The day’s work begins for the watch standers as they go to their respective posts in the engine-room control station and the bridge for the morning’s eight-to-twelve shift. This September 30 the “day” deckhands—Hatch, Porter, Wright, and Jones—also start at 8:00 a.m., but will work right through a normal daytime routine, like their counterparts on any land-based crew, like the Polish riding gang, since much of the work they do is on deck and often requires sunlight; they will knock off in the evening. Sometimes off-duty watch standers, such as Frank Hamm on the four-to-eight, will join the day crew to work an extra four hours of overtime, if Shultz has okayed it.
The day gang shapes up by the bosun’s store, coffee breath strong, hair maybe still wet from the shower and drying in warm, oil-and-paint-perfumed wind. The store consists of the outermost port container in a row of three permanent and dedicated freight containers lined up fore and aft on Main Deck’s breezeway, one on the port side and two starboard, under the sheltering house. (The other containers hold safety gear such as CO2 foam and other firefighting equipment.) Deck work is organized by Chief Mate Shultz, and he is there to assign overtime, if any, and generally oversee the shape-up, distributing scratch-pad notes as he organizes the crew. The work itself is run by the bosun, Roan Lightfoot; he holds the same rank and authority as a chief petty officer in the Navy, a master sergeant in the Army, the highest unlicensed position aboard.
Lightfoot is fifty-four years old. One of the crew has described him as an “aging surfer” type—stubble-cut blond hair losing the battle with male-pattern baldness, shortish and muscled and squat—a guy who like some others in the crew likes hanging at Angel’s Bar in San Juan, where the beer is cool and the Friday-night strippers are, sort of, hot. Lightfoot is another who jokes around a lot, but not enough to fool anybody: like many bosuns this guy’s a hard-ass and it’s his way or the highway, and he doesn’t care much if the crew likes him or not, and some of them do not. Still, he knows his job and people respect that, just as some deckies don’t speak too fondly of Shultz either, but they’re aware he knows his stuff. The shape-up, often enough, is a binary theater of surface “yessir” and subsurface “fuck you,” but orders are orders and even grumbling the crew will do what they are told.
Day work on any large steel ship, and especially one as old as El Faro, consists of a lot of grunt maintenance, such as chipping off rust with a clatter-banging hydraulic needlegun in areas with the worst corrosion, ear protection mandatory. No shortage of rust around—the twenty-two big vent openings on 2nd Deck, though always left open to draw fumes from automobiles on the decks below, are supposed to close, but they’ve been corroded so thoroughly some of the baffles that shut them off won’t budge. If in some places the metal has wasted away to paper-thin or nothing, the engineers might be called in to patch and weld.
“They were bandaging that ship with steel all the time,” Chris Cash, a former crewman, says of El Faro later. “They didn’t want to put money into the ship, [they would] patch up instead of fix.” One of the Polish gang tells his wife there is “rust everywhere, I have never worked on such a hulk.”
If the work is done properly, the metal should be ground down, washed with fresh water before welding, protected with primer and heavy-duty oil paint afterward. Today, with swells growing from aft and port, and the occasional crest of a higher wave slurping through the big openings on 2nd Deck, any maintenance on that deck will probably have to be done on bulkheads or elevated areas to starboard, away from the spray; or else on Main Deck or the house or the enclosed lower levels below 2nd Deck.
Shultz will certainly check with Jeff Mathias, who’s organizing the Polish riding gang’s work, to ensure the two gangs don’t get in each other’s way. Then as a matter of routine he’ll make another round of the cargo, running into Louis Champa as the electrician starts his thrice-daily monitoring of the cooling systems on the refrigerated cargo—and these, too, might echo in a mate’s subconscious with how hurricanes work, for like cyclones the reefer units depend on a binary system of heat transfer, through evaporation on one side, condensation on the other. Shultz’s conscious thoughts, though, must be focused on much more obvious mechanisms. His job here is to double-check lashings on every trailer, each container, a task that calls for experience and muscle memory because there is no mechanical gauge to test tension on the lashings. He is well aware how many of them are tied off-button. Some of the D rings, too, were rusted to the deck, but loosened with a sledgehammer to accept a hook and chain to tie down cargo. The mate knows that the percentage of trailers and containers secured off-button and even to relatively distant D rings conforms to the limit prescribed in Tote’s minimalist cargo manual and should be fine for normal sailing and okay even for rough weather.
A hurricane is not “rough weather.”
The men don their hard hats, pick up needleguns, hoses, paint, brushes, tarps, sledges, whatever the job requires, and set off down the deck, walking with the practiced saltwater-cowpoke gait that fits their movements to the ship’s, which with the wind rising slowly but steadily off the port quarter and swells moving with it includes a fair amount of pitch, of bow-stern action. James Porter, quiet and focused on his job; Jackie Jones, Porter’s cousin, an excerpt from the Bible he reads every morning quite possibly still looping in his head; Mariette Wright; Carey Hatch. Those working on lower levels will take the house stairs to 2nd Deck and there, if they’ve been assigned a job in the forward holds—1, 2, and 2A—they’ll thread their way through the massed shadows, the ranked trailers, the humming reefers, the snaking electric cables, the stink of oil and gas, to one of the scuttles, the tight hatchways leading to a ladder that runs to the next deck down.
If Frank Hamm is working overtime today, this will not be his favorite route. These scuttles are scattered, two to each hold,I in alternating pattern on the very outer edge of 2nd Deck. Their coamings, the raised steel lips that prevent water from flowing to the next level down if, as often happens, 2nd Deck gets wet during passage, are just wide enough for the average man’s shoulders, but Hamm is not an average man, he is broad in all dimensions, and getting through requires a certain amount of twisting, of shipboard yoga. The scuttle’s cover opens and closes on a single hinge in the coaming; the silicon or synthetic-rubber gasket underneath seals the circle when it is shut. The cover’s considerable weight is augmented by its locking gears and dogs.
These 2nd Deck scuttle hatches are built of heavy-gauge steel in case rough weather should drive seas deep among the hatchways. Unlike the watertight doors such as those between the different holds, or between 3-hold and the engine room, they are not routinely listed in any checklists as open or shut, since they will be in fairly constant use throughout the voyage. Also, because the rules requiring it apply only to ships built after 1992, they are not fitted with electronic sensors that would indicate, on a panel on the bridge or engine-room consoles, whether they have been dogged.
The gaskets in particular are not inspected. They are made of either heavy silicon, a polymer that is normally resistant to salt, ultraviolet rays, and rushing water; or EPDM (for “ethylene propylene diene monomer”), a hard synthetic rubber. But neither substance is eternal, and both have been known to fail. When serially washed in water that contains chemicals, the component molecules of silicon, aligned in a polymer chain, can be cut, in a process known as chain scission, by the corrosive molecules of solvents and hydrocarbon compounds. And EPDM is highly vulnerable to erosion by gasoline and motor oil. Seawater sprayed or slopped onto 2nd Deck, with the fuel and oil drips of yard pigs, of old automobiles (around half of the cars shipped to Puerto Rico are used), of exhaust residue, of cleaning fluids used to wash the deck, quickly becomes a light cocktail of such chemicals. Presumably, over a long time, the cocktail saps a gasket’s integrity, its insulating qualities. And a “long time” is what El Faro’s all about.
“Set,” too, will reduce the seal’s effectiveness. Set is the effect of strong compression, in this case the repeated dogging down of heavy steel hatch on hard steel lip with the gasket buffering the two, not to mention the sailor’s habit of letting the hatch slam on its bed. All this will tend to change the gasket’s shape, the way a pillow crease leaves its line on a sleeper’s cheek, and such change also lessens the sealant qualities of polymers. But why should anyone pay attention to something that routinely works wellII—why, with everything you have to do, and maybe some constant irritation at the mate or bosun to bug you, or perhaps a shoreside issue elbowing in on your concentration, look twice at the scuttle hatches as they are opened, banged shut, opened again; reliable, sturdy, ignored?
“Ignored” is not a term that can be applied to the lifeboats, which theoretically are the principal means of escape off the ship. Lifeboats have ranked high on the list of international inspection rules since the loss of the RMS Titanic in 1912. El Faro’s are two nearly identical boats, twenty-three feet long, made of heavy, cored fiberglass, and suspended from twin sets of cranes, called davits, one on each side of the engineers’ level of the house. The boats are open, meaning they afford no shelter from the elements. The starboard boat is capable of holding forty-three people, the other forty-eight. They are painted white outside, orange inside, with benches, or “thwarts,” arranged across the boat’s width. The portside boat is powered by a diesel engine, the starboard by a construct of gears and push bars, called a Fleming system, moved back and forth by crew seated on the thwarts the way slaves pushed and pulled at oars in Roman galleys. The Fleming gear, like the diesel, turns a shaft and propeller at the stern. Except for the propulsion, however, and the davits’ electric motors, El Faro’s lifeboats are little different in design or in their launching systems from the lifeboats of the Titanic, and they suffer from the same drawbacks, in particular the near impossibility of launching an upslope boat, or loading on the downslope, if the ship is leaning heavily to one side.
