by the NTSB and US Coast Guard during their investigation of the El Faro tragedy. After the disappearance of the ship, the NTSB and US Coast Guard jointly interviewed dozens of family members of the lost mariners, TOTE executives and employees, coast guard officers involved in the search and rescue effort, and maritime industry experts—conversations which were then transcribed and made public. The Marine Board of Investigation re-interviewed many of these witnesses, as well as additional experts and mariners, during the three two-week public hearings held in Jacksonville in 2016 and 2017, many of which I attended. When I couldn’t be there in person, I followed the hearings via Livestream. All of these hearings were transcribed by the US Coast Guard and made public.
Later in 2017, the NTSB issued several chairman’s reports summarizing the facts of the case as they understood them. These included research on meteorology, survivability, engineering, electronic data, naval architecture, and human factors. The NTSB also painstakingly transcribed the twenty-six hours of recordings on the VDR and uploaded that five-hundred-page document on its website. (The audio was not made public.) These reports, plus supporting documentation, proved invaluable to me. Both the NTSB and the coast guard issued final reports of their findings and recommendations at the end of 2017, available to the public.
In addition, I personally interviewed dozens of key witnesses, family members, TOTE mariners, members of the coast guard and NTSB, and maritime experts involved in the case, traveling from Maine to Washington, DC, to New Orleans to Florida.
I’ve met some ships, too. Over two frigid but memorable days in the spring of 2017, I interviewed former NTSB Investigator Tom Roth-Roffy on SUNY Maritime College’s training ship Empire State (a steamship built in 1961) in Fort Schuyler, New York. Maine Maritime Academy was kind enough to allow me to tour their training ship State of Maine (a diesel ship launched in 1989), docked in Castine, Maine. I traveled with Commanders Mike Venturella and Mike Odom of the US Coast Guard to Philadelphia to tour SS Wright (formerly SS Mormacsun) a cargo steamship built in 1968, now owned by the American government and operated by Crowley Maritime. The car carrier/cargo ship Grande Congo, a diesel vessel built in 2010 for Grimaldi Group, was my home for twelve days in the summer of 2017.
Maritime history is well documented and several excellent books have been published on the subject. I am grateful for the impressive scholarship found in the following works: The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reeinvisioned, 1600–2000, by Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar; The Sea & Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine; The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 by Samuel Eliot Morison; The Forgotten Heroes: The Heroic Story of the United States Merchant Marine by Brian Herbert; Until the Sea Shall Free Them: Life, Death and Survival in the Merchant Marine by Robert Frump; America and the Sea: A Maritime History by Benjamin W. Labaree, William M. Fowler Jr., John B. Hattendorf, Jeffrey J. Safford, Edward W. Sloan, and Andrew W. German; and an obscure out of print volume published in 1958, The Maritime Story: A Study in Labor-Management Relations by Joseph P. Goldberg. And for anyone who still harbors a romantic view of the age of sail, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. will disabuse you of that notion.