On Monday, February 16, 2016, the Prime Osborne Convention Center in Jacksonville became the epicenter of the El Faro drama.
The white neoclassical building with its stately colonnade, built in 1919, sits inexplicably alone in a vast, sunbaked emptiness.
The building is a haunting reminder of America’s promise and prosperity, racism and decline. It had previously served as the bustling New Union Terminal Building—once the largest rail station in the South. Before the automobile took over the American landscape, trains at Union Station served as many as twenty thousand passengers a day traveling north to the great cities or south to the warm Florida coast. Wealthy New Yorkers and poor workingmen and -women briefly passed each other on their way to resorts in Miami or job prospects throughout the nation.
Where there was once an expanse of tracks carrying up to 142 trains a day is now cracked pavement. The last train pulled out of Union Station in 1974. Like a thumb in the eye, Florida’s Interstate 95, touted by the Miami-Herald in 1956 as a “slum-clearance project,” opened in 1960 just a few hundred feet from the station, sounding the American railroad’s death knell.
Nearby, the Jacksonville Skyway, a depressingly underused monorail built in 1986, clatters back and forth along its two and a half miles of track. The monorail was the one realization that emerged from a feverish urban vision once imagined for Jacksonville. Instead of blossoming into the Chicago of the South, however, downtown feels more like Detroit—rife with abandoned buildings and abandoned lots, scored by multilane roads occupied by indifferent drivers. Although the Skyway is free, it attracts few riders. At rush hour, my only companion was a homeless man.
The largest room in the Prime Osborne Convention Center once served as the main ticketing hall for the train station. With soaring vaulted ceilings and decorative friezes, illuminated by tall windows and large clerestories, it still feels like a grand railroad station. You can easily imagine the ladies and gentlemen in their finery eagerly scanning the timetables and purchasing tickets for their journeys across America.
There’s no direct connection from the main hall to the second-largest room at the former station—you have to pass through a labyrinth of closetlike spaces to get from one to the other. Formally, one enters the smaller hall via a modest side entrance off the street. The smaller hall’s ceiling is lower, coffered but flat. Its finishes are basic. It’s not much more than a room.
This is where, under Jim Crow, Jacksonville’s black passengers were permitted to buy their tickets and wait.
And this is where the Marine Board of Investigation El Faro hearings were held.
That first morning of the first round of hearings, family members, investigators, the media, and witnesses arrived before 9:00 a.m., parked in a gravelly lot in the shadow of the monorail, and made their way to the smaller hall.
Once inside, there was a deep sense of gravitas. Long vertical blinds blocked the Florida sunshine. A few dozen rows of stacking chairs faced a temporary podium framed by a navy blue velvet backdrop. The American flag and US Coast Guard flag stood side by side behind a long table outfitted with a pleated taupe skirt. Captain Neubauer sat in the center of the table flanked by coast guard investigators and members of the NTSB. The session opened with a moment of silence for El Faro’s thirty-three crew members who had perished with the ship.
Occupying the first three rows on the left half of the hall were the wives, parents, and children of the dead. They would camp out there all day, every day, for a total of six weeks. They constructed temporary shrines—propping up framed photographs of the men and women they’d lost—to remind TOTE’s executives and lawyers, Captain Neubauer and the coast guard, and all parties of the human side of the loss. Lives were broken. They wore custom T-shirts emblazoned with EL FARO 33 remembrances. They listened respectfully, took notes, and occasionally shook their heads in disgust during testimony. Their loved ones were gone; they were there to find out why.
Most of the people occupying those first three rows were related to the unlicensed seamen, including Jill Jackson-d’Entremont and Glen Jackson who’d lost their brother Jack Jackson; Marlena Porter, wife of AB James Porter; Val Champa who’d lost her son Louis Champa; Rochelle Hamm, wife of Frank Hamm; Pastor Green, stepfather of LaShawn Rivera; and Gina Lightfoot, sister of the boatswain Roan Lightfoot. For the most part, they lived near Jacksonville. Up north, where most of the officers resided, those left behind tried their best to pick up the pieces, catching snippets of the hearings when they could. A few officers’ relatives, including Rich Pusatere’s father (retired and based in New York) and Steven Shultz’s wife (who lived in Florida) attended many of the hearings.
The media sat on the other side of the room. TV cameras lined the back. Two court stenographers sat at the ready. In front of the proscenium was a witness table equipped with a couple of microphones.
Around the world, mariners watched the hearings via Livestream.