Modern cargo ships don’t use these antiquated boats. Today’s American ships are legally mandated to be equipped with totally enclosed, engine-powered boats, often launched like a torpedo down a chute off the ship’s stern. In this system, when abandoning ship, crew members climb through a hatch into the boat, lock the hatch, strap themselves in, start the engine; then the boat’s coxswain hits a switch that triggers the unlocking device. The lifeboat, acting more like a rocket at this stage, plunges into the sea, its tapered bow allowing the craft to dive briefly, damping the shock. When the lifeboat bobs back to the surface, the crew member in charge revs the engine and speeds his boat away from the distressed ship.
El Faro, however, is grandfathered. Because of her age, her owners are not legally obliged to replace these old boats with the modern, chute-launched version. This grandfathered status, and the lack of obligation to modernize, must be key to Tote’s bottom line; when the vessel was converted from pure roll on, roll off to Ro-Ro/container in 2006, the Coast Guard initially flagged the work as a “major conversion,” which could have required, among other safety-equipment changes, a lifeboat upgrade. State-of-the-art lifeboats cost upward of half a million dollars each. But Tote fought that designation, lodging a protest that resulted in a turnaround by the Coast Guard Marine Inspection Office, which eventually ruled that the work had been, technically, a “minor” conversion and thus did not mandate safety upgrades. And so the antiquated lifeboats remained. So did all other safety features that conformed to the 1975-era “International Safety of Life at Sea,” or SOLAS, regulations, even if they did not meet modern standards.III
Third Mate Riehm, inspecting the boats, must clamber inside to check the stores: filtered water, rations, first-aid kit, emergency flares, fuel for the diesel. He makes sure the electric winches that lower the boats are working properly and carefully inspects the davits themselves, including the padeyes, half circles of steel, welded to the deck, that anchor some of the cables. A short time ago the old padeyes, rusted out, were replaced. El Faro’s sister ship El Yunque had to obtain temporary permission to sail from classification-society inspectors because her davits were corroded. But El Faro’s davits have been inspected recently, new clutches and brake pads were installed on the electric winches just before sailing and the system seems to be in good shape.
Riehm, with his usual diligence, would also check out the life rafts, of which there are five, all of the sturdy, tent-covered variety, orange-colored and self-inflating:IV two, capable of holding twenty-five people apiece, are strapped inside protective fiberglass shells to cradles just behind the lifeboats, one on each side of the house. Two more twenty-five-man rafts are lashed to railings or brackets near the boat deck, and a six-person raft added as a precaution when El Yunque’s lifeboat system was found to be deficient is stowed up forward. The third mate, like every other mariner aboard, is aware of the lifeboats’ shortcomings and knows the rafts offer his best chance of survival if things really go south.
2
For a stateroom captain, or at least what Tote considers to be a stateroom captain, Davidson is pretty active on deck today as El Faro steams farther to the south and east, skirting the Bahamas chain. Early this morning he went four levels down from the bridge to the galley and spoke to Lashawn Rivera and the stewards about securing their china, sauces, and cooking equipment for rough seas ahead; he is conscious of the mess that happens when a violent roll sends jars of mayonnaise and catsup flying to the deck.
Then Davidson took the stairs another four levels deeper to the engine room to carry the same message to the engineers. The mates worry about the Polish riding crew. “They leave pipes lying around,” one of them remarks, and someone will mention this to Jeff Mathias, the chief engineer in charge of the conversion work the Poles are doing, though it’s almost certain that Mathias, with his experience and sea savvy (“A born sailor,” Hearn says of him later), is already conscious of what’s going on and will be taking safety measures accordingly; making sure any equipment not currently being used among the welding cables and bottles of oxyacetylene, the spools of wire, the hulking new winches and heater, are securely tied down and out of the way.
The winches and heater in particular would need to be lashed down hard because they are heavy. The heater is a big steel furnace called a Butterworth, used to make steam for deicing the regular ramps as well as the five extra ramps that will be added to El Faro for use in Alaska; the vessel is due to go to shipyard shortly for a final overhaul before traveling to Alaska the following month. The eighteen winches, with electric motors that will raise and lower those ramps or cinch the ship in tight against ice-encrusted docks, all add up to several tons in weight, and it’s not clear, then or later, if their combined weight and location have been added to the CargoMax stability algorithm.
The presence of five Polish men adds an extra zest of the surreal to El Faro’s human soup. Because of the language barrier, communication is rare or nonexistent between the riding gang and the ship’s regular crew. Some bridge watch keepers refer to them as Team Poland and make jokes, not unkindly, about their tastes and proclivities. Describing Team Poland at mealtimes, an AB says, “The cook or the steward comes out and goes, ‘Do you want meat or fish?’ . . . And they all go ‘Fish! Fish! Fish!’ ” And when later the likelihood of their coming close to a hurricane is explained to them, one of the mates says the foreigners seem excited, smiling, not concerned, even eager to undergo the experience, crying, “Hurricane! Yes!” . . . “Ah, if they only knew,” the mate adds wryly.
Generally, the Poles are looked on by the rest of the crew with the sort of bemused tolerance that characterizes Americans forced to deal with non–English speakers, people who don’t understand what quarterbacks do. The general impression of the riding crew is that, though foreign, they’re good-natured, assiduous, too. Piotr Krause, the twenty-seven-year-old pipefitter, seems particularly easy to get along with; he loves cars and history programs and is liked for his sense of humor, though his recent jokes might conceal an underlying tension. Krause and his wife, Anna, are devoted to each other and to their one-year-old son, Viktor; he took the job on El Faro because his family needed the money and the pay was good compared to similar work in Poland, but the long months he spends working on another continent have been hard on all of them. Krause longs to leave the ship and find work in Europe; he is thinking of looking in Norway, where he could make good money and live with his family as well. Krause is happiest working with his hands, fixing stuff. He spends a lot of time with Jeff Mathias, the conversion supervisor. Mathias has no problem working with Team Poland, but Mathias tends to get along fine with most people and especially people who care about machinery as much as he does.
Mathias grew up in Kingston, one of the more rural areas of southeastern Massachusetts, not far from where the Pilgrims got off the Mayflower mumbling prayers of thanks for their salvation from the sea. His family owns cranberry bogs and, as with most farming, the care and maintenance of working acreage requires a lot of machinery: excavators and front-end loaders to overhaul the bogs, pumps to flood the plants over winter, rolling pickers, mechanized conveyor belts to load the harvested berries, trucks to carry them, tractors to drag the machinery from bog to bog. Cape Cod Bay isn’t far from Kingston and Mathias did his share of sailing small boats, but what fascinated him was engines. He grew adept at running bog machinery, fixing it when it broke, scouting around for replacement parts; little pleases him more than scoring what he calls a “smokin’ deal” on a used fuel injector or water pump, unless it be creating hayrides and other kid-oriented events the Mathias farm puts on around Halloween. When he applied to “Mass. Maritime,” only twenty miles south of his home, on Buzzards Bay, the engineering department was what interested him. And there, like Rich Pusatere, he came under the spell of steam engines, to the point where he chose the Tote assignment deliberately so that he could work on a steam plant—although he, like others on El Faro, has no illusions about the ship’s condition and talks of it openly with fellow engineers. He once asked rhetorically, “How long will Tote keep spending money to keep this ship running?”
Today, despite the freshening wind and the subtly increasing freshness of the ship’s motion, he supervises the Poles as they configure overhead cable conduits and new steam lines for the ramps; tells his crew also to weld on a new railing below the bridge, for which the paint and underlying steel must be ground down to bond clean metal to clean metal. Most of this should be dockside or shipyard work but Tote, having recently sent El Morro, one of its three ships in the “Ponce” class, which includes El Faro, to the scrapyard, is scrambling to get El Faro to Tacoma for the Alaska run by December 8.. This is so that one of their Alaska ships, in turn, can be sent to Singapore for conversion to LNG-powered diesel. Dry-docking for El Faro is scheduled for early November, the time slot already reserved at the Bahamas shipyard where she is to be worked on. The Coast Guard and Tote’s client regulatory body, the American Bureau of Shipping, have been notified so inspectors can be on-site to sign off on repairs. That inspection is scheduled for November 6 to 19. According to Mathias, the decision to scrap one of El Faro’s sister ships, Great Land, was made too quickly, without any plan to cannibalize the decommissioned ship for spares, which means a lot of unnecessary hours must be spent finding used parts elsewhere or jury-rigging others to refit the Faro. This is work in which Mathias, the widget wonk, finds pleasure, but still . . . Because of the extra duties, Mathias recently chose not to stay shoreside, but to ride with the ship to make sure the conversion is pushed through on time. “How do I know what needs to be done if the ship’s only in port for one day?” he explained to his wife.
