25.42°N -75.47°W
The sun dropped like a stone on Wednesday evening, September 30, casting El Faro in darkness. At eight o’clock, Third Mate Jeremie Riehm joined his AB Jack Jackson on the bridge for their four-hour watch. Chief Mate Steve Shultz went over the newest course change—a welcome concession from Captain Davidson. They’d maintain a heading of 150 degrees—south-southeast straight toward the lee side of tiny San Salvador.
Captain Davidson stood nearby, listening closely. “Safety of the ship comes first,” he reminded them, enunciating each syllable. “San Salvador’s gonna afford us a lot of lee,” Davidson told them. He continued referring to the hurricane—now a Category 3 with 85-knot winds—as “the low.”
Jeremie had been assiduously watching the forecasts on the TV in his room. “I just hope Joaquin’s not worse than what BVS is saying,” he told Davidson, “because Weather Underground is saying it’s a lot. They’re saying it’s more like 85 miles per hour, not 50 like on BVS. They’re saying this is much more powerful than BVS is saying right now.”
“We’ll be passing clear on the backside of it,” announced Davidson, dismissing his third mate’s intransigence. “Just keep steaming. Our speed is tremendous right now. The faster we’re going, the better. This will put the wind on the stern a little bit more. It’s giving us a push.”
Jeremie considered San Salvador, a six-by-twelve-mile island, just a wisp of sand, highest elevation 140 feet. It stood all alone in deep ocean. He knew it wouldn’t block Joaquin’s wind, though the seas would be somewhat mitigated as they broke on the island’s eastern shore. Then he thought about how El Faro’s aging power plant might fare in the storm.
Deep in the bowels of the ship, the forty-year-old engine burned ton after ton of bunker fuel, producing astounding heat (900°F) that converted water to superheated dry steam. The pressure coming from that steam, about 860 pounds per square inch, spun the engine’s first turbine at a rate of 6,700 revolutions per minute. That’s way too fast for a ship’s propeller to spin (more like a jet engine) so a series of gears stepped down this rate of rotation to a comfortable 132 RPMs. At the end of a massive horizontal shaft spun the ship’s 25-foot-tall propeller. This whole system was bathed in thousands of gallons of lube oil to prevent the fast-spinning metal parts from breaking down under friction and splintering into a million shards.
All that machinery occupied a three-story engine room built on the floor of the hull. Unlike today’s clean diesel engines, it was dark, gloomy, and dirty down there. Narrow steel ladders and catwalks led workers around countless steam pipes, valves, and pumps, many of which were unmarked, or poorly lit. Earlier in 2015, while the ship was under way, an AB accidentally closed the wrong valve and shut down the engine. The chief engineer quickly identified the problem and got it up and running in about ten minutes. But that experience shows how easy it is to disrupt the system.
Anyone who’s opened the hood of a car would recognize most parts on a ship’s diesel engine—cylinders, pistons, crank shafts. But a ship’s steam engine is a strange and awesome beast. It’s easy to get disoriented in the three-story assemblage that sits heavily on the floor of the hull. To operate a steam engine, you have to know it cold.
Taking care of the old engine required constant vigilance. El Faro’s chief engineers’ turnover notes to each other were often several pages long, detailing everything they fixed, everything they had their eye on, and everything that needed immediate attention.
Rich Pusatere was the thirty-four-year-old chief engineer aboard El Faro on September 30. He’d last boarded the ship on August 11, leaving his wife and baby daughter at home in North Carolina. Rich had trained at SUNY Maritime in Fort Schuyler and, like Jeff Mathias, had a passion for steam. The newer diesel engines weren’t nearly as exciting. They didn’t demand the constant attention he lavished on his beloved turbines and boilers.
Rich’s parents had done everything they could to make sure he had opportunities they hadn’t. They were children of Italian immigrants, and they’d escaped New York City tenements for a tiny suburban house in a tiny village north of the city along the Hudson River. Rich’s father, Frank, had an engineering mind and ran plants for ConEd. Then he ran a chimney sweep company. Now he works as a forensic fire investigator. Rich took after his dad—when his mother, Lilian, totaled her car, he rebuilt it in their garage at the age of sixteen.
