Lashawn Rivera shows his TWIC, the federal Transportation Worker Identification Credential that allows him into secure harbor areas, to the guards at the Blount Island Marine Terminal checkpoint. He drives down four-lane roadways through flat country quivering with Florida heat; past warning signs and CCTV cams, a totem anchor, cargo areas for different companies, to his company’s zone at the island’s southwest corner. There he parks in a slot reserved for mariners, between Cyclone fences topped with barbed wire, stacks of white containers marked TOTE, and the company’s harbor office.
Rivera is thirty-two, maybe five foot ten, of medium build; he has a trimmed beard and mustache and hair frizzed in dreadlocks to his shoulders. He is chief cook on the SS El Faro, and this does not afford him a lot of time ashore, given that he must ensure a lunch of cold cuts, sandwiches, and a salad bar is available for the unloading crew and for shipmates who stay on board for loading.
Maybe, before opening his door to the late-September heat, Rivera takes a minute in the arctic air-conditioning of his Dodge muscle car to look at this ship, docked “starboard-side-to”—the right or starboard flank of her hull snubbed in close against the south-facing wharf. Moored in this way, her sharp bow points upriver, as if reluctant to face the direction in which she is due to sail a few hours from now.
El Faro, seen this close, is a massive flat blue-painted cliff of hull, rising nearly forty feet overhead to the Main Deck. That deck carries a narrow steel balcony all around the hull, the better to support containers. The hull just under the Main Deck is punctuated at intervals by boxy ventilation ducts, as well as by fifteen large rectangular ports through which someone ashore can catch glimpses of work lights and moving truck trailers inside, as of chthonic behemoths restlessly shifting in a cave. The blue cliff is so long it seems to extend, behind a latticework of thick mooring lines, halfway down the island.
To Rivera’s right the ship’s bow, which has a graceful reverse curve to it—like a clipper’s, the top reaching forward much farther than at the waterline as if eager to ride over waves—imparts a feeling of forward motion. The back end, or stern, is flat and vertical, shaped in cross section like the cup of a wineglass. Up two long steel ramps leading to a pair of particularly large openings in the middle and back sections of the starboard side, tractors drag more trailers into the hull.
A stack of seven accommodation decks, usually called the house, painted white, is piled roughly three-quarters of the way down the hull, atop the Main Deck toward the stern; these decks are crowned by a boxy wheelhouse and reach, in a maze of portholes, windows, stairs, and lifeboats, seventy feet over the Main Deck. Atop the wheelhouse an array of radar scanners, satellite receivers, and radio antennas bristle on a tripod mast, almost a hundred feet over the water, near a thirty-foot smokestack rising behind. A chaff of grayish smoke wisps from the red-white-blue-painted stack and is dispersed toward Saint Augustine by a light northerly breeze. SEA STAR is painted in boxy blue letters ten feet high on a steel panel shielding the lower levels of the house. Invisible from where Rivera sits, on the stern, under an American flag flapping listlessly in the near calm, the ship’s name is painted: EL FARO, and her home port, SAN JUAN, PR.
The sight of a great ship getting ready for sea, no matter how often a crew member observes it—even if he, or she, is sick to death of the work and the lonely separation from friends and family it entails and would far rather stay home with a brew in one hand and a loved one in the other—nevertheless triggers a kick of excitement, however habitual and mundane, because of the scale, energy, and organization involved; because this ship constitutes a giant, self-contained world that is busily preparing to come into its own, its true reason for being. Because this blue-hulled world is leaving land, and places that are safe and fixed and known, and wandering onto the face of the deep.
The cook has two daughters of grade-school age; a one-year-old son, Yael; and a fiancée, Vana Jules, who is eight months pregnant. This will be his last round-trip on El Faro for a while since he plans to be home for the birth; he and Jules are due to marry shortly thereafter. Rivera, like many of the ship’s unlicensed crew—the ordinary seamen, engine-room oilers, stewards, and other nonofficers—grew up in North Jacksonville, a rough, largely poor, mostly African-American part of town. It’s a place about which his stepfather, Pastor Robert Green, says, “kids medicate, and someone gets bumped every night.” Rivera was good at sports but rambunctious. “As a boy,” his stepfather says, “he’d fall, hit his head, be bleeding and still going.” In North Jacksonville, clawing clear of the local drugs-crime-prison subculture often goes hand in hand with getting religion, and that was the route Rivera, with the help of his stepfather, ended up taking. In this case, following Jesus also took him to sea. It’s more likely than not, while getting out of his car, that Rivera, who is still highly religious, mutters a quick prayer for his family, for his own safe travels, before hoisting his bag and walking to the gangway.
Two men stand guard at the gangway’s foot. One is the able seaman on watch; the other is a private security guard. The AB on watch for the noon to 4:00 p.m. shift is Larry Davis, and Rivera perhaps shows surprise since everyone knows Larry, who is sixty-three, was planning to retire after the next trip or maybe the one after that, so a shipmate might wonder, “Why is he still here?” Behind the banter, though, lies a darker awareness of the guard, and why he’s checking IDs. Two years ago when El Faro’s sister ship El Morro, under El Faro’s former captain Jack Hearn, docked at Fort Lauderdale, a team of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed aboard and busted two seamen and a bosun,I along with the forty-three pounds of cocaine they were smuggling into Florida. The smugglers went to prison. Tote fired Hearn, as well as another captain and two mates, though it was clear they had nothing to do with the smuggling and had no suspicion of it. Tote did not sack the current captain, Michael Davidson, who was also aboard but not in command at the time.
Most of El Faro’s crew know each other well and, after months of working smoothly on this “liner” gig back and forth to San Juan, are quietly proud of the discipline and skills that make it possible. The guard is a reminder that discipline and teamwork are not the whole story, and underneath the groomed slope of smooth routines on this ship lie crevasses and fault lines that are no less deep for being, in the main, unacknowledged.
Rivera’s routine takes him up the gangway to the Main Deck, to a companionway at the entry level of the house that leads him up two levels to the kitchens, or galley. On Main Deck his route crosses a path obsessively traveled by the ship’s chief mate, Steven Shultz, second-in-command to the captain.
If Rivera actually sees Shultz, it’s only for a few seconds, a tossed greeting. The chief mate’s job in port is to supervise unloading and loading cargo. Now, in midafternoon, with the 8:00 p.m. departure time posted on a bulletin board, called the sailing board, by the gangway head, Shultz probably feels like the demon charged with running the HVAC of hell—a hell wigged out on methamphetamines to boot, for this must be what Hades is like, in this heat on fried steel decks with 391 heavy containers to be hoisted over and stacked four-deep on Main Deck, plus 118 truck trailers, 149 automobiles, 6 tanks each holding eighteen thousand gallons of fructose syrup, and assorted other loads to be rushed, shoved, pumped, and shoehorned into the three enclosed decks below.