Doubtless Mathias also keeps some portion of his mind on projects Rich Pusatere has going on below. As a licensed chief engineer, as a lover of machinery, Mathias thinks about the whole plant, the entire mechanical enchilada, whether it’s his direct responsibility or not, and El Faro’s forty-year-old machinery provides plenty of mysteries to worry at. Mathias is known, one could almost say famous, for being single-minded about his job. He was engineer on a ship running to Hawaii when his wife, Jenn, was pregnant with their first child; when news came through the ship’s email that Jenn had given birth, the captain called him up to the bridge; but Mathias, once assured that mother and child were well, replied that he would first finish the job he was engaged in, then come topside to celebrate.
His focus on work notwithstanding, like most mariners Mathias holds consciousness of his family ever present in the background, as if they were a favorite show playing on TV in the next room; all the more so because he’s scheduled to leave the ship after this trip, to help set up a maze/slide structure he designed for “Pumpkin Patch Weekend,” the series of autumn activities due to take place over Columbus Day on his family’s cranberry farm.
3
The swells build further, still out of the north. The troughs between get deeper, and the indigo and jade colors inside them darken. As the day progresses, the long northern waves take on even more of an easterly component. People often see their world in terms of overlapping stories, all marked and girdered by the convenient theories of sequence and causality, one event being triggered by a previous event and causing, in turn, a third, with all the time and miles of road between forgotten in the telling; and so they tend to miss the slow, often uneven progression of things, the budding of a flower, the turn toward evening, the rise or fall of tide, the building up of seas. From high up, through the windows of El Faro’s bridge, the waves look the same from minute to minute, even over the course of an hour. What sticks out, what makes the navigators notice, will be signals they are trained to observe, such as a greater number of whitecaps, the symptoms of wind speed as defined by the Beaufort scale: “Force 5, wind 17 to 21 knots, fresh breeze, moderate waves taking a more pronounced long form; many white foam crests; there may be some spray.”
They will notice, too, the unusual—when a tarpaulin is ripped off by wind from the bridge wing, or when the ship lurches unexpectedly.
Davidson is back on the bridge at midmorning. “Ship’s solid . . . ,” he tells Riehm. “. . . Just gotta keep the speed up so we can get goin’ down. And who knows, maybe this low will just stall—stall a little bit . . . just enough for us to duck underneath.”
It’s a scenario of wishful thinking in the skipper’s mind, uncomplicated by new facts; a scenario strong and plausible enough that it extrapolates trouble to a later time, when Joaquin has stalled and hung around, once El Faro is safely past and in Puerto Rico and her officers are prepping the trip back.
At 10:22 a.m. Davidson sends an email, transmitted by satellite via the Inmarsat device, from his office computer to Tote’s safety manager, John Lawrence. The email, noting that Joaquin is “erratic and unpredictable,” says Davidson expects to be safely on the storm’s back side by morning. It then asks for authorization, if Joaquin is still hanging around causing trouble in the area after El Faro loads in San Juan, to return to Jacksonville via the Old Bahama Channel route.
Lawrence doesn’t see the email immediately; he is busy attending the National Safety Congress convention in Atlanta, the biggest such event of the year for safety officers. At the convention—perhaps ironically, given the tension existing between crew and officers on El Faro—he may well have listened to one of the keynote speakers, a former US Navy commander named Michael Abrashoff, detailing the increase in safety that results at sea when a captain takes the time to interact meaningfully with his crew.
In Lawrence’s absence the email is fielded by another Tote officer, Jim Fisker-Andersen, who replies, “Understood and authorized.” But Fisker-Andersen does not send this for several hours, and in the interval Davidson will for some reason fret as nervously as a teenager waiting for a girl to accept his invitation to the prom.
“I have to wait for confirmation from the office, but I put it out there,” the captain says later. And later still: “That’s why, you know, I just said, ‘Hey, you know—I would like to take this [Old Bahama Channel] going northbound. I’ll wait for your reply.’ I don’t think they’ll say no. I gave them a good reason why, because if you should follow this down, then look what it does on the third [October]—fourth and fifth. And it’s right where we’re going. . . . So I just put it out there.”
On three additional occasions, in the interval between sending the message and receiving the go-ahead, Davidson repeats these or similar statements, and all of them sound as if they’re coming from someone desperate for approval; all indicate a substantive worry on his part, that Tote might refuse. What is also clearly implied in how he frames the issue on the bridge is this: Davidson believes that if Tote disputes his request, he might feel pressured to take a route back that is close to a storm that could put his ship in danger.
Why Michael Davidson is so nervous about Tote’s approval of his change of course is relevant to what will happen later, but the tension audible in his worry is not new. Shipowners make their money by delivering freight safely and on time at the lowest feasible cost, and the consequent need to stick to schedule is thus a normal part of shipping. If a ship is delayed—if her captain, for whatever reason, takes a detour—the companies whose freight she hauls will receive, and deliver, their goods later, which in turn might cause them to lose money.V Sometimes, as in the case of Walmart, a client can penalize the transportation outfit for the delay, especially if spoilage (as in rotted foodstuffs) results. In all cases the possibility exists that recurrent delays will cause the freight owners to switch to a different, more punctual shipping company.
The result of all these factors is pressure: direct pressure, in the form of a shipowner’s schedules and the expectation, spoken or implied, that they be met; indirect, in the form of awareness on a captain’s part that if he is consistently late—if, for example, he acquires a reputation for excessive timidity in the face of weather that results in chronic tardiness and higher associated expense—he will find himself eventually without a job and blacklisted throughout the industry to boot.
Against these pressures has always stood the tradition of the all-powerful captain, of his, or her, status as ultimate authority on board ship; as the saying goes in the French merchant marine, “Sole master aboard after God.” The reason for this unitary authority is simple. It’s the same as for any other group of people, such as army commandos or astronauts, seeking to fulfill a specific mission in a risky, potentially lethal environment. For a patrol behind enemy lines, for a ship beset by storm, the ability to make swift and firm decisions in the face of fast-changing threats is paramount, because nearly any action ordered quickly and firmly is better than hesitation, and in such a situation it makes sense to delegate authority to a single experienced and decisive commander with the expectation that she or he will get the group out of trouble as swiftly as possible.
Two hundred, even seventy-five, years ago, while the commercial pressures on a captain always existed, their potency was far less because of the practical impossibility of second-guessing a captain’s decisions, or of changing them if one did. Before wireless radio became common on merchant ships after World War I, a seagoing ship had no contact with shore and the shipowner no possibility of knowing what obstacles—such as adverse winds, pirates, or storms—might affect a captain’s route. Even through the 1980s, when satellite navigation and weather observation were starting to come online, a ship’s master had to make decisions in good part based on personal observation and experience without real-time reference to land; it was up to him to weigh an eventual reckoning with the ship’s owner against his immediate duty to keep vessel, crew, and cargo safe.
It was this balancing act that Joseph Conrad, himself a former ship’s master, described in his novella Typhoon, in which Captain MacWhirr weighs whether to flee a hurricane, expressing his thoughts to the first mate much as Davidson does to Shultz:
“If the weather delays me—very well. There’s your logbook to talk straight about the weather. But suppose I went swinging off my course and came in two days late, and they asked me, ‘Where have you been all that time, Captain?’ What could I say to that? ‘It must have been dam’ bad,’ they would say. ‘Don’t know,’ I would have to say; ‘I’ve dodged clear of it.’ See that, Jukes? I have been thinking it out all afternoon.”VI
Over the last twenty years, MacWhirr’s dilemma has become somewhat anachronistic. To take an extreme example, it is now possible for a shipowner to operate, navigate, and command a fully automated ship, without captain or crew aboard, almost anywhere in the world, using real-time links to satellite images, weather forecasts, CCTV, radar, GPS, and engine and steering controls. Fully automated vessels, though prototypes already exist, have not been authorized to travel internationally, but the same technology allows company officers to hire routing services that will plot the most efficient route possible given weather, sea state, and other factors for an individual ship, and to ensure that the vessel’s systems capture that information. Having done so, the company will expect the master to go along with what the service recommends, and if the master does not, the shipowner will know and can demand explanations immediately, by radio, emails, and satellite telephone calls.