As Rich approached his high school graduation, Frank started to hound him about going to college. Rich didn’t have a clue what he wanted to do. Well, said Frank, I think you should go somewhere. He did some research for his son and discovered the SUNY Maritime program in Fort Schuyler—a tiny spit of land under the Throgs Neck Bridge in the Bronx. Rich could easily commute from their Croton-on-Hudson home, and the school was affordable.
Rich was intense. He drove himself hard and expected everyone around him to do the same. He was only interested in logic and facts. “Officers talk to people. Engineers talk to machines,” seamen have told me, and that was never truer than with Rich. He was happiest when he was covered in grease fixing something in the sweltering heat of the engine room, earplugs in, earmuffs on.
When his daughter, Josephine, was born in 2013, Rich’s awkwardness with the infant made his parents laugh out loud. He wasn’t exactly a cuddly kind of guy.
Chief engineers can be otherworldly. They knock a valve here or bang a pump there, and things just click back into place. The old salts who cut their teeth on steam know every single component of the system so well that they can draw it from memory. They scramble up and down the steep metal ladders and catwalks that thread through the three-story behemoths to get to their lube pumps, sumps, and manifolds. When something goes wrong, they can usually pinpoint the problem in less than five minutes. But knowledge like this takes time to acquire. You have to pay attention, and really care, because no one’s going to teach you everything you need to know.
Maritime schools can’t fully cover the intricacies of operating a steam engine. It’s just not worth the time, especially because there are so few of these engines still being used. Instead, learning is done on the job. If the chief is impatient, the kind of person who likes fixing things himself without having to explain every little thing, it will take longer for his knowledge to get passed down.
“It’s a dying art,” says Brian Young, a former mariner, now an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board. “There aren’t a lot of steamships anymore. Take an old chief who knows what he’s doing and it’s magic. He just comes down, tweaks something, and walks away and everything’s fine. I’d gone over to the Persian Gulf in Desert Storm and they broke out this old chief who couldn’t even leave his office because he was so old and had a limp. He smoked cigars all day long. And if he had to come down, if something was really bad, he would limp down there and he would swish through the smoke, sit down, and turn some valve halfway. Halfway. And everything would be fixed.”
Rich worked tirelessly to keep El Faro running, and sometimes got frustrated when the people around him didn’t push themselves as hard. On his 2015 evaluation of first engineer Keith Griffin, a man he had to work with closely, Rich couldn’t mask his disappointment. He felt that Keith didn’t have the same drive and passion.
That evaluation drove a deep rift between the two men.
Rich may have felt the same frustration with Davidson.
Sailing into heavy seas tests the most critical relationship aboard a steam ship: that between captain and chief engineer. Though separated by a dozen flights of stairs, the pair represent the mind and heart of the ship. They must collaborate to get her through—you can’t will a ship through gale force winds. If a captain decides to steer any vessel into the belly of a hurricane, the engineers must be prepared to assiduously monitor her health to gauge how much power she can give. As the external forces on the ship grow, all the captain’s senses should be attuned to the vessel’s reactions to wind, wave, and rudder, while the chief engineer obsessively monitors steam pressure, oil pressure, and RPMs. At the moment she falters, shows signs of distress, that bridge phone should ring.
But weatherwise, it had been a quiet couple of years in the Caribbean, and so the captain and young engineers aboard El Faro hadn’t been seriously tested. In the engine room, the recent maritime school grads had spent their time taking orders from their chiefs—fixing, patching, and oiling the giant machine—executing their duties, learning what they could from their supervisors.
A powerful storm would expose every weakness on the vessel.
Steam, the wondrous force that drives the turbines, travels through a complex web of steel pipes throughout the engine room under intense pressure. These pipes are secured by hangers. If one fails, shaken loose by the rocking and rolling of a ship, the pipe could rupture, exploding into a thick fog of scalding steam. We know that El Faro’s steam pipes hangers were in bad shape. The list of things to be done when she went into dry dock in November included: “Verify all pipe hangers, snubbers, and supports for the main steam system in the engine room are in good order to take the increased pounding in Alaska service. Many hangers are currently loose or broken.”
The condition of El Faro’s boiler itself looms large in this story, too. A month before her final voyage an inspector wrote: “Burner throats have deteriorated severely especially between number one and three burners. Cracking and loss of material plus heavy buildup of fuel is present on all three throats. The front wall of the starboard boiler is in very bad shape. It is highly recommended that the front wall tubes as well as the brick including burner throats be renewed on both boilers. The brick is moving due to soot buildup behind them as a result can cause casing fires as well as damage to tubes to the point of failure.”