El Faro was built as a Ro-Ro: a roll-on, roll-off ship whose cargo largely consisted of the kind of trailers you see dragged in eighteen-wheeled rigs on America’s highways, as well as other wheeled vehicles that could be driven aboard and unloaded under their own steam. In 2006 she was modified to carry shipping containers, large rectangular steel boxes full of assorted goods, on the Main Deck, thus increasing her capacity for freight of all kinds.
Now giant gantry cranes that look like light-blue, mutated Meccano vultures with jibs eighty feet high prey on the box-shaped carrion. They roll on rails and steel wheels as they claw up containers of various lengths—twenty, forty-five, fifty-three feet—and lower them, according to a set schedule, on the ship’s top deck and atop previously loaded containers both forward of and behind the house. Longshoremen fasten the top containers to the next ones down with twist locks, metal mechanisms that insert a thick, half-flanged bolt up and down into adjacent, horizontal ovals on the two containers; when rotated the bolts turn the flange across the narrow sections of oval to lock the boxes together. The lower containers are either locked in the same way or tied down with steel rods hooked in a cross-breast pattern, upper left corner of the container to a purchase under its lower right, top right to bottom left, and tightened with threaded steel tubes the size of a man’s leg, called turnbuckles. The purchases are usually padeyes or D rings—half circles of steel bolted into a mortise that’s welded onto the deck. The turnbuckles, screwed into opposing threads on the rods, are twisted—the dockers use metal “cheater” bars to lever them around—until the lashings are hard and tight as rifle barrels.
As the containers are being stacked and locked, small diesel-powered tractors, known as yard pigs or hustlers, drag truck trailers to and from giant scales in Tote’s cargo lot. Once the trailers have been weighed, the hustlers haul them fast up the two starboard loading ramps into the depths of El Faro’s highest covered deck, known as 2nd Deck. Those assigned to the two lower decks are either shunted down one of four internal ramps or, for 3rd Deck only, onto a giant, hydraulically powered elevator similar to the aircraft lifts on a Navy carrier. Inside the holds they are parked and chocked in the spaces reserved for them.
These trailers are secured differently from the containers, with a version of the twist-screw known as a Roloc box, essentially a square, vertical bolt linking the trailer’s hitchpin into “buttons,” slotted steel pads welded, like the D-ring mortises, to the deck; that is, if the buttons are not rusted out. If they are corroded, or no button is available, the trailers are lashed down tight with chains at six different points, front and back, right and left; these in turn are hooked into D rings or more distant buttons to prevent rolling. (If the Roloc is functioning, the trailer is secured with two to four extra lashings.)
The scene, if you substitute steel decks and bulkheads for buildings, and orange-jacketed, hard-hatted stevedores for tourists, is as busy as Times Square at rush hour on a Friday evening; everywhere yard pigs snort and roar, dragging in trailers, circling around each other, speeding back down the ramp for another trailer. Containers boom, the gantries whine, cars race down ramps, mates and longshoremen yell; in the thick of loading it gets so loud at times that deckhands use earplugs to cut the noise. It all moves “hard and heavy,” as the saying goes; a foot left too long in one place, a misjudged move can break a leg, cut off an arm. On deck seagulls screech, exhaust is braided into the superheated breeze; and Chief Mate Steve Shultz keeps an eye on all of it, pacing Main Deck, where the boxes are stacked thirty feet above his head, all the way to the raised “forecastle” (pronounced fo’c’sle) at the bow, back to the transom aft; plunging down into the vast echoing neon-shined garage systems of the lower decks, 2nd Deck, then 3rd Deck, to the lowest level of all, known as the Tank Top, set on plates above the ballast and fuel tanks and the steel ribs and shell of the ship’s bottom. It’s a rough job, especially since Tote last month got rid of the shoreside assistant for cargo work, known as “port mate.” Third Mate Jeremie Riehm, who helps out with loading, describes the current process, lacking the extra help, as “a storm of shit.”
Now and again Shultz consults with Riehm; with Second Mate Randolph, who is on cargo duty in the afternoon; with the chief engineer, Richard Pusatere; and with Louis Champa, the ship’s electrician, whose job it is to hook up every one of the 238 refrigerated trailers and containers to the ship’s electrical system and make sure the reefers’ compressors and evaporators, blowers and pumps, are all working and at the right temperature. Ice cream’s in those freezers, and milk, butter, Halloween candy, frozen waffles; the future happiness of Puerto Rico’s kids depends on keeping the contents cold.
At regular intervals Shultz scales the nine flights of stairs to the house’s top deck, just under the bridge (or wheelhouse), to his office, to check if emails containing cargo updates have come in from Tote’s shoreside operation; to make sure the loading schedule is going according to plan. For everything that comes aboard his ship has to be choreographed and stowed according to a precise map and timetable in order to preserve the ship’s stability.
Stability is crucial. This ship took on a tilt, or list, before disappearing; a ship this large and well built should not lean sideways like that, ever—not even, especially not even, in storm.
2
A ship’s stability is a function of two components. One is her center of gravity, which makes sense intuitively: a person holding a heavy suitcase at head level will be far more likely to topple over, because of the levering effect of the body’s length, than if the suitcase were somehow fastened at ankle level. The same is true of a ship whose cargo is carried too high.
The second component is the center of buoyancy, which in turn depends mostly on hull shape. Generally speaking, since light air is what keeps the ship floating on denser water, buoyancy is determined by how much air is contained in the hull. A wide hull tilting (or listing) to port holds a lot more air in the space between its centerline and its port side than would a narrow hull, and all that air will fight whatever force—waves, wind, shifting cargo—is pressing the hull down on that side.
There’s nothing to be done about hull shape, but the center of gravity depends on weight and location of cargo; in loading, the company’s port engineer and El Faro’s chief mate seek to keep the ship’s burden low and evenly spaced, achieving maximum stability for a given freight. The optimum relationship between buoyancy and center of gravity is expressed by a number called the GM margin.II
Computing all this with pen and calculator once required hours of intellectual sweat. A ship’s officer nowadays figures out stability by plugging cargo numbers, as well as figures representing the weight of stores, equipment, ballast (water pumped into bottom tanks to further lower the center of gravity),III and fuel, into a custom-made program called CargoMax and pressing the enter key on his workstation. The GM pops out within seconds.IV
At this stage the preliminary numbers are tallied and organized in Tote’s Blount Island office, where trailers are weighed, bills of lading processed, and loading schedules figured out; not an easy task, as was proved earlier in the day when the ship was loaded too quickly on one side, causing a four-degree list to starboard, which had to be corrected by loading to the opposite side.
Shultz’s job now is to make sure that what went into the CargoMax program is accurate, that the six fructose tanks up forward in the lowest levels of 1- and 2-holds have been pumped as full as possible; that the containers containing hazardous materials have been parked in designated areas and locked down. At least on this trip no cattle or horses are aboard; loading livestock would require that an area aft be set aside for their trailers and feed, and a cabin prepped for their wranglers.