The first witness was Phil Morrell, vice president of Marine Operations, Commercial for TOTE Services. He was an executive high up on TOTE’s organizational chart responsible for the operations of the company’s fleet of ships. The line of questioning quickly established that Morrell had no direct marine experience. He was a budget guy, a numbers guy. He described a multitude of entities within his company—Saltchuk, TOTE Services, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico, TOTE Maritime Alaska. He sometimes struggled to name his fellow executives’ titles and responsibilities, evidence of the recent restructuring. Until 2013, he’d only been responsible for the Alaska trade. Following the firings and corporate shuffling, his workload doubled. He now had to oversee the company’s Puerto Rican outfit from Tacoma, Washington, thirty-seven hundred miles away.
For the past few years, Morrell said, he’d been focused on getting the new LNG ships ready for Puerto Rico. He knew remarkably little about ship operations—how cargo got ordered and found its way to the ship, how it was loaded, and how it got to its destination. But he wanted to make one point very clear: the ship’s captain was in charge of the vessel at sea. “The master is in charge of the voyage plan and voyage preparation,” he said. If the captain had a question about anything while en route, he was basically on his own.
From the point of view of admiralty law, this was a smart position for Morrell to take. The Limitation of Liability Act, passed in 1851, caps a shipowner’s liability to the value of the ship, if the accident is not caused by the vessel owner’s neglect or malfeasance. In other words, as long as a shipping company doesn’t interfere with its captain’s decisions while he or she is at sea, explains admiralty and maritime lawyer Chris Hug, vessel owners can limit their liability when the causes of the accident occurred without their “privity or knowledge.”
Shipping was a risky business throughout the nineteenth century; Congress believed that its role was to shelter owners from lawsuits and egregious payouts. Now much of American admiralty law focuses on who is responsible for what, and much of it favors the shipowners.
One could say that before the age of satellite communication, the Limitation of Liability Act made a certain amount of sense. When a vessel was out of sight of land, its owners had no means of contacting it. At that point, how could they prevent their officers from making fatal decisions? Holding a shipping company accountable didn’t seem fair. But these days, the law seems profoundly anachronistic. It could even encourage deliberate negligence.
When at sea, TOTE’s ships sent noon reports via email to nearly everyone in the office, but no one was specifically charged with monitoring these reports. With the elimination of the port captain—the one member of the organization who would have been fully dedicated to the ship’s operations at sea—there was a gaping hole in management. When El Faro steamed into Joaquin, no one at TOTE was specifically responsible for watching the weather or tracking the ships, and from a liability standpoint, that fact absolved TOTE from responsibility.
After the sinking of El Faro, those who tried to make claims against the company—either for loss of life or loss of cargo—came up against the limitation law. Families of the dead were dismayed to discover that they had the burden of proving that the company’s deliberate malfeasance led to the vessel’s unseaworthiness, which led to its undoing. The law even precluded the plaintiffs’ right to a jury trial. All families would eventually settle with the company for undisclosed amounts.
During the hearings, the coast guard repeatedly tried to find ways to hold TOTE responsible for the accident. Morrell was asked, “Who at TOTE oversaw things related to the ships’ operation such as voyage planning, anchoring, maneuvering, pilot-master exchanges, and the route ships are taking at sea?”
“That’s managed on board by the captain,” Morrell answered. “That’s all managed on board by the captain,” he repeated. “He has total responsibility for all of that work.” The men and women behind him rolled their eyes and squirmed in their seats. So this is how it was going to go.
Morrell, along with all of TOTE’s executives, maintained that they followed the letter of the law. They adhered to all ship inspection guidelines and paid for any necessary repairs. Their paperwork was flawless. On board, their crew followed the international standards for watch-keeping. If anyone was overworked aboard El Faro, it was their own fault.
If Morrell’s responses seemed slightly defensive, his boss’s testimony seemed the epitome of executive evasion. Throughout Rear Admiral Philip Greene’s full day of testimony, he continually praised the managers of his company in breathless tones, extolling their leadership qualities, praising their expertise and supreme focus on safety. As the day wore on, his platitudes must have been sickening to those seeking contrition from the company that had allowed not one—but two—of its ships to sail into a hurricane.
Tom Roth-Roffy spoke for many when he expressed confusion about the labyrinthine corporate structure.
Greene took the opportunity to clear the air: “In the fall of 2012, TOTE Services, as part of branding alignment, underwent a name change to TOTE Services. And in February of 2013, I was appointed president of TOTE Services, with a charge to grow the company. Because it’s a phenomenal company with a great base of business, fine reputation, but an opportunity to grow as well within the field of vessel management.