Since Tote does not subscribe to the BVS routing service, the company’s officials have no easy way to track El Faro’s route in relation to the elements. And those corporate officers in closest touch with the ship, probably dulled by the routine, back-and-forth tag team El Faro and El Yunque run on this short and mostly trouble-free route, are not in the habit of keeping close track by any other means of either ships or weather. Certainly they are not keeping track of either El Faro or Joaquin on this trip. Yet it seems clear that El Faro, her crew, and especially her master fall victim here to a peculiar dead spot in the evolution of ship management: before the advent of fully automated ships, but long after the era of fully independent captaincy.
This limbo is reflected in the well-demonstrated belief on the part of Michael Davidson that he must clear major detours—such as taking the Old Bahama Channel, a route that were he to follow it on the run south, as will be clearly suggested by his subordinates, would take El Faro out of Joaquin’s grasp—with the company beforehand. Tote’s officers later will vehemently challenge that assessment and state that they would never interfere with a captain’s judgment on safety issues; in the words of safety manager John Lawrence, “We don’t tell masters what to do.” Tote’s operations manual notes a captain must check any route change or delay with management, but does not state he must obtain permission for the change.
In later hearings, one captain will testify that his DPA, or “designated person ashore” at Tote, told him that if he did not reveal his route plans, the DPA would relieve him of command within two hours. But other captains who work for Tote will affirm that the practice of notifying the company of a route change does not mean they have to obtain company approval.VII And a company executive claims in testimony that Tote always implements a “safety first” policy for its ships and crews.
Still, Tote’s officers will never be able to explain away Davidson’s obsession with getting the company’s okay for his northbound detour, as demonstrated in the de facto request for permission Davidson makes at 10:22 a.m. on September 30 as El Faro heads south; and in repeated, informal statements by Davidson to the effect that he must await approval from Tote to plan the longer route.
Davidson has his own reasons for being particularly sensitive to the opinions of his employer. He told his wife he was forced to resign from his previous job with Crowley Maritime when the ship he was commanding developed steering trouble in the Chesapeake and, on his own initiative, he hired tugboats to escort the vessel out of the bay in case her steering failed. Davidson believed that this decision, which on the face of it was justified on safety grounds, cost Crowley money and Davidson his job.
Davidson’s sensitivity to safety decisions that might irritate Corporate was probably exacerbated recently when Davidson was passed over for a master’s position aboard one of the two new “Marlin” class ships, the LNG/diesel-powered Isla Bella and Perla del Caribe, that Tote has ordered built in San Diego for the Puerto Rico run. (Company officials initially recommended him for promotion, then changed their collective mind, and while they have not formally notified him as yet, Davidson seems to have got wind of the verdict before leaving on this voyage.) Though Davidson apparently was not given an explanation, the previous censure of his crew handling, and his reputedly hands-off command style, were cited internally in Tote’s decision to reject his application. Melissa Clark, the human resources officer, reported “dwindling confidence” in his leadership as one reason she and another manager counseled against posting him to a new ship. The ship-management director, Jim Fisker-Andersen, paid Davidson a left-handed compliment: while he was the “least engaged” of all four captains on the Puerto Rico run, Davidson was great at “sucking up” to office staff.
Other El Faro officers, particularly on the engine side—Pusatere, Griffin, Kuflik—have been tapped to serve on the Marlin ships, so it’s no surprise Davidson feels that he is not appreciated in this company. In an earlier email to his wife he writes of Tote, “I feel taken advantage of . . . but they pay real good.” Later today he will talk bleakly to Chief Mate Shultz about being “on [Tote’s] chopping block,” a sentiment Shultz shares regarding the mate’s own prospects at Tote. In such circumstances it makes sense to assume that Davidson’s state of mind when reaching decisions that affect El Faro’s safety will be influenced by what he apparently believes will be the punishment, even dismissal, he might expect if the company disagrees with those decisions. The captain’s two daughters are of college age—though both will go to Southern Maine University, a relatively inexpensive state school—and the watch keepers he has talked to say he’s concerned with the bills he must pay, and the need to hang on to a good job. He is fifty-three years old, competing now against younger officers, men more familiar with the automation technology that will eventually replace them all. He is truly, in the words of his fellow captain, Earl Loftfield, someone who’s “not going in the direction Tote is going in.”
4
If a ship is a complex world that in its detail and isolation starts to feel like a distinct form of life to her crew and passengers, a large corporation—if usually less attractive and unitary and certainly less seaworthy in aspect—can be at least as complicated and full of quirks as an aging freighter.
Enough has been written about bureaucratic pathologies to suggest that, just as a ship sometimes seems to adopt a distinct personality, a corporation too acquires idiosyncrasies and characteristics that build, memo by memo, email by email, conference call by conference call, rumor by rumor, a collective personality of sorts; and that personality ultimately affects the people within.
The transcript of the bridge recording makes clear that Tote, in its various guises concerning the Puerto Rico trade, worries the hell out of Davidson and Shultz. Davidson at least seems to take it for granted that he needs some sort of permission for a major course change, even if such a change is warranted by safety concerns; and even Randolph, who is very far from a complainer, while talking on the bridge to Larry Davis about an engineer who worked long unpaid hours in a shipyard, slags the company’s indifference toward employees. “Tote has its favorites,” the wife of another El Faro officer said recently; those not favored, in her view, could expect punishment in the form of piecework, arbitrarily assigned.
Former crew, including Jack Hearn, one of El Faro’s captains, as well as AB Bruer and oiler Hearman, have mentioned Tote’s slowness in addressing safety-related issues brought to the company’s attention by mariners. Hearn, in public testimony, has drawn a causal link between his demands to report safety concerns on Tote ships to the Coast Guard, and his eventual firing on supposedly unrelated grounds. But all these judgments, while relevant, are based on symptoms. To find out the core reasons for Tote’s behavior one must scalpel deep into the tendon and bone of company personality, history, and ownership.
The company that would become known, on the waterfront anyway, as Tote was born in 1983 in Chester, Pennsylvania—a city with a long shipbuilding tradition—in the shipyard that built El Faro and her four Ponce-class sister ships. Sun Shipbuilding, also known as Sunships, went into the freighter-owning business, in partnership with individual investors, under the name Totem Ocean Trailer Express, running first a single freighter, the Great Land—Sunships hull number 673—and then in 1977 adding Westward Venture to the fleet. Totem, or TOTE—essentially a Jones Act outfit precisely engineered to shuttle cargo between Washington State and Alaska—was soon bought out by a consortium of eight individual partners, mostly men from Sun’s senior management. Their number included the director; a couple of lawyers, Michael Garvey and Stanley Barer; and another Sun exec, a World War II vet named Leonard Shapiro. TOTE Resources, as the new company was called, soon changed its name to Saltchuk Resources, borrowing the word for “salt water” from a trading jargon spoken by the Chinook tribe of the Pacific Northwest.
Saltchuk expanded steadily, focusing on niche markets similar to its original Alaska route, buying up Foss Maritime, one of the oldest Pacific Northwest tug companies, as well as Interocean, a ship-management corporation. Another Ponce ship, the Puerto Rico (Sun hull number 670), was renamed Northern Lights, lengthened by 90.9 feet in a Mobile, Alabama, yard, and assigned to Tote’s Alaskan freight run in 1993. In 1998 Saltchuk bought the Sea Barge towing operation, which transported freight between Puerto Rico and Florida, and renamed it Sea Star Lines.
Still Saltchuk expanded, snapping up air cargo, trucking, fuel, and port-logistics firms—companies such as North Star petroleum, Northern Aviation Services, Aloha Air Cargo. In 2006 Northern Lights was converted to a Ro-Ro/Con ship—a “minor” conversion, as the company’s lawyers contended—renamed El Faro, and transferred to Sea Star’s Puerto Rico route.
Saltchuk’s original owners, the Sun Shipbuilding crew, were eventually bought out by the lawyer Mike Garvey, who became majority stockholder in ’93. His son-in-law, another attorney, named Mark Tabbutt, became president of Saltchuk Resources in ’99. Garvey transferred ownership to his three daughters, Nicole, Michelle, and Denise (Mark’s wife), in 2009, making Saltchuk one of the largest private companies in the United States to be owned solely by women.
In 2010 a ship managed by a Saltchuk subsidiary delivered aid to Haiti following the devastating earthquake of that year and remained in Port-au-Prince over two months, providing the only large-scale unloading facility for relief efforts in that harbor.
Judging by their surface record, Saltchuk and its subsidiaries seem a well-run, dynamic outfit focusing on precisely defined markets liable to produce steady if undramatic returns. In 2015 Saltchuk was Washington State’s largest private company, with over $2 billion in assets, $3 billion in revenues, and almost eight thousand employees; in that year Saltchuk companies gave away $2.5 million in donations to various communities. In 2014 Saltchuk Resources was awarded the title of “world’s most ethical corporation” by the Ethisphere Institute of Scottsdale, Arizona.