Everywhere Shultz double-checks to make sure the twist-locks are engaged, that chains, bolts, and rods holding down the cargo to buttons and D rings are bar tight, that everything is lashed as strongly as it should be. This is hurricane season, and the National Weather Service says a tropical storm is out there somewhere, though it’s not supposed to amount to much. The Tote ships on the Puerto Rico run are fast; if a hurricane develops, they can easily outrun it, and therefore they are rarely affected by dangerous weather. But rough seas are always possible, and loose lashings on any one of the stacked containers topside, or the lined-up trailers below, can have a domino effect as the container or trailer works against its lashings, loosening them further, and then the cargo slides harder and faster and in the end breaks what ties it down. “It’s only seventy [-gauge] chain,” says Olabode “Odd Rod” Borisade, a former longshoreman who used to tie down cargo on El Faro. “It’s not going to hold a forty-thousand-pound container.” Chain of this strength is commonly rated to hold up to sixty-six hundred pounds working load, with a breaking strength of twenty-six thousand pounds, insufficient to restrain a large box. Once adrift the container will start to bang or roll into the cargo beside, the lashings of which will loosen in turn, and so forth.
Tote apparently has printed a short “lashing manual” to ensure consistent tie-down, but several longshoremen say they’ve never seen it. And no one has ordered extra securing gear, called storm lashings, which would require that more chains, rods, and hooks be brought to the ship and fitted. This would mean a lot more work; with no clear and present threat on the horizon Shultz has gone along with this decision and runs the usual sailor’s controlled tumble down the steep companionways to check again the situation on 2nd Deck, where the second mate is working.
3
Shultz, along with everyone else, likes working with the second mate, and not just because Danielle Randolph is cute and female in an industry where, even now, women are rare as snow in Florida; there is one other female aboard El Faro, Mariette Wright, an AB. In this environment guys can get sick of the preponderant locker-room maleness, the harsh angles and fart jokes. Danielle Randolph, sometimes called Dany, is “five foot nothin’,” her mother’s description, of rounded, compact build, hair either light brown or dirty blond depending on how much sun has got to it; a heart-shaped face, slightly aquiline nose, and a wide-open smile that narrows her North Sea–hued eyes into an expression that seems to say, “Mischief? Bring it on!”—or if not mischief exactly, certainly a joke. She likes cracking one-liners as much as she enjoys fielding them and is quick as hell at getting any joke you throw at her.
Randolph, like most, is the balance of her contradictions. She is gregarious, cheerful, easy to get along with; open to everyone, officers and unlicensed mariners alike. But when it comes to her job she is dead serious. Her MO is to define exactly what has to be done and then do it now, all the way and right. Although she was brought up in Rockland, Maine, a town still hungover from the hard-ass cultural brew of coastal schooners and the lobster fishery; though both her parents are ex-military and she was raised in a house where orders were orders and you obeyed first and asked questions later; although, like Captain Davidson and two of the engineers, she graduated from Maine Maritime Academy, which like other US maritime academies is run along military-service lines with half an eye to spawning tame naval officers, which means in turn that discipline is prized as much as or more than other qualities; she is not afraid to speak up when she sees a better way of doing things.
At work she wears a worn jumpsuit, construction boots. Under a hard hat a faded kerchief lashes down her hair. Yet her mother, Laurie Bobillot, describes her as “a real girlie girl,” who once painted her cabin pink and collects Barbie dolls; who sells Mary Kay cosmetics in her spare time;V who loves dressing up in 1950s skirts, makeup, and heels, and riding around in her dad’s 1948 Chevy Fleetside.
A lot of bullshit is spoken and written, mostly by people who don’t ship out, about the lure of the sea, the romance of seafaring. Any merchant mariner knows only too well how hard, boring, lonely, and sometimes cruel the trade often is; most everyone on commercial ships would not be out there if the job didn’t pay pretty well. But if anyone has a calling for this trade, and a feel for how ships work, it is this thirty-four-year-old woman. “Her first day of kindergarten I took her to school,” Laurie Bobillot recalls. “I was crying like a damn fool; she looks up at me and says, ‘Mommy, how’m I gonna learn about boats and the sea if I don’t go to school?’ ” Randolph applied to one college only. Ever since graduating from Maine Maritime she has worked on ships happily, enthusiastically. She once consoled her mother, who was worrying about some of the risks her daughter took at work, by saying, “Shipping out is dangerous, life is dangerous. But if something happens to me when I’m at sea, it’s where I want to be.”
And yet, before she boarded the flight to Jacksonville for this last rotation, Randolph for the first time expressed doubts about going; even thought, or so she told her mother, of asking Tote to find another mate to replace her for this trip. Partly it’s because she loves Christmas, all the snow and carols and sugared cookies of it, and this cycle will keep her away from home for the holidays. And partly it’s just a funny feeling. Randolph is the opposite of psychic, she is focused on tools and jobs and conscious logic; she knows that everyone gets a weird feeling now and again on the order of “Maybe this will be the plane that crashes and I really should change my ticket.” But you don’t want to lose your fare and you don’t change your reservation, the plane lands safely, and the feeling disappears like a dream you neglected to write down.
In any case, a big ship loading for departure—her navigation, cargo, engine, and steward departments all buzzing, thumping, racing, humming with the urgency of getting a job done now because once you’re out there it’s too late—tends to swamp doubt and the luxuries of fantasy in a torrent of deadlines. Randolph, who splits a twelve-hour loading watch with Shultz, must also remember to take a break before her bridge duty starts at midnight. Like many watch standers she takes over-the-counter meds, such as ZzzQuil or Tylenol PM, to sleep; like Riehm and Shultz in particular, she has trouble getting enough snooze-time over her standard four-hours-on, eight-hours-off cycle. When she leaves the ship, her mother says, Randolph spends at least a week sleeping ten to twelve hours a night to catch up. In hearings later, the question of watch officers’ fatigue will crop up again and again.
Today Randolph has another goal to fulfill, one that has no bearing on ship’s business, and to do that she needs to keep an eye out for a new third engineer, Dylan Meklin, who was supposed to report for duty early but did not show up as scheduled.
4
Most of the containers have been loaded by now, almost all the trailers jockeyed into place by dockworkers and lashed down. The Jacksonville stevedores are used to this work and know their jobs, and they know Shultz and Randolph and Jeremie Riehm, the third mate, and in that knowledge of shared competence Shultz and the mates get along with shoreside but still everything has to be double-checked. At forty years of age El Faro is an old lady, and old ships rust, and a lot of the buttons and D rings are clogged with rotted metal and, if they’re seized up, have to be reamed out with a specialized tool, designed and hammered into a combination crowbar and pick by the previous captain, Hearn. Not all can be rescued, however; no one even knows how many D rings are deficient, since no program is in place to log, test, or replace them; and for this voyage a number of containers and trailers have been secured “off-button,” meaning they are not lashed to anything more secure than the next container over, or (in the case of trailers) to a chain stretched to a working D ring. Most of the cars are stored on the lowest deck, Tank-Top, where chains are stretched across the ship’s width and the cars then individually lashed to the chains; a method that speeds up the loading process, but contravenes Tote’s own guidelines.VI
Now the nine watertight gates that section off the vast parking spaces of the lower decks are hydraulically shut and locked, thus defining 1-, 2-, and 3-holds, counting aft.VII The closing and bolting—“dogging,” in the lingo—of both the massive gates (all are over two hundred square feet) and of smaller watertight access doors within those gates must be carried out, verified, and logged by a mate. One former bosun describes the process as complicated enough that the gates between 2A- and 3-holds are at times not securely locked. Kurt Bruer says two of the nine gates seldom closed completely. In March of 2014 El Faro’s gates failed inspection due to significant leakage around the doors’ seals and dogs.
