23.23°N, -73.55°W
In a small office at the NTSB in Washington, DC, sat Captain Neubauer’s physical antipode. Compact, hair thinning, with an indeterminate midwestern accent, Tom Roth-Roffy would have blended right in to Washington, DC, circa 1955. The only thing missing from his otherwise classic government employee look was a pair of Robert McNamara glasses.
Tom was the quintessential hardworking, incorruptible federal investigator. He was raised in Panama, where his father was a navy officer, which no doubt fostered in young Tom a complicated relationship with authority. Cut off from mainstream American culture, he grew up in a republic created by an imperial-minded US for the sole purpose of digging, and then overseeing, the canal that would ultimately unite America’s coasts.
Tom’s upbringing didn’t make him cynical. It made him a firm believer in truth. His role model might have been the tireless Joe Friday, someone who holds undying faith in the meritocracy. And the indisputable nature of facts.
Tom was trained as a marine engineer and once served on ships laying cable around Puerto Rico, but most of his decades-long career has been spent solving complex mysteries for the US government. Surrounded by traces of the dead captured in black boxes, twisted hulls, oil spills, and mountains of data, Tom and his team track the human errors and engineering mistakes that lead to devastating losses. When describing his life, he uses headline cases—Deepwater Horizon or Exxon Valdez—to mark time the way most people use births, deaths, weddings, and anniversaries.
Tom was given the job of leading the NTSB’s investigation of the El Faro mystery.
Five days after the disappearance of the ship, Tom joined Neubauer aboard a plane from DC to Jacksonville. The US Coast Guard and the NTSB would be working together to gather information about El Faro, but they would issue separate reports.
Many on the respective teams—naval architects, engineers, former mariners, marine inspectors—were on that plane, too. They’d worked together on previous cases, creating an instant rapport now. Both groups set up shop at the Jacksonville Marriott and spent their evenings huddled in conference rooms, comparing notes. They didn’t want to burden the dozens of witnesses with more than one interview, or double efforts, so agreed to conduct most interviews jointly and coordinate information gathering.
El Faro’s crew’s wives, parents, and children who had come down during the tense weeklong search were also staying at the hotel when the investigative teams arrived. There were awkward moments when the investigators crossed paths with those dealing with shock and loss. Emotions were raw, and the proximity to family members made Neubauer even more committed to his work, he says.
Two days later, Rear Admiral Scott Buschman, commander, Coast Guard 7th District, announced the official end of the search and rescue effort: “I have come to a very difficult decision to suspend the search for the crew of El Faro at sunset tonight. My deepest condolences go to the families, loved ones, and friends of El Faro crew. US Coast Guard, US Navy, US Air Force, and the TOTE Maritime tug crews searched day and night, sometimes in perilous conditions with the hope of finding survivors in this tragic loss.”
Some of the families were furious that the search was over. Others understood that all that could be done had been done.
Strong and resilient, like so many parents of New England mariners before them, Deb Roberts and Laurie Bobillot were among the first relatives of the lost crew to accept that El Faro had been lost. During the agonizing week in Jacksonville while the coast guard combed the ocean for the survivors—and then any evidence of the gigantic ship—they became the public face of grief.
They worked with the Red Cross to set up a Facebook page with regular updates for anyone connected to El Faro. They gave TV interviews to ensure that the human side of the tragedy wasn’t lost in its telling. Pictures of Michael and Danielle—smiling in their crisp Maine Maritime Academy uniforms, Danielle’s hair tucked beneath her hat—appeared everywhere.
Nothing captivates the American imagination like a shipwreck. Even after we lost our direct connection to the ocean, sea stories remain high in American lore. We still feast on the Titanic and continue to poke around its ancient remains. We consume the Deadliest Catch, a show shamelessly dedicated to tragedy at sea. Every year or so a blockbuster film depicts courageous sailors battling enormous waves. The ocean is a mystery, its forces unknowable. It draws us in.
Once the harrowing search for El Faro began, it dominated the news cycle. The media descended on the scene—vans from local news outlets, the AP, and national news outlets were parked outside the Marriott. Joaquin was the big story that week. The storm had caused historic flooding in South Carolina. Most Americans couldn’t tell you what the merchant marine was, but during that week, the names of the seamen aboard the ship, and snippets of their lives and the people they’d left behind, continually ran online, on TV, and in newspapers across the country.