If one looks closer, though, cracks start to fan out across Saltchuk’s shiny facade.
For one thing, the Ethisphere Institute is a for-profit, Arizona-based corporation that takes money from a limited stable of corporations who pay to join, then nominate themselves for 144 “world’s most ethical company” titles. Ethisphere’s due diligence, according to the Los Angeles Times and slate.com, is token at best.
Another crack in Tote/Saltchuk’s benevolent front concerns the record of Foss Maritime, a Saltchuk subsidiary that will be sued in 2017 by a West Coast longshoremen’s union for retaliatory layoffs during a longstanding dispute over overtime and work-shift limits. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union also accused Foss-chartered tugs of breaking picket lines during a 2013 Columbia River strike; an unsurprising action for a corporation, perhaps, except that Mike Garvey’s father was a committed union man, a stevedore who was part of a dockworkers’ gang that threw scabs off ships during strikes in California ports.
Tote has also engaged in illegal price-fixing activities on the Puerto Rico run El Faro works. In 2002—this according to federal criminal charges against Sea Star and Tote Services—following the bankruptcy of Navieras de Puerto Rico, a major rival on that run, Saltchuk cofounder Shapiro told Sea Star Lines president Frank Peake and pricing director Peter Baci that the Tote subsidiary, Sea Star, which had lost $20 million the year before, must start turning a profit. Later that year, in the Park Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, Peake and Baci met executives from the two other major Florida–Puerto Rico shipping companies, Crowley Maritime and Horizon Lines. At that meeting the three companies secretly agreed to fix, for the Puerto Rico trade, uniformly higher prices that would guarantee fat returns. The scheme worked, and next year Sea Star posted a profit; the arrangement continued until 2008, when the colluding companies were sued by some of their major clients, including Walmart, Walgreens, Kraft, and Kellogg’s. Baci and Peake were sentenced to four and five years in jail, respectively: harsh punishment that a federal prosecutor said “Reflects the serious harm these conspirators inflicted on American consumers, both in the continental United States and in Puerto Rico.” The Saltchuk cofounder Shapiro was accused by Baci of ordering the price-fixing strategy, but never charged.
Peake and Baci, of course, are no longer employed by Tote companies. Tote, Inc.’s director since 2010 has been Anthony Chiarello. Its general counsel and chief ethics officer is a lawyer named Michael B. Holt. Both executives came to Tote from the giant Japanese shipping conglomerate NYK; they worked for the company’s US arm headquartered in Secaucus, New Jersey. Coincidentally, NYK was prosecuted for price-fixing in the port of Baltimore between 1997 and 2012, a period during which, at varying times, Chiarello and Holt both worked for NYK. A plea bargain that forced NYK to pay $59.4 million to victims of its restraint of trade was agreed upon with federal prosecutors in March 2015.
Chiarello was deputy administrator for the Port of Baltimore until the early nineties, long before NYK allegedly got involved in price-fixing activities there.
Under Holt’s stewardship as top ethical counsel for NYK’s US group, the company was selected as one of the “world’s most ethical” companies in ’08, ’09, ’10, and ’11 by an Arizona business-ethics consultancy called Ethisphere.
That Saltchuk also seeks to improve its regulatory environment by contributing to, on average, a third of the election war chests of US House and Senate subcommittee members charged with overseeing the merchant marine would of course be routine for a big corporation and accepted as perfectly ethical by current business standards.VIII
Despite the record of Peake and Baci, Saltchuk and its Tote subsidiaries do not normally appear to behave in a manner that can be construed as illegal or even unethical by current business standards. But it’s also fair to say that the record suggests a pressure both standard and significant exerted by Saltchuk on subsidiary companies to maximize profits irrespective of labor sensitivities or, at times, the sensibilities of its employees; and such pressure might well have resulted in behavior that generates risk for those employees.
At Tote, the evidence for a link between pressure to maximize profits—which for any company must include cost cutting—and the experience of El Faro’s people becomes, at least circumstantially, important. Jack Hearn, in later testimony, will say he noticed a change in office support when he joined the Puerto Rico run in 2012. Cuts in staff numbers tend to be one of the first tools a company uses to reduce costs, and inadequate staffing was cited by Tote’s HR officer, Melissa Clark, and also by Jack Hearn as causing glitches in ship/office relations. “I felt at the time I could have used additional staff,” Clark will comment in testimony. An audit cited a company reorganization in 2012, under Chiarello’s supervision, as being at least partially to blame for delayed maintenance and poor ship/office communications; a foreman of longshoremen working on Tote vessels in Tacoma around that time says he noticed a definite change in style, from a fairly low-key, paternalistic company that didn’t mind putting money into equipment, to an outfit with a more hard-edged and stingy management persona.
In 2013, a reorganization at Tote Services Inc., El Faro’s operator of record, resulted in its marine-operations team being reduced, from a team including ship’s officers tasked with offering real-time advice on offshore operations and weather, to one officer, a person holding no merchant marine license and with little direct experience of seafaring. The company’s president also refused to hire a safety coordinator, whose job apparently would have included tracking ships, although the job was listed in the organizational chart and at least one candidate was interviewed before the hire was prohibited. Later hearings will determine that the safety department overall consists of only two persons, one of them Lawrence, charged with overseeing the safety of twenty-five ships worldwide; 85 percent of their workload, according to evidence presented at the hearings, is devoted to the LNG fleet.
El Faro’s port engineer, Neeson, will testify at the same hearings that he is always working the equivalent of two and a half to three jobs at once. His workload must certainly have been increased last month by Tote’s decision to get rid of the “port mate” who helped out with loading. A former chief engineer on El Faro will state at the hearings that whereas, before the company’s reorganization, he could count on support from multiple Tote officers in Jacksonville, afterward he could turn to only one: the port engineer. This kind of reorganization could certainly have had an impact on safety and overall maintenance, at sea and in port. It is important to reemphasize as well that pressure to keep to schedule and reduce operating costs, coupled with a human resources culture that fosters insecurity among some officers, might lead employees to cut corners in an effort to satisfy company expectations.
Tote, of course, will deny any negligence, let alone malfeasance, in what is to happen to El Faro during hearings on the loss. Tote will refuse to comment on any matters pertaining to El Faro in the writing of this book. Multiple lawsuits brought by families of El Faro’s crew will be settled out of court. Tote will prove to be fairly humane in its response to individual families and will help pay for memorials to its crew members. And looking at the issue through accountants’ eyes for a moment, one must admit that no company—especially in a niche market in which the bills for replacing equipment are high—can stay 100 percent safety conscious or maintenance obsessed. Nor can such a company afford to be 100 percent profit-oriented at the expense of safety and maintenance; that is, if it wishes its operations to run smoothly.
Every corporation builds an operational rheostat on which it seeks a right setting between the two poles of employee safety and profit. It seems very possible if not likely that Tote, used to the tranquil Puerto Rico run, and encouraged by a more bottom-line-oriented regime at Saltchuk, allowed its setting to creep too far to the profit side, and this resulted in a slacking of effort devoted to safety concerns. An important example of this might be the failure to keep close track of ships and weather, of El Faro in relation to Joaquin; relying instead and solely on the noon report, the time-honored practice of having the captain notify the head office of position and status daily at midday.
As Michael Garvey will say in an interview after the price-fixing incident, most business sins are sins of omission rather than commission. Tote’s line managers, some of whom were mariners themselves, are certainly far from indifferent to El Faro’s fate. Many of them, it appears, will be personally devastated by what happens to her crew. But overall the evidence seems to point to Tote’s responsibility for a number of sins of omission: “a colossal failure of management” is how Tom Roth-Roffy, the leading National Transportation Safety Board official investigating El Faro’s disappearance, will express it during hearings;IX and this will have a measurable part to play in the fate of one of Tote’s ships over the next twenty-one hours.
It is ironic that the ship in question should have been one of the original Sun fleet present at the conception of Tote and Saltchuk—come back, an unshriven ghost, to haunt the company’s offices in Jacksonville, Princeton, and Seattle, for years to come.
5
The first SAT-C forecast to predict Joaquin’s elevation to hurricane status comes chittering out of the Inmarsat console on the bridge at 10:57 a.m. and is torn off the printer at 11:00. It shows the storm, which (it is also predicted) will generate winds of seventy knots, is going to move to the southwest, heading 230 degrees; ambling along, still slowly, at five knots. This prediction will turn out to be off by sixty-two miles and thirty knots. It heralds a Category 1, blowing between 64 and 82 knots (74 to 95 mph),X the least strong of hurricane ratings. Yet the forecast for the first time gives some definition to the beast Joaquin is at heart, some clue to what it is becoming.