The inspector hoped that the boiler repairs would be done right away, but these fixes were deferred for the November dry dock.
Those were problems people could see. On a 790-foot ship, there was a lot that inspectors couldn’t see.
All this was on Jeremie’s mind as he arrived to take over the watch at 8:00 p.m. That, and securing life rafts. Before he came up to the bridge, he’d put a couple of car straps on one of them to ensure it didn’t fly off the second deck. He also secured the small first aid room.
In contrast, Davidson’s biggest concern seemed to be their arrival time. “I told the office to expect us at eight o’clock in the morning in San Juan,” he told Jeremie. Then, turning to amiable Jack, Davidson said, “Before it got dark, we altered our course. Picked a new route to get farther away from the low,” still refusing to call Joaquin a hurricane. “This course will put the wind on our stern which gives us a nice push. So fasten your belt till we get on that backside of it.”
He reassured Jeremie that he would be there for him: “I will definitely be up for the better part of your watch. So if you see anything you don’t like, don’t hesitate to change course and give me a shout.”
Before leaving the bridge, Davidson said: “I have the BVS new waypoint route sheet. I’m gonna enter it in on my computer. I’ll bring it back up.” Then he disappeared in his stateroom and failed to return to the bridge for eight hours. The waypoint route sheet never came.
In the darkness, Jeremie and Jack were left alone to face the consequences of Davidson’s decisions. Jeremie again wondered aloud about the discrepancy between the reports he’d seen. The Weather Channel and the NHC forecasts aligned; BVS was the outlier.
“This BVS map tells us that in the morning, we’ll see 53-knot winds,” he said. “But if the Weather Channel is right and BVS is wrong, then we’re gonna be really close to 90-plus-knot winds. It’s more powerful than we thought. We can’t outrun Joaquin, you know? The hurricane is supposed to hook north right here, but what if it doesn’t?”
“What if we get close?” Jack asked. “We get jammed into those islands there, and it starts comin’ at us.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Jeremie. He roughly combed his fingers through his hair like a backhoe clearing out a ditch. “Maybe I’m just being a Chicken Little.”
Jack struggled to understand how they’d found themselves in this mess. He decided to blame it on the breakdown of TOTE’s organization. Some really good, seasoned men like Haley and Villacampa had been fired. Others got away with murder. TOTE was a mess. Jeremie wasn’t paranoid.
He reminded Jeremie that one chief mate on El Yunque had been repeatedly caught sleeping during his watch on the bridge and no action had been taken. “Then he got caught again and nothing happened. Asshole kept on doing it. Got away with it and nobody noticed, nobody cared. Nobody else notices anything and then I’m always the bearer of bad tidings. I’m known as the troublemaker and that’s how I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut at those safety meetings. They don’t wanna hear anything you got to say, so don’t say anything.”
The mariners he sailed with were getting dangerously complacent, following orders instead of asking questions. Jack thought back on the time he sailed on a car carrier and wanted to know which vents he should close if they needed to dump CO2 on a fire to snuff it out. “The vents weren’t even labeled. So we decided to close all of them. And we went out there to test them and they were rusted solid.”
“Yeah,” Jeremie said. “You’re gonna have leadership that’s conscientious, and you’re gonna have guys that aren’t. I call them out and sometimes it gets me in trouble. Our primary responsibility out here should be making sure it’s a safe ship. It’s hard out here because there’s so many fucking things to address. It’s like, where do you start, you know?”
Jack returned to the situation at hand. He wanted to be prepared: “If you gotta divert if that hurricane veers south quickly, how much time do you have to set up waypoints, if you gotta duck inside?”
“Well, right now,” Jeremie said, “we got nowhere to go. We can head south, you know. But it’s a good idea to have an alternate. We should have a backup route.”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “There’s no escape plan.”
“We need a plan B. If this happens, we do this. If this happens, we do this. Because already twice now, we’ve changed course to avoid Joaquin.”
Jack worried about lack of experience aboard the ship: “Remember when I came on back in February and was asking about the hurricane history? And everybody’s just shrugging—Nah, whatever—you know? We never see anything. Ever.”
“They’ve got short memories,” agreed Jeremie. “Some other captain would have taken one look at that and said, We’re gonna go the Old Bahama Channel. We’re not taking any chances here. And we’ll go well south of it, and we’ll be getting in a bit late. We’ll be off schedule but we’ll catch up.”