The incident instantly became politicized. Just a few days after El Faro was lost, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida called a meeting with Tom Roth-Roffy and Jason Neubauer at El Yunque, docked in Jacksonville. The senator demanded answers. Why couldn’t they find El Faro? he asked. His questions seemed reasonable. How, he wanted to know, in the twenty-first century, when every idiot has a smart phone with GPS, can we lose a huge cargo ship?
Tom was accustomed to working with government operatives, investigators, and other officials, but not politicians. He told me that in his long career, he’d never witnessed a show of power like that.
Tom’s earnestness seems anachronistic in this era of political bombast, but it would make him the perfect foil for the corporate tripe spewed by TOTE’s executives and lawyers. In the case of El Faro, this small, unassuming man became something of a folk hero. That would ultimately lead to his undoing.
The NTSB and coast guard began compiling lists of people they wanted to talk to and documents they wanted to see. Without survivors, the lists were extensive; the inquiry was broad. They set up a conference room for interviews and began bringing people in—TOTE executives and employees, family members, former and current TOTE mariners, the coast guard’s search-and-rescue teams, pilots, marine inspectors, and naval architects. One by one, they told their tiny piece of the story. A story began to form about an outdated vessel and a shipping company in transition, but none of that would in itself sink a ship.
The most compelling leads were the brief conversations Davidson had had with Captain Lawrence’s voice mail and the emergency operator. Something about a blown scuttle, a list, lost propulsion, dewatering. His words were put under a microscope, analyzed and reanalyzed, but that inquisition only led to more questions. Why was the ship there in the first place? And why did she sink?
It was clear: the investigators needed to get El Faro’s black box—the voyage data recorder, or VDR for short. The VDR had been bolted to the roof of El Faro’s wheelhouse, at the highest point of the ship. The newest VDRs are designed to break free and float in the event of an accident, but this one wasn’t.
That meant that the VDR was somewhere deep in the ocean off the coast of the Bahamas. The coast guard had an approximate location based on the ship’s last known position, the debris field, and the navy’s hydrophones, but that didn’t mean they could pinpoint it on a map. It was somewhere in a two-hundred-square-mile area, about forty miles east of San Salvador.
If they were going to find the ship, the investigators had to move quickly. El Faro’s VDR had been equipped with a pinger—a weak battery-powered beacon with a life span of about thirty days after activation. They had to get to the beacon before the battery died. Otherwise, finding the VDR could turn into a huge ordeal.
The NTSB had a member agreement with the navy to request help in locating wreckage or data recorders. The navy, for example, assisted in finding aircraft wreckage after TWA flight 800, a Boeing 747, exploded shortly after takeoff from New York’s JFK airport in 1996.
Search money was quickly approved by Congress with major support from Senator Jay Rockefeller, a champion of the American shipping industry.
On October 19, USNS Apache—a Powhatan class of tug—deployed out of Little Creek, Virginia, equipped with a suite of underwater detection equipment and a team of technical experts to run it. The crew’s mission: search nearly two hundred square miles of the sandy ocean bottom fifteen thousand feet below for a cargo ship.
Tom Roth-Roffy was on that mission. He boarded the 226-foot vessel in Virginia and rode it nearly one thousand miles down to the warm waters off the Bahamas. Once the boat arrived in the search area three days later, the technical team aboard the Apache towed a seventy-pound, bright yellow stingray-shaped pinger locator back and forth along the search pattern, hoping to pick up a signal from El Faro’s beacon.
The nerve center of the operation was set up in a narrow, windowless room in the Apache where an array of outboard gear and servers stacked in racks along one wall fed nearly a dozen computer screens of various sizes.
The pinger locator had to be within a certain distance of the beacon, so the technicians towed it far below the Apache on a long cable. Though it was sensitive, the locator couldn’t be rushed. The initial two-hundred-square-mile search went at about two miles per hour. When the Apache reached the edge of its search field, the boat above had to reverse direction, which meant waiting for the locator to swing back and settle into position before continuing. After four days of dragging the locator twenty-four hours a day, the technical crew aboard the Apache heard nothing from El Faro. The massive container ship had seemingly vanished.