On the bridge Jeremie Riehm and the captain confer. A few minutes earlier, before the SAT-C came in, Riehm talked about being on a “collision course” with the storm, and Davidson tweaked his “nice little diversion” a handful of degrees farther west, pressing the change into the ship’s GPS and putting the ship on a course of 138 degrees. He and Riehm think the ship won’t experience winds stronger than forty-five knots when they brush by the circling tumult of the storm. When he looks at the newest forecast, though, Davidson compares it to the Bon Voyage prediction he has already scanned, and curiously, he repeats the same line he used before, almost as if it were a prayer: “Yeah, I think we’re gonna—we’re gonna duck underneath it.”
Davidson puts a lot of faith in BVS and the clarity and resolution of its forecast package, and so does at least one other officer: Shultz at 3:33 p.m. today will say to his opposite number on a radio call to El Faro’s sister ship, “We’re really lovin’ that BVS program now.” The red zone of highest winds at the center of a cyclone, the orange/yellow of lesser turbulence around, the easy greens and blues of relative calm; the black projected track of a storm, sharply defined on a chart; these seem to offer solid, concrete choices, as opposed to the small gray print and implied uncertainties of the longer meteorological analyses offered in text. Against these bright, colorful pictures one can plot a ship’s evasive tactics as clearly and simply as in a video game.
One thing Davidson cannot know, however, and nor can anyone else, is that the BVS track he is relying on is misleading, and not only because of the underlying inaccuracy of the National Weather Service forecast. A glitch in Advanced Weather Technologies’ mainframe computer in Sunnyvale, California, has resulted in an uneven refresh of the BVS forecast package. The text portion has been changed to reflect the newest NWS/NHC data, but the track portion of the graphics has not been reworked. It is the old track, and this means that if you tot up the time that NWS takes to convert raw data into a forecast (three hours), plus the time BVS needs to create their package (six hours), plus the wait period before the next transmission cycle, the trackline Davidson and his officers are looking at through most of the morning of September 30 represents yesterday’s predictions for Joaquin, well before it became a hurricane. Graphically speaking, the forecast is twenty-one hours old.
This is not a terrible delay for the clients NWS most cares about, who are wondering whether to put their bikes in the garage or nail plywood over the picture window, but it’s a matter of life and death for mariners depending on BVS to show them the likely path of a cyclone.
If we imagine Michael Davidson on the bridge or in his office, focusing on the clearest and most visually effective representation of Joaquin—a BVS track that shows the storm, a circle of bruised scarlet, separated by a collar of lighter and cooler colors from El Faro’s projected course, and visually just far enough away to allow the ship to “duck” beneath, through winds and seas that will resemble, as Davidson likes to repeat, the usual day’s work in Alaskan waters—it is not entirely surprising that he doesn’t stop to reassess his thinking and opts instead to keep the ship on course.
It seems clear from the VDR recording that El Faro’s officers in general are not aware of the lag between data and prediction inherent in either forecast; or if they are, they do not pay sufficient attention to the extra uncertainty such a lag must entail.
6
Danielle Randolph is up and running well before the change of watch at noon, in part because that’s the etiquette for relieving the previous watch; in part, very likely, because the second mate’s brief, as well as navigation and keeping the bridge in order, is to back up the chief mate on cargo work, so she would walk the narrow canyons on Main Deck between the stacked containers, their crossed breastwork of chains and rods; thin rectangular views of sea, clouds, a flat horizon slowly moving up and down against the ship’s roll, and a stubborn spangle of bright sun glimpsed between the forty-foot-high steel walls; random spray of thrown spume, warm but still refreshing, when she moves between the outboard railing and the outermost boxes; and there, a heart-salving sensory overload of wind and the crash-wash-crash of wake.
Then, down the companionway to the decks below, opening a scuttle to clamber down the ladders, past 2nd Deck to 3rd Deck, where she might run across Champa and one of the goodies doing another ritual check of the refrigerated trailers; down yet another level to the Tank Top, where the only company among a crowd of parked, silent cars might be an engineer checking on the complex of pipes and pump valves that is the core of the ship’s firefighting system, ranked against the bulkhead starboard-aft. Sensory overload of a different kind happens inside these cargo spaces at sea, everything half-dark yet alive with the ship’s motion, the vast, echoing, exhaust-blackened garages inside El Faro’s hull, most of the holds over a hundred feet long and ninety wide, sectioned off by the gates, and through those gates you walk into the next vast space, hold after hold, each an abode of steel girders and close-packed trailers and great black shadows fighting the occasional blare of neon light; smell of oil and gas from the cars, pervasive roar of reefers all around, creaking springs as the trailers rock, the distant, regular boom of waves on the thick metal that keeps the sea out. Throwing your weight on the levers that dog the watertight doors inside the gates, you make your way from the forward areas, 1-hold back to 2-hold and 2-A (a “plug” hold, the section added in 1993), to the ass end of 3-hold, making sure you close and dog every door behind you; then through the watertight door kept open for ventilation to the engine room on 3rd Deck, or back up to 2nd Deck to another hatch, and a final check of 5-hold aft.
Then, most likely, a quick lunch in the officers’ mess. Afterward, Randolph and Larry Davis make their way to the bridge, where Riehm and Jackson have been looking over the forecast—“Got it forecasted all the way up to one hundred and twenty [knots],” Riehm says, and Jackson responds, “Holy shit,” but that’s a forecast for October 3, and the men agree they’ll be in “safe harbor” before that: “. . . We’ll probably see forty-five [knots],” Riehm says. While Davis and Jackson complain about the union meeting that woke them up this morning—“If I were you, I’d come out with a hammer and just whack! Whack! Get the fuck outta here!” Jackson advises—Riehm shows Randolph the GPS waypoints for the tweaked course Shultz and Davidson planned earlier. The new course is “one three eight,” Jackson tells Davis. “One three eight,” Riehm repeats, and “One-three-eight,” Randolph confirms; and wishes Riehm and Jackson good day.
Once Riehm has left the bridge, though, Randolph seems to fall prey to doubt about the new course. Maybe because she is less focused on the BVS graphics and can pay more attention to the raw NWS text data on the SAT-C, she is starting to doubt her captain’s reasons for not taking more drastic action to evade Joaquin. She acts it out, in a way, for Davis’s benefit, pretending to be Davidson: “ ‘It’s nothing and it’s nothing!’ ” and “ ‘Uh, I’m going up here fucking way off course.’ Of course it’s nothing—then why the hell are we goin’ on a different track line? I think he’s just tryin’ to play it down because he shouldn’t have come this way . . . saving face.”
“We’re getting sea swells now,” Davis says, referring to the deeper period waves that might be expected from the hurricane.
“Well, Larry,” Randolph says, presumably showing him a chart or forecast track line, “we are here and the storm is here. . . . We’re entering it.”
At noon a bell sounds, on the bridge and throughout the ship. It’s the test signal for the general alarm, a ringing that sounds throughout El Faro, which at any other time would signal to everyone that the ship is in peril. At this time also, Davidson, from a computer terminal in his office, sends Tote an email via Inmarsat. This is the routine noon report, a standard form including average speed (19.8 knots), amount of fuel consumed (580 barrels), distance remaining to San Juan (828 miles), as well as various engine temperatures and pressures. In the “notes” section of the report, he adds one terse line: “Precautions observed regarding Hurricane Joaquin.”
Clouds scud before the sun, the ship seems to rock ’n’ roll from dark to bright sea. Jeff Mathias shows up on the bridge, looking for an update on the storm or maybe just Randolph’s famously excellent coffee. The two are friends and do favors for each other. Randolph once went on a shopping raid into San Juan to buy presents for Mathias’s kids when he was too busy to get off the ship. “Is it gourmet?” he asks now, referring to the java, and Randolph assures him, “It’s freshly ground. . . . We do not joke up here when it comes to coffee.”
“I guess not,” Mathias agrees.
As they sip their brew Randolph shows the engineer where Joaquin is in relation to the ship, offering him “the pretty colors,” presumably on the BVS map. If it is the BVS, though, she is not as confident of its accuracy as her superiors, or maybe she’s more aware of the overall lack of comfort in being at close quarters with something so big, the way someone might feel about edging around a bad-tempered gorilla, though the gorilla is just beyond arm’s reach.
“Okay,” Mathias agrees finally.
“We’re not going far off course.”
“Well, hey, this is a fine cup of coffee, so thank you.” As Mathias is leaving, Davis advises him to pack up his metal pipes and conduits, and the engineer replies, “Absolutely. Acetylene bottles secured . . . pipes are all lashed down.”
“Lash down your workers?” Randolph asks.
“They’re all excited.”
“I don’t think they realize what they’re getting into,” Davis comments, and, disgustingly, mimes someone being sick on the deck.