On the 2nd Deck, seven scuttles—round hatches ringed by steel lips, or coamings, a couple of feet high and painted yellow—carry covers that are locked by four large movable bolts, cranked home into the coaming lips by wheel-driven gears. Gaskets along the covers’ inner edge deter waves, which in heavy seas will break through the thirty big ports (fifteen on each side) opening onto 2nd Deck, from sloshing down into the dry decks below. The integrity of the scuttles is important, for not only is 2nd Deck accessible to the elements, but it is much more open lengthwise than the other cargo decks. Only one bulkhead, or watertight steel wall, bisects this deck, between 2A- and 2-holds, whereas bulkheads break up the lower decks at each end of the five holds. Any water entering 2nd Deck will thus have relatively more space to run and do damage. Moreover, some of the scuttles lie in an angle between ventilation housings and the ship’s side, and water tends to collect there when the ship rolls. The scuttles are all supposed to be dogged before sailing; a quick three-quarter turn of the wheel on top is all it takes to secure them. But the wheels look the same open or closed; there is no way to check visually if the bolts have slotted home and, whereas standard procedure with the big gates is to log every time they are touched, the scuttles’ status is not recorded. Some of the bolts, too, are worn. And no one checks the gaskets; the consensus is that only a shipyard test, using high-pressure hoses, could assess their continuing integrity.
Where daylight is not masked by overcast, it’s starting to pull long, ash-colored shadows from the Dames Point Bridge. El Faro, already stained by rust in places—in parts of the ship, some deckhands claim, rust has eaten right through the deck—turns more orange still under a beam of shine filtered horizontally through the pollution from downtown Jacksonville to the west.
A flight of pelicans, like flying machines designed by a committee, cross the sky and splash down awkwardly in a creek separating Blount Island from the mainland. The two Moran tugs that will unstick El Faro from her dock lie moored on the mainland side of the creek, at Dames Point, deck lights burning, a slight thud of diesel emanating from their stacks.
Around the point to the north—hidden among spavined trailer homes, swamp oaks ghouled with Spanish moss, and rotten pilings—lies a small marina, half-peopled with pleasure boats, a few of which are almost as old as El Faro. Just down the creek float a couple of shrimpers, nets splayed for repair. Between the docks and the marina office is Paulie’s dockside bar, open on three sides to the light, warm breeze wafting off the river. It’s a friendly place, sporting the usual maritime kitsch: a yellow life ring, a stretch of fishnet, a stuffed bonito. Signs read FISH NAKED: SHOW OFF YOUR BOBBERS; NO WORKING DURING DRINKING HOURS; $5 CHARGE FOR WHINING; JELL-O SHOT $3.
One or two of El Faro’s crew have been known to slope into Paulie’s for a drink before departure since it has the advantage of being both hidden and a five-minute drive from the secure port area. No alcohol is allowed aboard the ship although, ironically, El Faro has carrried hundreds of thousands of gallons of rum as freight from Puerto Rico to the mainland. Sitting at the south end of the bar, a guy scoring his last cold one before going to sea can keep an eye on the cranes and tell, from their sustained pace or else a slowing in their rhythm, how close he is to sailing.
5
Joaquin.
It starts as a shift in a goatherd’s robes.
Experts in global weather might quibble; they’d claim it really started earlier, at a scale even more minute, such as one stroke of a seagull’s wings over Tasmania, a 2 percent hike in the frog population of a Saskatchewan pond: a function of the Lorenz effect, which posits a snowballing of weather consequences from the tiniest of initial causes. But the first recognizable symptom of the meteorological event that will become Hurricane Joaquin is a new, southerly breeze, very light at first but strengthening, that must disturb the cotton robe of some Omoro herder where he watches his flock in the high mountains of Ethiopia, near the east coast of Africa.
The breeze is scout for a stronger, drier wind blowing north through the Turkana Channel between Kenya’s upcountry and Ethiopia’s highlands. Those mountains flick the breeze upward, where it bumps into a broader rush of warm, wet wind from the summer monsoon, flowing west out of the Indian Ocean. As the two winds touch, a tiny kink happens—a microcosmic roil, a twist of lower pressure in the vast flow of humid, low-pressure monsoon air.
But the roil subsists, becoming its own miniature low-pressure system in the process. Since air always flows from higher pressure to lower, the kink starts to pull in air around it and rides the monsoon’s frontal system as an “African wave,” westward across the continent.
Many such systems do not survive the journey. This one—albeit weakened occasionally by hot, dry blasts of air from the Sahara, and clogged by sand from the same desert;VIII its moisture content boosted at other times by wetter air bouncing off highlands in Congo and Cameroon; like a thirst-mad legionnaire dragging himself over sand dunes to water finally makes it to the Atlantic coast, somewhere around southern Morocco, near the Canary Islands.
Here appears the first sign of Joaquin’s freakish nature, since it’s highly unusual for a potential hurricane to appear in the waters off Morocco. The low-pressure systems that later become hurricanes tend to reach the Atlantic much farther south, between eight and twenty degrees north of the equator, around the latitude of Senegal and the Cape Verde Islands. That latitude is normally free of the eastward-tending, high-altitude jet stream, which at lower levels induces wind shear. Wind shear—winds blowing from varied directions across a vertical column of atmosphere—will rip a low-pressure system apart, and such conditions are the norm where Joaquin shows up, farther north near the Canary Islands. This year, however, is an El Niño year, when the jet stream has been dragged southward by low pressure off South America, leaving the atmosphere off the Canary Islands relatively calm.
Even at its inception, therefore, this pre-Joaquin is a freak system. Yet much of the basic mechanism of meteorology is visible in its formation, such as the destructive force of crosswinds on a low-pressure zone, the strengthening effect of heat and humidity on that zone. The change of state from warm humidity to vapor, the cooling of vapor back into rain, also mirror how El Faro’s steam engine works, and while it’s tempting to spot portent in such shared traits, they are only indicative of how basic to planetary physics are the movement from high to low pressure, the relationship of temperature to evaporation, the cyclic flows of a heat pump.
