Run the Storm is a work of nonfiction. The author has drawn on thousands of pages of documentation from three separate hearings and separate working groups conducted by the US Coast Guard and the federal National Transportation Safety Board to solve the mystery of what happened to El Faro. The hearings, conducted by maritime experts, called scores of witnesses and were followed by months of painstaking analysis. The author has supplemented the record with dozens of interviews with family members, former officers and crew, search-and-rescue personnel, government officials and spokespersons, independent mariners, meteorologists, and others.
This book also draws heavily on the twenty-six consecutive hours of bridge conversation and other data recovered from the vessel’s black box, or voyage data recorder. The drama of hearing the actual voices affords a unique, if emotionally difficult, opportunity to understand firsthand what El Faro’s crew were thinking and doing as they sailed into the wrath of Hurricane Joaquin. The conversations used are all direct quotes; they have been edited only for coherence and to avoid repetition, and occasionally to restore some government-redacted salty language used by the crew. In all cases the guiding principle was to remain faithful to meaning and context.
Most important, this fact remains: there are no witnesses to recount exactly what happened to El Faro as she went into the storm. The VDR gives us a tremendously useful and accurate tool to track decisions and anxiety levels on the bridge, so when an action is clearly implied by both a conversation and the overall likelihood of its taking place—such as when a navigating officer points out course details, implying that he or she is looking at a chart—that action is described accordingly.
Except in instances when both sides of a phone or radio dialogue could be heard, conversations in the rest of the ship went unrecorded, and so description of what happened in, say, the galley or engine room must be based on guesswork. But any ship relies on solid, recurrent routines to function, and a ship on “liner” service, as El Faro was, making exactly the same passage, week in, week out, year in, year out, enjoys more fixed routines than most. The mariners standing an 8:00 a.m. to noon watch, for example, always woke well before eight to eat breakfast; they always reported to the bridge, or the engine-room control flat, fifteen minutes before their watch started, as is the custom on shipboard. The watch rosters and schedules on El Faro were well-known and apparently adhered to rigidly on all her voyages. The VDR transcript in almost every instance indicates that crew members and officers stuck by those routines exactly, and while the author is careful to indicate that unrecorded events are presumed, rather than certain, he has faithfully described unrecorded actions of the crew based on what they would normally have done aboard El Faro on the southbound leg of her journey.