7
Down in the hissing, rumbling, wheezing, chugging chiaroscuro of the engine room, though this is its own closed world and you have no visual of the weather or sea state unless you leave it, the ship’s livelier motion is noticeable; you have to compensate a bit more for the deck shifting beneath your feet, rocking fore and aft mostly but lately with a bit more sideways to it; the motion has more of an effect here, lacking a horizon to keep track of what’s up and down, the vestibular system in your inner ear has to work harder. Sometimes it helps to hold the handrail set at waist level on the control panel, not to save you from falling, the motion is not yet so violent, but to hold steady, give the semicircular canals a break while you check gauges in sequence or jot down settings.
All of this is normal; to the engine-room crew, motion sensed and seen, the shifting dark areas and glaring lights, the gleam of those lights on sleek, oiled machinery casings, warm breeze from fans and vents, the smell of grease, steam, and hot metal wafted on that breeze are all objective correlatives of home—the rocking is as comforting in its way as the rocking of a porch swing. Here amid the regular thrumming sounds of El Faro’s engine room it seems everything is in its place, all of these sense impressions evidence that the engineers’ world is working, doing what it’s supposed to do, turning and pressurizing, spinning and squirting, roaring and driving the ship through whatever the sea might lob at them now.
Captain Mike came down earlier, in the second watch, to warn of heavy weather, and everything loose that can be stowed or tied down is secured, so that even in the context of the upcoming storm everything is right with this world, top to bottom—top being the uppermost level of the engine room, just a platform and steel stairs, but the flat includes a space with a good selection of gym equipment, Exercycles, weights, StairMasters; though the third engineers are not on watch between four and eight, you might well find Mitch Kuflik here, working out. Maybe because he’s six foot four and there’s more of him to feel confined and bogged down by shipboard claustrophobia, he likes to stretch his muscles and spends more time exercising here than most; just as, having recently moved with his fiancée to Brooklyn, he spends a lot of his spare time out of the city, hiking in the summer, skiing in winter. He proposed to Brittany on Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, prepared the whole thing with an engineer’s attention to detail, delegating friends to shepherd her to the mountain’s very top just before sunset so he could pop the question with half of New England shining in blue-tinged snow and golden light beneath them. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t foresee everything, couldn’t know beforehand that Brittany, a ski novice, though more than willing to learn a sport her future husband loved, by the time late afternoon rolled around would have hit the wall of chill and muscle cramp and would flatly refuse to ride back up to the mountaintop. Eventually, worn down by the weird insistence of Mitch’s buddies, she consented to do one more run on the bunny slope, and Mitch ended up proposing to her on the kiddie lift while his chums, chortling, snapped pictures of them from the next chair.
Next level down, to the control bank between the mass of boilers and sloped housing of the reduction gear. The second engineer, Howard Schoenly, earlier was busy blowing tubes, channeling steam at high pressure back into the boilers to knock accumulated soot, the carbon detritus of burning, off the pipes through which water circulates. Diverting steam in this way reduces the amount driving the turbine and therefore brings down rpms, something the bridge noticed and took in stride, though speed is a big part of the captain’s safety equation, the ability to zip quickly around Joaquin implied—but blowing soot is necessary to avoid the fire-side clogging up, which eventually would slow the system down anyway.
At this hour Schoenly is probably busy on the engine room’s lower level, cleaning out the strainers on the fuel-transfer pump. El Faro, per company policy, did not fill her fuel tanks to the brim; she took on eighty-five hundred barrels of RMK 500, a viscous golden liquid, known as bunker oil, somewhere between regular diesel fuel and home heating oil, from a barge at Blount Island; enough for the Puerto Rico round-trip plus a 50 percent safety margin. Most of that is stored in four tanks, two on each side in the lowest part of the ship, below the Tank Top Deck; it is then transferred to a service tank as needed. The company mandates the partial fill-up, some say to preserve its ability to top up the tanks at lower cost if bunker prices drop, although to anyone with awareness of seagoing stability, the idea of half-full tanks is bothersome because of “free surface motion.” In a full (or “pressed-up”) tank the liquid, whatever it is, stays put because it has nowhere to move. In a half-full tank, if the ship tilts to one side, the liquid follows gravity and sloshes to the downhill side of the tank, adding weight to that side and causing the vessel to list farther in an exponential, self-sustaining chain reaction that can have serious consequences for a ship already in trouble. It is not clear however, now or later, whether free-surface motion in the fuel tanks is an active factor in what is going to happen, now only fourteen hours in the future.
The burn-off of several thousand barrels of fuel also affects stability, decreasing weight low in the hull and raising the center of gravity so that the ship’s average GM margin, when arriving at destination, typically decreases to .25, still safely above the minimum. One ex-captain believes this change also is noticeable on the bridge, the ship becoming more tender as her roll period, the time she takes to tilt from side to side, increases from roughly ten seconds to twelve or fifteen.
The strainers Schoenly is working on are part of the pump that moves fuel from storage to service tank, from which it is squirted into the boilers. They screen out impurities to prevent clogging in the burners; the burners atomize the fuel that, once lit, heats the steam that keeps the turbine spinning. It’s therefore important to clean the strainers daily, even more vital to do so if heavy weather is anticipated, since a lot of rolling and pitching will stir up accumulated rust and other sediments in the main fuel tanks, which will clog the strainers’ pores. There are two strainers, one of large mesh set at the suction end of the pump, where the raw fuel comes in; the other, of finer mesh, screens the discharge end, whence the fuel goes straight to the burners. Each strainer has two baskets, one in use and one off-line: turning a handle between them diverts flow to the second filter, which allows removal of the first for cleaning. The engineer then cleans the used filter and replaces it in the unused basket, ready for the next switch tomorrow, or sooner if the pressure differential between suction and discharge ends of the pump starts to climb, indicating blockage.
And Schoenly can do this in his sleep, having been a second engineer for so long. Like Jackson in his able-seaman’s post, Schoenly has reached the level of responsibility he’s content with and has no desire to become chief or even first engineer and no fondness for the paperwork those posts entail. He is a large man with a big salt-and-pepper mustache, a fondness for beer, and, ironically perhaps, a near-total lack of filters when it comes to saying what he thinks. One engineer he has worked with says that if you ever want to vent, but don’t know how to do it diplomatically, tell Howard; he will do it for you, in the whaddya accent and high volume of his native New York but usually in such a manner, laced with insults that are not really offensive—“Ya snapperheads,” he calls the deck officers—that no one gets truly pissed off. The targets of his harmless abuse just shake their heads and mutter, “That’s Howard,” although they’ll have heard the message, too.
The second engineer has his own spectrum of duties, most having to do with the boilers: fuel and strainers are part of that, as is checking the “water side” of the system, the vacuum feed pumps on the lower, portside level that supply water to the boilers, the condensers that capture and cool the steam. He might have Griffin, the first engineer, working with him or elsewhere in the engine room, since engineers often stand normal watch at the controls then add on two hours for maintenance duties. Schoenly’s regular assistant on the four-to-eight watch is Shawn Thomas, a hardworking oiler, or engine-room hand, a man who’s as quiet as Howard sometimes is loud and knows the routine as well as Schoenly. The routine on this ancient ship is a bit more heavy-duty than it would be on a modern vessel; it’s like crossing the street with your grandmother as opposed to a buddy you’re going to play squash with, you know you have to take more care, look out for the old lady, be a bit more attentive to avoid granny breaking her hip—shun a malfunction that might shut down propulsion.
As regards the boilers, two hoary Babcock & Wilcox D-type supersized kettles, the granny analogy is no exaggeration. They are original, like the rest of the main propulsion plant, thus forty years old. They were checked at the end of July by an inspector from Walashek Industrial & Marine, an engineering firm that specializes in seagoing boilers, and reinspected earlier this month. During that process the portside boiler was cooled down over a day and a half so that engineers could crawl inside and directly examine the pipes and burners. The starboard was not inspected that way, but the chief assumes it’s in the same shape, since it suffered from even worse problems on a previous inspection.
Those problems do not prevent the boilers from working at their present capacity, generating steam at a pressure of 850 to 900 pounds per square inch, a somewhat lower level than their original rating of over 1,070 but adequate for pushing the turbines. Deterioration of the boilers, as of granny’s innards, is a foreseeable consequence of age: the “throats” of the burners, where fuel is sprayed into the heating chamber, are worn, and the tubes that hold the water as it’s heated to steam are bending outward because the wall of insulating bricks lining that chamber is also starting to bow outward. Although a September survey cited concerns about oil buildup on all three burners because of cracks in the metal, nobody seems to think the problem is grave enough to stop the ship from sailing. The company has deferred repair till El Faro goes to shipyard for her refit in November, before she goes to Alaska. The Walashek inspector has advised that the repair be seen to as soon as possible—“not prudent to leave” is how he puts it—but it’s also true that he has pressed no panic buttons, does not foresee an immediate danger to the ship, and his report was sent to no one excepting his supervisors at Walashek and Tote.