But how this system transforms now—though it functions according to the same laws as continental weather systems—is so powerful, so dramatic, that it feels more like a science-fiction device; like what happens to a young superhero when he is exposed to the radioactive overdose that endows him with freakish powers, after which this normally meek, unathletic dweeb starts to toss locomotives around like Ping-Pong balls for the hell of it.
The waters of the Atlantic off the Canary Islands in this postsummer season are extraordinarily warm, and they add both heat and humidity to wet, warm air at the low-pressure system’s core. Jazzed on the extra bolus of humid heat, the core starts to rise faster, drawing in more air, which rushes in as wind, further speeding up evaporation; this sucks in more air and stronger winds from all around in a self-sustaining, self-accelerating chain reaction.
6
Dinner on El Faro bears little resemblance to the sumptuous affairs on cruise ships with their creamy linen tablecloths, flower arrangements, haute cuisine, and servile third-world waiters. Two mess halls, one for officers, one for unlicensed personnel, take up the starboard and port sides, respectively, of the mess deck in the house. This is three levels up from the open Main Deck, upon which containers are stacked.IX
The galley and pantries lie between the two eating areas; freezers and other food-storage spaces take up separate spaces on mess deck, which is arranged, like the three accommodation decks above, with a connecting passageway in the shape of a squared horseshoe, open side facing aft. The passageway surrounds a steel casing containing the ship’s boiler-exhaust system, which extends vertically to the smokestack. Living spaces are lined up on the horseshoe’s outer edge, while utility areas—for laundry, linen, and other stores—lie inside, next to the casing.
The galley is the usual food-service warren of stainless-steel ranges, fryolators, cabinets, and harsh neon, with lockers and refrigerators bolted against the bulkhead. Here, safe and protected in his domain, Lashawn Rivera is apt to talk football with Lonnie Jordan as Jordan, the assistant steward, baker, and breakfast chef, pulls a tray of Stouffer’s rolls from the oven.
The crew’s mess is an equally functional area, little different from the average office canteen except that the tables are bolted down against the ship’s motion. As elsewhere on the ship the color scheme is largely industrial, gray-speckled decks, off-white walls. A few safety posters—one of them urges deckhands to lift with the legs, not with the back—and framed images of El Faro in Alaska and Kuwait, relieve the walls’ monotony. Serving arrangements are curiously formal. Deckhands and oilers pick their choices off a menu, and the cook and stewards load the plates and hand them out through an access hatch between galley area and mess. The two menus for each main meal usually include two of the three staples: beef, chicken, fish. Sometimes Rivera will tweak the dishes in the direction of soul or Latino food to please the unlicensed personnel.
The officers’ mess looks no different except that, in deference to the officers’ loftier position in the chain of command, the tables are neatly set by the chief steward, Ted Quammie, who combines the positions of waiter, concierge, and stores manager; essentially, with Rivera’s help, he runs the ship’s housekeeping side.
Quammie is sixty-seven but doesn’t look his age. He smiles often, one of those soft smiles that people sometimes rely on without knowing it to make daylight a bit brighter, in good part because the man behind the smile is nonjudgmental and reliably kind. Though he talks as easily as he grins, he rarely mentions his personal life. His accent, which comes from an English-speaking island in the Caribbean, no one seems to be quite sure which, kneads the vowels till they seem soft and full of colors and adds to the comforting effect.
In one corner of the crew’s mess the Polish riding gang sit on their own. “Riding gang” is the mariner’s term for workers not part of the normal crew or watch schedules. These men work a full twelve-hour day shift and, when they get off, talk among themselves in what to the rest of the crew is a strange code of n’s, sh’s, and y’s. They are all welders and pipe fitters this trip; two electricians, their projects done, have just been sent home from Jacksonville. Only two of the men, Marcin Nita and Piotr Krause, speak any English, so none of the regular crew knows what they’re talking about except sometimes Jeff Mathias, the chief engineer assigned by Tote to supervise their work, who spends a lot of time asking Krause or Nita to translate.
On departure it’s common for the captain to host a meal for available officers and the various Tote personnel responsible for arranging cargo and ship’s business ashore. On this evening at the butt end of September, Tim Neeson, Tote’s port engineer, is finishing up a discussion about payroll with the captain.
Here, too, a landsman’s romantic view of the sea falls somewhat short of the truth. Instead of standing eagle-eyed at the helm, the master of a large commercial ship delegates most of the traditional captain’s duties to his or her mates,X and in such a system a good part of the skipper’s job consists of fielding reports from subordinates and dealing with paperwork: overtime, requests for equipment, company forms. Given that much of the office work must be printed out and physically logged, digitization has not lightened this workload much. Officers who trained to work with salt and steel, charts and weather, often resent the desk-job aspect of a captain’s brief.XI
But a captain learns not to betray his thoughts, let alone resentments, and Davidson seems at ease and comfortable, lounging at the dinner table on the evening of September 29, cool in the air-conditioned house, while the chief steward stacks plates and the sunset paints peach tones on a bulkhead. In any event he’s unlikely to be worrying now about the balance between paperwork and deck duties. Davidson is an athletic man with close-cropped silver hair, an engaging grin, a friendly manner. Though of average height, he is known for his outsize appetite. Usually he orders both menus at dinner.
Some masters, mates even, take refuge in their authority as officers and refrain from talking to deck or engine peons except when giving orders. Davidson harbors no such prejudices. This might in part be due to his down east background; like Danielle Randolph, like Third Engineer Michael Holland, like the new third engineer, Dylan Meklin, Davidson is a native of coastal Maine and a graduate of Maine Maritime Academy in Castine. The no-bullshit culture of the Maine coast includes a healthy contempt for authority, or at least for authority that is unearned.XII Davidson’s family had a summer home on Great Diamond Island and he grew up sailing. While in his teens he worked as a deckhand on Maine State ferries running across Casco Bay, an area known for its fogs and nor’easter storms. He earned his coastal captain’s license at an early age, and it could be that being promoted “through the hawsepipe” on ships too small to tolerate caste systems had something to do with his egalitarian style.
Those who have shipped with “Captain Mike,” as he is often called, know him to be a skilled and professional mariner, someone who worked on tankers in Alaska, where rough seas are run-of-the-mill. On El Faro he has surely been keeping a close eye on the weather, which an expert captain will do almost instinctively, especially in Florida during hurricane season. Without a doubt he has repeatedly checked the principal sources of meteorological information on El Faro as they are emailed to his office workstation and relayed to a console on the bridge.
7
The forecast a Tote master consults, and which Michael Davidson is using to plan this voyage, consists of maritime predictions created by the federal National Weather Service, part of NOAA. The predictions for tropical cyclones are generated by a weather service subgroup, the National Hurricane Center, based in Miami. These forecasts are grouped under the headings Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch high seas forecast (TAFB) and SAT-C. They are issued jointly as text messages around five and eleven eastern daylight time, both morning and afternoon (thus 0500, 1100, 1700, and 2300 in ship’s time), over the Inmarsat system, a satellite-based, privately run text/data-transmission service that has replaced long-distance shortwave radio sets on most commercial ships. The service includes not only communication and weather functions but two discrete distress-transmission modes as well.