“A part of that change of management involved a couple of things. One: assimilating technical management of the TOTEm and Sea Star line vessels under one entity, which happened to be TOTE Services, a vessel management company. Another initiative was reviewing and ultimately deciding to relocate the company from where it had been located within the New York, New Jersey, Philly area for almost forty years. In my humble opinion, Jacksonville was a positive place to come because of the workforce here, the synergy with a sister company that was here, and proximity on the East Coast. It was also a part of assimilating what was called TOTE – TOTEm Vessel operations which provided an excellent opportunity to revisit the structure of TOTE Services’s organizational structure.
“Along with that we also had a very important, in 2013 and into 2014, effort for financial backbone alignment with our shared service platform and basically, taking the ethos and leadership philosophy of our leadership team and spreading them effectively across our organization. So it was very exciting as we undertook these change management things, but it was done in a very methodical planned way, realizing first and foremost that safety programs and other key elements that sustain fleet readiness are kept uppermost in our minds.
“Obviously we had employees that chose to move with us from New Jersey to Jacksonville, but some didn’t, which afforded us the opportunity to then bring on new and talented employees from the Jacksonville area. And we also brought carryover employees who had great backgrounds and experience from the TOTEm and Sea Star organizations as they assimilated into TOTE Services.
“In July 2014, we stood up our new headquarters here in Jacksonville in what I thought was a well-planned-out, seamless transition in a purpose-filled space that fit my philosophy of transparency, communication, and teamwork. And then, from that point [we] have continued to emphasize business processes, continuous improvement in all that we do, which by the way is a cornerstone of the ISM system. And we are now well established and very pleased to be here in Jacksonville. Great city and great people.”
Tom Roth-Roffy wasn’t sure what to do with all that corporate-speak, so he continued to pursue hard facts. He wanted to know why Captain Davidson’s file was thin, and why he’d received only one official job evaluation during his two-year tenure with TOTE. If the company was working as well as Greene implied, things like captains’ evaluations should happen like clockwork, especially when they’re being considered for new positions.
Tom asked, “Is there some management process to track the completion of performance evaluations within the HR function?”
Greene replied that, as president of the company, he didn’t expect such petty paperwork issues to rise to his level. Besides, he added, the officers aboard his ships had attended marine academies and were licensed by the US Coast Guard. Why would anyone ever question their judgment?
“I would like to think that the United States Coast Guard under Homeland Security delivers requirements that are respected, that are creditable, and that we’re proud of . . .” Greene said.
“And I would hope that our credentialing process represents the fact that we’re producing the finest officers to sail on our ships [that] the world can provide. And I know that our training institutions—from the United States Merchant Marine Academy, to our state academies, to the Coast Guard Academy, to our other institutions—we all could be proud that we deliver for our country. I believe that the American Maritime Officers and the Seafarers International Union the unions that TOTE uses to staff its [vessels] represent a gold standard. I’m proud of our officers and our men and women who sail on the ships.”
Sitting in the hearing room, I found it fascinating to watch corporate America wrangling with government America. Members of the Marine Board were looking for answers in earnest; highly paid shipping executives were filibustering. Pricey lawyers representing TOTE were running interference. It was clear that Greene could go on all day about how proud he was of his company. He seemed perfectly comfortable spewing nonsense that flew in the face of facts.
Captain Neubauer pressed on, trying in vain to pinpoint specific issues within the company’s policy that could have led to El Faro’s ill-fated voyage. “If the TOTE Services master communicated a voyage plan that was considered manifestly unsafe by the company,” he asked, “who at the company has the duty and the authority to intervene? Who would have that authority?”
Greene replied, “With all due respect, Captain, our masters wouldn’t do that.”
The profound irony washed over the room. “[TOTE’s captains] wouldn’t create a voyage plan, in my estimation, that was anything but based on their immense credentials, their qualifications, and their recognition for the voyage at hand.”
Had the voyage of El Faro sailed into a hurricane of fake news?
Then Greene passed the buck. It was as if this whole business was beneath him.
“Sir,” Greene continued, “I’m the president of the company with twenty-six ships in a fleet. I provide strategic direction. I have qualified individuals within the portfolio areas, officers in the company. I expect them to dedicate the time that is required and necessary and appropriate to fulfill their duties in the capacities that they serve. And I rely and trust and count on them to do that, as I oversee a significant company.”