The Apache team was confident that they were close enough to El Faro to pick up the pinger’s signal if it was working. Clearly, something was wrong.
They switched to using a side-scan sonar called Orion, a thirty-six-hundred-pound truck-size machine that sends pulses down into the deep to produce contour images of the seafloor on the technicians’ computers. Orion had been strapped to the Apache’s deck, and the crew used the boat’s crane to carefully lift it up and over the side, then gently release it into the sea, its fiber-optic umbilical cord trailing behind it as it traveled down into the void.
Again, with every direction change following the search field, they had to winch Orion almost to the surface, turn the boat, then send Orion back down and wait for it to stabilize before proceeding. It was tedious work, projected to take fourteen days to complete.
The Apache’s crew was divided into six-hour watches to monitor the computer screens for anything that looked unusual.
After five days of dragging, at 1:35 on October 31, a technician saw something new: right angles on the otherwise indeterminate seafloor. Then he saw shadows. He jacked up the resolution of Orion’s imagery to reveal what looked like a tiny object the size and shape of the missing container ship. It was unmistakable.
Tom got the wake-up call as soon as the vessel was discovered. He hurried over to the control center to watch the recording of the initial sonar echoes. On the computer screen, Tom clearly saw a container ship resting upright on the ocean floor. He could make out what appeared to be the ship’s house and the exhaust stack. Finer resolution revealed that El Faro had landed with such force that the sandy ocean floor around it was frozen in the shape of a permanent splash.
El Faro and her secrets lay directly below him.
Tom felt a great sense of relief wash over him. The investigation, one of the most important of his career, now had an accident site that he could study. They could scan the hull to determine whether it had been breached. They could examine patterns on the seafloor to get a better understanding of how it went down. Even better, the ship’s VDR might be accessible somewhere near the wreck. That black box was the holy grail of any investigation. Tom was one step closer to solving a case. He was elated.
After locating the hull, the techs slowly winched up Orion, and then sent down a CURV-21 to document the site. The eight-foot-high, sixty-five-hundred-pound fiber-optic cable-controlled vehicle was capable of withstanding three tons per square inch, the pressure at El Faro, three thousand feet deeper than the Titanic. The force down there was so great that it caused the heavy steel containers that were once lashed to the ship’s decks to crush inward as they sunk.
A primitive version of the CURV-21 had been used to help the NTSB learn more about another famous shipwreck, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a 729-foot freighter that disappeared in 1975 while sailing in a severe storm on Lake Superior. All twenty-nine crewmen aboard perished; like El Faro, there were no eyewitnesses.
The great tragedy of the Fitzgerald—the worst peacetime accident on the Great Lakes—led to major industry changes. It was a benchmark case for the Marine Board of Investigation, one that Captain Neubauer and Tom Roth-Roffy thought a lot about when El Faro disappeared.
Ultimately, the cause of the Fitzgerald’s sinking was inconclusive, and the event continues to draw armchair theorists, but many of the contributing factors debated during that case came up again in the El Faro investigation.
It’s possible that opened or damaged hatch covers may have caused flooding in the thirty-five-foot waves that ultimately overwhelmed the ship, the 1970s US Coast Guard report theorized. This flooding could have been slowed by the installation of watertight doors between the vessel’s holds, but the shipping industry had fought against such protective measures for years, claiming that such modifications would be prohibitively expensive. Without watertight separation between her holds, the Fitzgerald probably went down very fast. The captain didn’t even have time to send a distress signal.
The Fitzgerald was also overloaded—her Plimsoll line had been raised three times in a few short years leading up to the accident, allowing her freeboard to run three feet closer to the water than specified by her original designers. That made her very vulnerable to flooding in foul weather.
Another problem revealed in the case: the National Weather Service had inaccurately forecasted the conditions on the Lakes during the storm that sunk her. In fact, the seas were much higher than predicted and may have caused a few massive rogue waves.
There were human factors involved as well. The Fitzgerald’s captain was known for pushing his vessel hard and flouting storm warnings. When weather kicked up, he’d thrill to it. He boasted about the strength of his ship and the bravado of his crew—they could take on anything Mother Nature could throw at them. In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales writes, “The word ‘experienced’ often refers to someone who has gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.” This captain was experienced in exactly in that way.