Inmarsat also provides satellite telephony and email transmissions, which are El Faro’s primary links to shore. The distress function includes GMDSS, for Global Marine Distress and Safety System, capable of transmitting a preformatted, ship-specific distress call with either automated or manually inputted position information in a text to the ship’s owner and the Coast Guard; and a more specialized, “covert” function called SSAS (Ship Security Alert System), which does the same thing only without any outward alarms or confirmation of transmission in case of takeover by pirates or other security-related emergencies.
Earlier, when the scheduled NWS bulletin was due, Davidson probably left his stateroom and climbed one level up to the bridge, where he checked the Inmarsat console for the NWS bulletin, to compare Joaquin’s projected track to El Faro’s route off Florida’s eastern coast.
The morning forecast today, September 29, puts Tropical Storm Joaquin at latitude 26.6 north, longitude 70.6 west, over five hundred miles east-southeast of Blount Island; the storm is said to be moving 270 degrees, or due west, and slowly, at four knots. Joaquin will remain a tropical storm, the NWS predicts. Its winds will top out at forty to fifty knots on October 1, weaken thereafter. Not much to worry about, though Davidson must bear in mind, as always with a tropical system, that no forecast is foolproof, that a storm can change direction quickly and with little warning.
Catastrophe starts with small details, such as the cross-flip of wind in the Ethiopian highlands that first triggered the low-pressure zone that would become Joaquin. Davidson and his mates do not spot such small seeds of trouble: they are invisible even to experts at the outset. But it is here, in the forecasts, that what will happen to El Faro starts to acquire more visible form; because on September 29 the packages, and the forecast, contain serious, and ominous, mistakes.
At 11:00 a.m. on the day of departure, the predicted position for Joaquin is 180 miles too far northeast. Its wind speed is underestimated by sixty knots. Worst of all, perhaps, this forecast is dismissive of the storm and predicts it will not become a hurricane but will weaken instead and veer, eventually, northward.
Davidson keeps an eye on the Weather Channel on a television in his stateroom—nearly everyone on the ship has a screen mounted on his cabin wall, or bulkhead—but the TV forecasting services, and most forecasters for that matter, are attuned to a land-based clientele, and from what you might glean from the six o’clock news on the twenty-ninth, you’d be forgiven for thinking no storm stewed out there at all.
Before he went to dinner, Davidson would also have checked his office computer for the latest package sent by the bespoke marine-weather service Applied Weather Technology.XIII AWT’s Bon Voyage System, or BVS, sends emails on a schedule roughly concurrent with the National Weather Service’s SAT-C transmission. While AWT bases its predictions for waters around the United States entirely on the National Weather Service forecast, the company enhances those data with fancy, easy-to-read graphics, formatted for Microsoft Outlook, that show various weather events in vividly colored maps and graphs: very high winds are displayed in red, less strong in orange and yellow. The package also includes projections of the effect of wind, waves, and currents on an individual ship’s course, which the NWS does not.
Each ship subscribing to BVS can elect to receive a more specialized “tropical weather update” simply by clicking on the option. This comes in thirty minutes after the main package and elaborates on the basic information sent earlier. But according to BVS, El Faro’s officers never click on the option.
Also, for a further fee and for a specific ship, BVS will plan and recommend tailor-made routes to a given destination that avoid bad weather and maximize fuel efficiency. Tote has not forked over the extra $750 per month, per ship, and no routing advice is included in El Faro’s package.
Just as the Weather Service did, BVS’s email package clearly shows the predicted, westward-trending track of Tropical Storm Joaquin running well to the north of El Faro’s course to San Juan: clear graphic images of a spatial buffer protecting the ship from potential peril. Based on this information, a captain keeping to his usual course would expect seas and winds depicted in yellows and maybe orange, stronger than routine but not unusually so, especially compared to what passes for normal wind and sea conditions on the Alaskan route El Faro ran for years.
The flawed weather predictions are certainly one big reason Davidson does not consider taking a safer, more southerly route to Puerto Rico. Alternate routes from Florida to Puerto Rico are few because the Bahamas chain, to mariners, reads the way a high barrier fence thick with razor wire reads to a horseman. It’s a nightmare of shoals, reefs, and stupidly shallow water. El Faro’s usual path keeps her safely north and east of the chain, in the profoundly deep water over the Nares abyssal plain.
But one deepwater path behind the chain exists: the Old Bahama Channel. It lies much farther southwest of El Faro’s usual route, and even farther from Joaquin’s predicted track on September 29: a line of deep blue running between central Florida and the Bahamas, hugging southern Florida and then—via the Old Bahama Channel proper—the coasts of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All the way to Puerto Rico. Though it adds 160 miles to the trip, it’s not an unusual route: Davidson took it on his way north in mid-August to avoid Tropical Storm Erika, and another Tote captain, Bror Erik Axelsson, is known to have done the same to avoid a different storm. The channel, accessible only from its northern and southern ends and through a handful of winding “holes in the wall,” principally the Northeast Providence Channel between Abaco and Eleuthera Islands, and the Crooked Island Passage between San Salvador and Crooked Island farther south, can seem narrow as it threads between Bahamian sandbars and the big islands of Cuba and Hispaniola to the southwest. And its lack of breadth would restrict further evasion if a storm should come that way. But it is so far to the south and west that a captain choosing to take that detour could be reasonably certain he is out of range of a storm raising Cain hundreds of miles offshore, in the Atlantic.
The Old Bahama route—including the holes in the wall—are alternatives that Charles Baird, a former second mate on El Faro, urges Davidson to consider in the last of three text messages sent from his home in South Portland, Maine, to Davidson on the twenty-ninth, in which he counsels caution regarding Joaquin; advice that Davidson acknowledges politely, but rejects on the grounds that he is already aware of the storm and factoring it into his plan, which is to “skirt under” the hurricane.
These are the roads not taken.
8
Davidson’s equanimity at dinner should surprise no one; why worry, when the ship seems okay and is nearly ready for sea? He knows that a tropical disturbance was officially recognized as having turned into a storm yesterday evening—was even given a name, something hard to pronounce for the Anglo palate, Joaquin, apparently pronounced Wa-keen. But the forecasts are reassuring. Though the port engineer remembers Joaquin being mentioned at table, it is without emphasis, as someone discussing the weather in his kitchen might say, “It’s supposed to rain.” No heavy weather is expected.
This is in marked contrast to the previous month, late August, when Tote’s safety manager sent out that email advising masters to prepare for Hurricane Danny by checking weather maps and reviewing cargo procedure with Tote’s shoreside personnel. Updates were also requested on preparations for Erika, which followed close on Danny’s heels. Both cyclones, of course, looked set to become the season’s first bad-ass hurricane and like all firstborns got more attention; by the time the fourth or sixth storm rolls around, what once seemed noteworthy has become run-of-the-mill.