Later that day, Commander Mike Odom, the former rescue swimmer, focused on procedural operations once again. Odom was one of the coast guard’s few traveling ship inspectors who go around the world boarding vessels to make sure they comply with the most current regulations. He’d seen a lot of questionable practices in the American merchant marine.
Odom asked whether TOTE had developed contingency plans that would guide how shoreside personnel dealt with a vessel in specific emergency situations. He was thinking about the hurricane—a very specific situation, but an expected one, considering the fact that TOTE sailed in the Caribbean. What was TOTE’s directive to its employees when a massive hurricane threatened its assets?
Once again, Greene replied that TOTE followed the letter of the law, implying that if there was a failure, it wasn’t the company’s fault, it was the law’s. He said on no uncertain terms that TOTE’s safety management system (SMS) complied with the US Coast Guard’s regulations. Which it did.
In fact, those regulations are pretty loose. Instead of providing a model or clear guidelines, the coast guard merely requires that shipping companies have a safety management system. That’s like making a kid take a test that her teacher will never grade. What incentive does that kid have to do a good job?
The law says that every company has to have some kind of manual that details how crew and shoreside management should deal with various situations. The specifics of that manual—how it’s written, what it covers, how it addresses each anticipated issue—are left up to the individual company. No one approves or evaluates it. The coast guard would like to be more proscriptive about the contents of these manuals, but there’s a tacit agreement that any additional guidance would burden shipping companies.
In contrast, the International Maritime Organization (the branch of the UN dedicated to regulating shipping) issued an International Maritime Safety Code in 1987 in response to a spate of accidents caused by major management errors. This code, adopted by most of the world’s merchant fleet (with the exception of the US), offers clear SMS guidelines, has been continually tested and updated, and has resulted in safer shipping worldwide.
Before the hearings, members of the Marine Board asked TOTE how the company’s staff learned about this SMS, and TOTE said that everyone aboard its ships was required to read and understand the manual. The coast guard pressed TOTE for more training information. After all, the SMS was useless if no one in the company was familiar with its standards and protocols. Especially in the event of an emergency, who had the time to digest a manual? So, the coast guard wanted to know, how did TOTE make sure everyone knew what was in that document?
Well, TOTE answered, we have a training video that the crew is required to watch. After much prodding, TOTE produced a VHS copy of said video. But they couldn’t locate a VCR to watch it.
“I understand you’re telling me that your safety management system is in compliance with the treaty,” Odom said to Greene. “But did you have specific plans that identified specific emergencies? Did you have contingency plans based on known risks to your vessels along with plans required by the code to support the vessels from shoreside?”
“You know, I don’t have them in front of me,” Greene said. “I’m the president of the company. I have a staff that administers this.”
Exasperated, Odom lost a bit of composure: “But did you guys ever have any discussions about the hurricane season? Not specific to the vessel, but in the company? Did you guys ever discuss hurricanes, upcoming hurricane season, and have any type of scenario, an exercise, training, or any of that with respect to the weather alert season?”
“We addressed the season last year by promulgating the safety alert that you’ve highlighted as an exhibit,” Greene replied dryly. He was referring to a brief memo sent to all TOTE shipmasters at the beginning of the 2015 hurricane season reminding them that it was hurricane season.
Throughout his daylong testimony, Greene maintained that his employees were above reproach, that TOTE’s mariners were the world’s best, and that they complied with all national standards and regulations. But the evidence didn’t support that. A month after El Faro went down, TOTE issued its monthly safety memo—a roundup of lessons learned in the past thirty days—to its staff. There was no mention of the cargo ship that had been lost under their watch. Apparently, there were no safety lessons to be gleaned from the loss of El Faro.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, CAPTAIN EARL LOFTFIELD, ONE OF THE MASTERS OF EL Yunque, gave the public the first inside look at what it was like to work at TOTE. Like many captains, Loftfield was a passionate yet practical man. He loved the sea but understood his role in the larger shipping system.
Loftfield had worked for TOTE for more than a decade. He was the man who mastered El Yunque out of Jacksonville to Puerto Rico on October 2, the day after El Faro disappeared. The experience of steering through the sister ship’s wake weighed on him heavily.