The sinking of the Fitzgerald showed the coast guard that shipping companies weren’t capable of regulating themselves; the organization needed to step up to protect the men and women who crewed these vessels. Among the many new regulations implemented following the sinking: shippers had to provide survival suits for all hands sailing on the Great Lakes to stave off hypothermia and drowning; Great Lakes navigation charts were improved; vessels above a certain tonnage had to be equipped with depth finders and EPIRBs; and the coast guard committed to boarding and inspecting all Great Lakes ships for watertight integrity each year before the fall storms kicked in.
These new regulations served the industry well for decades after the Fitzgerald catastrophe, with the exception of the sinking of the Marine Electric in 1983. American commercial shipping enjoyed a nearly spotless safety record, with no major losses after that.
But almost forty years to the day, the specter of the Fitzgerald returned when El Faro went down. Had regulators and industry slacked off in the ensuing time? Had we all become too complacent?
That’s how Tom Roth-Roffy found himself in the dark, chilly control room on the Apache, transfixed by the images being sent back to his computer screen from the deepest Atlantic by the CURV-21.
The CURV ran tethered to the Apache by a thirty-six-thousand-foot-long electro-optical-magnetic cable that wrapped around an enormous winch on the vessel’s deck. Using the CURV’s thrusters, the techs could fly it like a drone, but very slowly.
When the CURV was in position close to the sunken hull’s location, the techs switched on its high-resolution cameras and bright lights to illuminate the abyss. A murky gray-blue landscape appeared on their screens. If the CURV got too close to the sea bottom, its thrusters kicked up fine particles that got caught in its bright spotlight, temporarily blinding them.
The first thing the CURV revealed was the miles-long and -wide path of debris and containers. As the loaded freighter went down, everything she held peeled off, leaving a trail for the CURV to follow, like breadcrumbs in the forest. Some containers opened as they made their rapid journey three miles to the bottom, scattering their contents onto the soft ocean floor. Cars spilled out of the ship’s hull in slow motion, their components breaking free and raining down. The site looked like a murky gray sprawling city made entirely of junk.
Tom saw a bicycle. Car batteries. Crumpled containers everywhere. Flung about was the eerily familiar detritus of modern life—a printer, a microwave, the top of a car, abstractly rendered in the foreign dusty desert of the deep Atlantic.
Eventually, they came upon the hull—a steep wall of solid steel.
In the quiet calm of the ocean’s depths, the CURV glided along the port side of the ship, recording the frozen remains of a calamitous event. Then the CURV reached the stern. It turned the corner and slowly panned up. Emerging from the blue gloom, white letters stood proud on the twisted hull: EL _ARO, San Juan PR. The steel where the F had been was crushed inward.
Tom and the tech team gazed at those words in silence.
After lingering for a few minutes, the CURV moved up to the vast top deck, now empty of the cargo boxes that once were stacked three-high. It ran down the length of the deck like a plane taxiing on a runway until it reached the multistory wheelhouse where the ship’s crew once lived and worked. The CURV’s operator pivoted its camera and lights upward and began puttering up to the top of the house, where the VDR was expected to be. As the vehicle rose, those watching aboard the Apache shuddered.
El Faro’s top two stories, including the navigation bridge, mast, and VDR, were gone.
From the way she’d landed, the team theorized that after El Faro sank below the surface, she spiraled down at about 45 miles per hour stern-first at a steep angle to her final resting place on the ocean floor. She descended so quickly that at some point, the navigation bridge must have torn away. Later, another theory would be put forth: that when the cooler waters hit the ship’s boilers’ superheaters, there was an explosion that blew off the house.
After weeks of searching, the NTSB had found the ship, an important first step. But Tom’s mood was solemn. The VDR was attached to the roof of the navigation bridge, and that piece of the ship was nowhere to be seen. They hadn’t located the one thing that would unlock his investigation. If they couldn’t find the VDR, the NTSB and the coast guard would have to rely on conjecture. But how would they find something the size and shape of a coffee can in miles and miles of wreckage?