In the mess, loading updates crackle on UHF frequencies from walkie-talkies. The engineers and mates pop in and out to grab a cup of industrial coffee from the urn, or a sandwich, a plate of food. Coffee shows rings in the cup as the turbines are tested. Last cargo is now aboard and the port engineer, Neeson, has delivered a flash drive containing the latest CargoMax stability calculations;XIV Shultz has taken the drive to his office, where he plugs it into his workstation, downloads the worksheet, and compares it to the finalized cargo manifest. It all checks out, the GM margin stands over the desired 0.5, and Shultz has earned himself a sigh of satisfaction, a stretch, an instant of rest. Even the new third engineer, Dylan Meklin, who was late reporting for duty, has shown up, a fact that seems oddly important to Dany Randolph, now up on the bridge spinning the wheel to test the steering—right ten degrees, twenty degrees, then port ten and twenty—which translates under thirty feet of murky dark green water to a turn of the ship’s massive, twenty-foot-high steel rudder.
Someone who knows Randolph might well detect, beneath the second mate’s professional concentration, an extra two or three degrees of smile; likely no one’s aware that earlier she received a cell phone call from her mother, now living in Denmark, Wisconsin. Laurie had just heard a rumor that a former neighbor’s son, another Maine Maritime grad, might be joining Danielle’s ship; Laurie phoned to ask her daughter if El Faro had just signed up a young third engineer named Dylan.
“Oh my God, how did you know?” Randolph exclaimed.
“Do you remember that kid across the street?”
Silence, then: “Oh my God, it’s the baby!”
Twenty-five years earlier, Dylan Meklin’s parents had moved into their new house in Rockland with a newborn son. “Danielle was eight, nine, just a little shit herself,” her mother recalls. When Danielle was told about the baby, she insisted on going out to buy a toy—a set of building blocks—and presented the gift herself to the infant Dylan.
A quarter century later Randolph, chuckling, told her mom, “I am so going to give that kid a hard time. I am so going to have a field day with him, do you know he had the nerve to get to the ship late?”
Laurie protested; Dylan’s mother had phoned her out of sheer anxiety, this was the boy’s first ship after graduation and she was worried. Dylan’s plane was delayed; it was not his fault that he was late. But Randolph will not forgo the chance at a practical joke and presumably has made good on her threat: knocked on the door of Dylan’s cabin, given him the tongue-lashing she promised, smiling inwardly all the while.
9
As the air inside Joaquin warms and rises, it expands and is shunted outward as well by a local wind pattern that torques it away from the system’s center. But as anyone who has watched the flight-data screen in a commercial airliner knows, the higher you rise, the colder the atmosphere; that’s because less air exists high up to be heated by the sun. Therefore, as a hurricane’s warm air moves into the next layer up, the stratosphere, it cools. Cooling, still moving outward, the system’s vapor begins to condense into clouds, thunderheads, and then into water droplets that fall back to earth as rain. The downward cooling motion adds to what is now a vertically circular pattern: upward rush of warm wet air within, downward flow of cool air and rain without, all braided into more and more powerful winds that are both the result of and contributor to this increasingly rapid cycle.
The effects of the planet’s spin, known as Coriolis force, now come into play. As Earth rotates from west to east, it deflects north winds toward the west, and south winds toward the east (in the northern hemisphere; the opposite in the antipodes).XV The net effect of these winds is to spin this low-pressure system counterclockwise. Like Apaches circling a wagon train in a fifties western, the entire complex of rising warm vapor at the core and falling cool rain on the outskirts rides an increasingly furious cavalcade of winds that gallop harder and harder counterclockwise. The stronger the wind blows, the more air flows in toward the center; the faster it evaporates on its way up, the more hot, moist air it drags upward, the more rain falls outside the circle, and the faster the winds below.
Until now no one has paid much attention to this particular low-pressure system. But as its mechanism becomes more defined—a “tropical cyclone”—meteorologists start to peer closer at satellite pictures of the eastern, then the central, Atlantic. The doughnut-shaped swirl of clouds at the system’s top is distinctive, as is the hole of plummeting atmospheric pressure in the middle. From ship reports, radio buoys, instruments parachuted from weather aircraft, data start to flow in that show a growing difference in pressure between the doughnut hole and its outskirts. While the winds stay below thirty-three knots, or thirty-eight miles per hour, the system counts as a “tropical depression” and is merely numbered. Hurricane watchers at the National Hurricane Center, located on the campus of Florida International University in Miami, give this system the number 11, as the eleventh of its type to spin into the Atlantic this year.
But the system keeps developing: the winds of number 11 move up the scale to 40, 50 mph. Beyond 34 knots, or 39 mph, the system is now officially a tropical storm. Eventually, as the tenth system to achieve storm status in 2015, it is given a name, tenth down an alphabetical list compiled at the World Meteorological Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland:
Joaquin.
It might have a name, but to forecasters Joaquin still doesn’t look like much, it remains the troublesome kid next door who nine times out of ten grows out of his rebellion, his acting out, and, leaving for college or a job in the city, drops out of locals’ ken. The predictive models of the NHC as well as those of other forecasters show little likelihood of significant growth. Joaquin will churn along, increasing only slightly in strength and then, confronted by the fronts perpetually rolling eastward off North America, take the usual path, northeast and out to sea; and there it will die, harmless, ignored, alone.
Unfortunately, the models are flawed.
10
On deck a quiet reigns, it feels strange because of the uninterrupted noise of the day so far. The gantry cranes have stilled, the yard tractors are parked and shut off, the ship’s loading ramps winched up and stowed. Most of the longshoremen have by now punched the clock and gone home to families, tuna casseroles, Wheel of Fortune. The wind is still light, north-northeast; the air has given up some of the day’s heat. Behind the overcast the sun went down fifteen minutes ago, and only a vague smear of flamingo cloud shows over El Faro’s bow to the west. Lights glare like a prison on lockdown over Blount Island Marine Terminal. On the trip south, with a full order of goods for Puerto Rico, cargo load is always near capacity and El Faro’s spotlights shine metallic, eye-smarting, across the looming containers stacked four-deep on almost every stretch of her deck except the house and the very bow of the ship.
A mate has switched on the ship’s running lights, a jewel of bright emerald glowing outward on the starboard bridge wing, sharp ruby on the port. White range lights shine forward on the masts, there’s a light astern as well. Warm yellow glows at portholes and windows on the house’s sides; shadows lurk everywhere else, but the third mate, or perhaps the bosun, has already checked for stowaways. The shadows are uninhabited, and the chief mate declares the ship secured for departure.