“That’s what I thought we were gonna do,” said Jack. “Now we’re boxed in—just islands on one side and a hurricane on the other side. You got yourself a collision here.”
Jeremie caught himself again. He didn’t want to second-guess Davidson in front of a crewmember. “This guy’s been through a lot worse than this. He’s been sailing for a long, long time. He did it up in Alaska.”
Jack wasn’t so sure. “I’ll never have faith in these assholes like I used to,” he said. “One captain sailed us right into a storm. All naive and confident. Oh sure,” he said sarcastically, “they know what they’re doing. As I got thrown to the deck, I could hear the captain screaming. We were going over this big wave. First the ship started pitching and rolling. Then it got worse and worse. Then all of the sudden it was like some kind of wild animal trying to break out—like a bull in a stall. Going wilder and wilder and wilder and pretty soon it was out of control. Then all the cargo broke loose and oh my God.
“We were rolling, and a wave came in and slammed us. We came to this shuddering stop. I mean, I was sure we were going over. Positive.
“It was like death, actually. It was like we were fated to die. No one spoke about it for two to three days. People were shell-shocked. Everybody felt death was right on us. It was like this presence. Bring your rosary beads.”
“Well, you didn’t say anything then, and you’re here to tell the tale,” said Jeremie. “Guess I’m just turning into a Chicken Little, but I have a feeling like something bad is gonna happen.”
At 11:00 p.m., he ripped the latest NHC forecast off the SAT-C printer and couldn’t keep quiet anymore. The third mate picked up the phone and called Davidson. “Hey, Captain, sorry to wake you. The latest weather just came in and I thought you might want to take a look at it, if you have a chance. Just looking at the forecast and looking at our tracking, which way it’s going, thought you might wanna take a look at it.”
What do you see? Davidson asked him.
“Well, it’s the, the, the current forecast has max winds at 100 miles an hour at the storm’s center. And it’s moving at 230 [degrees] at five knots. I assume it’ll stay on that same direction for, say, the next five hours. So it’s advancing toward our bow, and our course puts us real close to it. I could be more specific. I could plot that out. But it’s gonna be real close. We’re looking to meet it at, say, four o’clock in the morning.”
The captain asked him to draw it on the chart. Jeremie did and six minutes later, called him back: “At four o’clock this morning, we’ll be twenty-two miles from the center of the hurricane with max [sustained winds] 100 [miles per hour], with gusts to 120 miles per hour and strengthening. From what I can see, at 2:00 a.m., we could head south, and that would open up some distance between us and the hurricane.” Then Jeremie caught himself, remembering to defer to his commanding officer. “I mean, of course I’d want you to verify what I’m seeing.”
He told the captain in no uncertain terms that if they continued on their current course, they would sail right into the most dangerous area of the hurricane—the eyewall, and into the eye. “Just so you know,” he told Davidson. “That’s how close we’ll be.”
Jeremie listened to Davidson’s response and hung up the phone. He turned slowly back to Jack, shaking his head. “Well, he seems to think that we’ll be south of it by then. So the winds won’t be an issue.”
“Fuck,” Jack said.
“Fuck.”
“We’ll be twenty-two miles from the center.”
“Fuck.”
“He’s saying we’ll be in the southwest quadrant of the hurricane, which is the safest place to be if you’re going to get close. Wind will be coming from the north and it’ll push us away, toward Puerto Rico. I trust what he’s saying, it’s just I don’t like being twenty-two miles away from 100-knot winds. This doesn’t even sound right.”
“No matter which way it’s hittin’ ya, it’s still 100-knot winds,” Jack agreed.
The captain may have been unhinged for steering them into this storm, but then again, hubris was part of his job. Great captains were made by taking risks and living to boast about them. Shipping history is replete with slightly mad masters aching to test their mettle, pushing their vessels and crew to the brink and coming out heroes. In the modern age, everything always turned out fine. El Faro had been inspected, tested, and secured. And they had a wide range of safety equipment at their disposal.
After he got off the phone with Jeremie, Davidson did not check the weather forecast. He did not download the latest BVS forecast waiting for him in his inbox. Instead, he went to bed. Records show that Captain Davidson did not download the eleven o’clock BVS forecast until five o’clock the next morning. His third mate had told him the truth. But he didn’t want to hear it.