Loftfield was a literary man, drawn to poetry and proverbs. Shortly after his return from that voyage, he published a piece called “The Sister’s Journey” on his union’s website. It was there that he reprinted an email he sent to John Lawrence on October 4, 2015, at 10:30 a.m., as his ship encountered the last remains of El Faro:
“Latitude 23-23.910N, Longitude 073-57.451W. This is the apparent point of origin for plume of oil rising and creating a slick. At this location, oil was black on the water and air smelled strongly of same. We found the slick after traveling through a debris field for 25 miles, at times having as many as fifty simultaneous sightings of pieces of insulated containers.”
On the following day, Loftfield gathered his crew in the mess hall of El Yunque to debrief. Of that event, he wrote, “Significance of what we have witnessed is acknowledged. The Pain. The Rage. The Knowing. Cautionary mention of predators ashore wanting to exploit the grieving and the possibility of ‘hearing the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.’”
Five days later, he held a memorial on the deck of El Yunque. “Crew gathered on the bow,” he wrote. “Moonless night. Sea was flat. Eternity over the rail. With each of 33 strikes of the ship’s bell, a flower was dropped in the water. Our ritual is complete. The mark on our souls will endure forever.”
The heavens sent signs, which he recorded: “Lightning began far in the distance—two points to port and continued throughout the watch. A meteor burned bright, arcing towards the lightning. We sailors see what we see and have our judgments about what is indicated.”
Loftfield addressed the Marine Board in measured tones and chose his words carefully. He said that he was deeply fond of the Ponce-class ships: “They made them long and skinny and aggressive looking, sort of like a barracuda. They’re very attractive, with a very pointy front end and a very pointy stern. Like a ’70s muscle car, which has a lot of steel on it.” He was such a fan of the ships that in 2010, he invited John Glanfield and other former Sun Ship employees to tour El Faro when she was docked in Philadelphia. Glanfield was thrilled to be aboard one of his babies again.
But, Loftfield told the board, the ships had their limitations. Although TOTE’s safety management system recommended that crew maintain stability with ballasting or by moving cargo, Loftfield said that that just wasn’t possible at sea on the Ponce-class ships. Their design didn’t offer a lot of ballasting flexibility, and you certainly couldn’t shift around shipping containers without cranes.
Further, the ships’ streamlined shape made them less stable in the water. To illustrate his point, Loftfield introduced the concept of “block coefficient,” a ratio that defines a vessel’s stability by comparing the shape of its hull to a solid box. The more you camber the sides of a boat’s hull to reduce drag, the tippier it gets. Think of a flat-bottomed skiff versus a narrow and shapely kayak. A barge, which is shaped as much like a block as any ship (and, therefore, is very inefficient from a drag perspective), has 100 percent block coefficient, Loftfield noted. A racing sloop, with its sharply angled deep keel, has a very small block coefficient.
“Modern [cargo] ships have a much larger block coefficient than the PONCE class ships,” Loftfield said. New ships, he said, look like a solid block of steel. The Ponce-class ships were all curves. “When the [El Faro] was tied to the dock,” he said, “out of 790 feet, there’s maybe 120 feet that actually touches the dock. For a barge, the entire length touches the dock.” El Faro was designed for speed, not stability.
Loftfield also addressed the question of securing the scuttles. He said that chief mates would go down through the hatches to check the holds for water, but there weren’t any scheduled rounds to ensure the hatches were secured. Once again, the responsibility to keep the ship watertight was everybody’s job. Hence, nobody’s.
Keith Fawcett, another Marine Board investigator, wanted to understand how TOTE operated after El Faro was lost. Did the company change at all? “Did they talk to you or communicate to you or discuss this at all with your sailing?”
“It was certainly on everybody’s mind,” Loftfield answered. But he made it evident that there was no formal response.
Then the captain expressed, better than anyone else could, some fundamental truths about the shipping industry: “In terms of sailing, it’s what I do. It’s what the ship does. It may seem cold and inhuman, but it’s the job. It’s why we’re here. So yes, there’s a casualty or there’s a mystery, there’s an unknown, it’s not business as usual, but we’ve got to go on with business. The shelves in Costco and Walmart [in Puerto Rico] emptied out after the sinking of El Faro and we were the link—El Yunque was the link—supplying an entire population. There was a job to do.”
In his mind, Loftfield could balance the horror of losing El Faro with the demands of his job. When he sailed to San Juan two days after the sister ship went down, he recalls: “We had the rather amazing experience of crossing right through the debris field with all hands on lookout and finding where the oil was bubbling up from El Faro and passing directly over it. And an eerie calm passed throughout the entire place. It was after we had finally passed the oil slick and debris field that we came back up to speed. We got to Puerto Rico as quickly as possible.”