Two pilots show up and, as a skeleton crew of dockworkers drop the gangway, are escorted by an AB to the wheelhouse.XVI
Jeremie Riehm, the third mate, is in the wheelhouse, along with Jack Jackson, the able seaman on watch, who will be steering. Chief Mate Shultz is now standing by on the bow with the bosun and the two “day” ABs, ready to winch in docking lines and pay out towlines to the tugs when the order comes. Riehm and two seamen stand at the stern. The docking pilot, James Frudaker, has maneuvered this ship in and out of Blount Island on over fifty occasions; for St. Johns Bar pilot Eric Bryson, this will be his fourteenth gig on El Faro. Davidson emerges from his cabin on the deck below, and everyone chats easily for a few minutes. The captain, too, has worked with these men before. He is known routinely to show off snapshots of his two daughters, Ariana and Marina, both athletic, attractive teens, both going to college in Maine. At one point in the conversation Bryson asks Davidson what he’s planning to do to avoid this new tropical storm, Joaquin.
“I’m just going to—we’re just gonna go out and shoot under it,” Davidson says.
No one comments. There is no hurricane plan or checklist on board to refer to. Tote’s advice on the subject is limited to two sentences in the safety guidelines: captains should take all precautions—and consult the maritime classic, Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator. The guidelines take care of all heavy weather routines inside two paragraphs.
Davidson and the pilots go over departure conditions. There is almost no traffic. The Kingfish, a 965-foot, Bahamas-flagged container ship owned by the French shipping conglomerate CMA CGM, is entering the river from the east. They can see her on radar, a yellow icon; her name, call sign, speed, and course are signaled by transponder and show up in a tiny text box next to the icon. The wind, still light and northerly, won’t be a factor tonight. Nevertheless, as the ship will be heading east when she drops her pilots, they’ll rig the Jacob’s ladder, down which the pilots will climb upon leaving, on the sheltered, starboard side. Saint Johns River is tidal, and the tide is coming in, so it will be a little harder to turn the ship’s bow 180 degrees against the upriver current, but that is what the two Moran tugs standing by across the inlet are for.
Then captain and pilots sign the “docking card,” a form that lists the vessel’s draft and affirms also that all required equipment is running: radars, radios, engine, steering. If any essential gear is broken, it should be listed here, and the pilots cannot take the ship out until the gear is fixed or the Jacksonville port captain signs an exemption. Everything works, with the exception of the ship’s anemometer, a device for measuring wind speed and direction.
The anemometer is not on the list.
With departure plan discussed and pilot form signed, Davidson telephones the engine room; his usual style is to loudly call, “Put some heat on ’er,” to which the chief replies they have sufficient steam on the boilers and the engine is ready to go. Davidson then gives the okay to the docking pilot, now standing on the port bridge wing, who radios the tug masters on his portable VHF. The pilot orders let go forward lines, let go aft, let go spring lines. There are splashes as the mooring lines and wire hawsers drop into the harbor; El Faro is free of land. The tugs take up slack on the towing lines, and the three-inch-diameter ropes straighten into nylon bars, hard as iron, water spraying from their compressed fibers. Roils of churned white water appear under the tugboats’ back ends as, with painful slowness, they start to pull the huge ship sideways.
Someone on the bridge pulls the foghorn lanyard, and the wail, both earsplitting and mournful, of a great ship departing echoes through the depots and gantries, the Spanish moss and saw grass. At Paulie’s the drinkers at the counter turn to watch, and for a few seconds their chatter wanes.
On the fo’c’sle and in the covered section aft on 2nd Deck, where mooring lines are handled, the ABs finish winching in the ropes and wires. They lash their ends with lighter cordage to the bits, the twin vertical steel posts around which lines are looped to hold the ship in harbor; in rough seas, if a four-hundred-foot, three-inch line of nylon or wire goes overboard, it can wind itself around the prop and slow or stop the ship. For big storms the lines are fed off their winch reels into storage boxes below. But no such storms are expected and the lines are not stowed.
When El Faro is several hundred feet off the dock, Frudaker tells the tugs to stop pulling. He orders slow ahead and left full rudder, and Jack Jackson, at the helm, repeats the order, spins the wheel all the way left, counterclockwise—not an easy task, as the wheel is set low on the console and even for a man of average height requires bending the knees to operate; but the joystick that would turn the rudder mechanically, through the ship’s autopilot, is too slow and clumsy for practical use. The deck begins to tremble as the turbine rolls. Seventy feet beneath the bridge a delta of crushed water emerges from El Faro’s stern. The ship, though carried upriver by the current, slowly turns leftward. The captain who knew her best, the one fired after the Lauderdale incident, claims that because the ship was not built for containers, a full deckload of freight will cause her to tilt centrifugally, which would mean to starboard now, when turning; but if that’s the case, the pilot doesn’t notice.XVII
In less than five minutes El Faro’s bow is pointing downriver. The tugs drop their lines. The river pilot now has control, and Riehm escorts Frudaker to the Main Deck, the ship’s topmost exposed level. One of the tugs has crept up and rides next to the ship, keeping pace, her port side to El Faro’s starboard; the dock pilot climbs carefully down to step aboard the tug, which now, with a roar of engines and a farewell peep of her whistle, peels off, back to quayside.
On El Faro’s bridge the VHF squawks. Bryson, the bar and river pilot, talks to the pilot on the Kingfish. Quite soon the two ships cross paths, huge dark shapes blanking the suburban glow, port to port. One deck down, the windows in Shultz’s stateroom shine brightly where the mate double-checks the cargo manifest against CargoMax figures; this is their last chance to turn back and reload if something is off. But he finds no discrepancies.
Mile Point Turn, Mayport Cut; finally El Faro moves down a line of buoys and two long breakwaters marking the end of the Saint Johns River. Now the ship, which has been gliding, stable as an apartment building, down the placid river, begins to feel the ocean; starts an almost imperceptible pitch forward to aft as her bow rises and falls, and a tiny roll, left and right, from the echoed waves bouncing off the rocks. A crew member, standing, doesn’t even have to shift his weight, the movement is so small. At the red-and-white sea buoy marking the channel’s end, Bryson radios the pilot boat to pick him up. He shakes hands with the bridge crew and makes his way to the pilot ladder.
The direct course to San Juan is 132 degrees. That number, along with the ship’s speed, is written in greasy felt tip on the course board, which hangs between wheelhouse windows directly ahead of the helm. Riehm programs the course into the autopilot and checks radars, but the only seagoing traffic this evening is the dot, between breakwaters, of the pilot boat speeding back to Jacksonville.
The engine room has been called again and the boilers are pumping more steam, turbines accelerating to roughly 120 rpm, which translates to a little over 20 knots, or 23 mph. Riehm settles himself at the watch keeper’s usual station, on the bridge’s port side, his electronic eyes—two of the three radar screens—within easy reach. The ship rolls a bit more to the northerly swell. Mayport, Manhattan Beach, glow orange, shift rightward as El Faro adopts her southeasterly course for San Juan; to the left, to port, the sky is veiled and there are few stars, only the black, limitless presence of the Atlantic.
It is 10:30 p.m., September 29, 2015. El Faro and her crew have just over thirty-three hours to live.