8
Through early afternoon the wind does not stop freshening. The barometer drops, which is hardly a surprise to anyone, given that a cyclonic system revolves around a node of deeply low atmospheric pressure, and the first effects tend to spread far from the actual storm. Davidson comes back to the bridge.
“Weather pattern . . . is crazy erratic,” he comments.
“It’s a good thing I’m the swell whisperer,” Randolph quips. “. . . I can feel it.” She taps a rhythm with her fingers. “Like, this way.” Tap, tap, tap. Then she asks if their sister ship El Yunque took the Old Bahama Channel on her opposite trip, northbound, and Davidson says, “She did not,” and explains: by speeding up (which is possible in part because, Puerto Rico’s resources being what they are, the ships on the northbound route carry less cargo and so can move faster) they have stayed ahead of the storm—and yet they encountered gusts gauged at one hundred knots on their anemometer. Because El Yunque was driving at twenty-plus knots into the wind, this meant the wind was blowing at less than eighty knots, but it was still hurricane force.
Randolph points at the anemometer dial. “That’s not been workin’ accurately so it’s not—” Now she points at Larry Davis. “We’ll just stick Larry out there; we’ll do the Larry gauge.” Still looking at Davis: “If you get blown off the bridge, we’ll be, like, ‘Aah, it was about a hundred, ninety.’ ”
“We’re gonna be far enough south,” Davidson says confidently, “not gonna hit the damn thing. Watch . . . these ships can take it.”
The waves galloping around are increasingly crowned with white, they tumble into troughs already laced with the torn shrouds of previously broken combers. The wind has picked up further. The VHF, always tuned to 16, the marine call-up and emergency channel, crackles as a Coast Guard aircraft, invisible above the hurrying clouds, sends out the latest brief for mariners: a warning for the central Bahamas, including San Salvador Island. A warning, though it is exactly that, announcing merely the possibility of a hurricane’s reaching a given area, is a step up from “watch” status.XI
Davidson, speculating now, says that when they get closer to the storm, they might have to alter course to steer into the waves. “I’ll be up all night for the most part,” he promises. “. . . We may just steer one twenty-five [roughly southeast, riding with the wind and waves as they would be when the hurricane was past]. Or we may just steer one thirty . . . get us through the storm. Weather ride.”
“Might as well be comfortable,” Randolph agrees.
Chief Mate Shultz and AB Frank Hamm relieve Randolph and Davis just before 1600 hours, 4:00 p.m. El Yunque is over the horizon, steaming on the opposite track; Shultz knows when she left San Juan and can figure out when El Yunque will be within range of VHF radio, which, as a line-of-sight transmission system, has a maximum range limited by antenna altitude and Earth’s curve, in this case roughly thirty or forty miles, more if the corresponding ships bear their antennas high. He calls the other ship, therefore, on Channel 16. On the Yunque, thirty miles to the east, the chief mate, Ray Stith, immediately answers, and they switch to the channel used for normal traffic.
After a few minutes of chitchat, of ribbing about mislaid supplies and broken lightbulbs, Shultz says, “Ya know we’re watching the weather, uh, you guys are all in the clear, right?”
“Yes,” El Yunque’s mate replies, “don’t worry, we sped up just ahead . . . of the storm.”
“And that’s why,” Shultz says, “we’re not side by side here, ’cause we’re tryin’ to give it an extra thirty to fifty miles from the predicted center as we, uh, scoot around here.”
“The captain,” Stith comments a little later, referring to El Yunque’s master, “says you’re going the wrong way.”
“No, you know, we’re really loving that BVS program now.”
“Okay,” El Yunque’s mate says, and adds, with irony perhaps intended, “bon voyage.”
Shultz, having repeated Davidson’s term for the hurricane evasion plan, goes back to the BVS, gauging the ship’s distance from the cyclone as the storm, proceeding southwestward and spinning counterclockwise, conceptually at least skirts the left-hand facet of El Faro’s track, sideswiping the ship with the outer skein of winds rocketing off its own left hand and then lower-left arc, on El Faro’s backside.
No one mentions it at the time, perhaps because this seems self-evident to any navigating officer, but the strategy of staying on the left-hand side of a typical cyclone’s course in the northern hemisphere makes sense for three reasons: first (and for this it’s helpful to visualize the circle of a storm spinning counterclockwise, with directional indications all taken from the storm’s point of view), because winds on the right-hand curve of an advancing cyclone will tend to scoop a ship toward the hurricane’s center; second, because winds in the right-hand quadrant, blowing roughly in the direction of its advance, will be stronger by the speed of the hurricane’s motion; third, because hurricanes approaching the North American continent typically veer rightward, to the north, at or shortly after this stage of their development, and thus away from a ship on its left-hand side.
Dead reckoning now puts El Faro off Elbow Cay, the southeastern corner of Abaco Island in the central Bahamas. A big stone lighthouse is built on the cay, easy for radar to spot, and it shows on the ship’s long-range screen, twenty-five miles to the right, or starboard, and a little behind the ship.
Davidson returns to the bridge. “That’s a pretty healthy swell building there, Chief Mate,” he says.
“Not totally unexpected,” Shultz replies. “It’s on the port quarter [the back, left side of the ship].”
“As expected. I like the period of the swell, too. Ride nicer. We are really comfortable actually.”
The “comfortable” nature of a ride is not just a matter of physical ease for the crew. Rough rides mean, almost inevitably, some cargo damage.
Both men now look at the charts and forecasts for the return trip, which the captain says, if Joaquin does what’s predicted, will mean a miserable ride northbound (“Watch this thing morph like on the third, fourth, and fifth. It then explo-o-o-des,” he says a little later). And once more he reiterates the pitch he made to the company for going north up the Old Bahama Channel route he decided against for this run south: “What I’d like to do is get away from all this. Let this do what it does. [He’s talking about the return trip, up the Old Bahama Channel.] . . . I would expect anyone in the office would say, ‘Absolutely, you’re the only one, you’re the one here.’ Yeah, but you know I’m extending them a professional courtesy,” he continues, “and saying, ‘Hey man—you know—these are some of my thoughts and you got any objection to that?’ ”
“So what did you say?” Able Seaman Hamm breaks in shortly afterward. “There could be a chance we’ll turn around?”
“Oh, no, no, no. We’re not gonna turn around,” Davidson replies firmly.
Around 4:21 p.m. the captain leaves. Presumably he consults his emails and finds Fisker-Andersen’s reply, for he comes back a few minutes later, announcing to Shultz, “We can go Old Bahamas Channel comin’ home.” They remind each other to tell Randolph when she comes back from supper, presumably so she can get charts ready, and then Davidson, clearly relieved, exclaims, “Old Bahamas—northbound!” and Hamm joins in happily, “Woo-ooh!”
The second mate, coming back to relieve Shultz and Davidson so they can eat dinner, sorts through the paper charts that the ship will use to go through the Old Bahama Channel. And then the 5:00 p.m. SAT-C forecast chatters in. Randolph examines it intently. “Looks like the hurricane is right over our track here. Our old trackline . . . so, two in the morning . . . it should be right here.” She starts chuckling. “Looks like this storm’s coming right for us. Aah, you gotta be kidding me.”
Her chuckles swell to outright laughter, and this might be a measure of real worry on Randolph’s part. Her roommate at Maine Maritime, Claire Lewis, now captain of a seagoing tug with Crowley Maritime in Alaska, says later, “[Danielle] used her sense of humor as a way to deal with situations she either didn’t like or was uncomfortable with. I clearly remember her stressing about a paper due in one of our classes . . . and how she wasn’t going to get it done on time. Instead of freaking out about it, she instead was laughing. Laughing and joking about how, if she botched this paper, it would be the first step on her road to ruin.”
“Max winds eighty-five—gusts to one hundred and five knots,” Randolph reads now.
“We’re gonna get our ass ripped,” says Larry Davis, who has just come up to the bridge to relieve Hamm.
“We are gonna go right through the fuckin’ eye.”
“Kiss those containers good-bye.”
“Gonna get to sleep fast tonight,” Randolph adds, “ ’cause I think you and I are gonna be the lucky ones—we’re gonna get the brunt of the storm during our normal . . . watch hours.”
Later, when the regular watch standers return to the bridge, Randolph and Davis head for their cabins. Able Seaman Frank Hamm is still nervous. “Doesn’t look pretty,” he tells Shultz. They both are looking at the SAT-C forecast, each adjusting his glasses to read. Davidson is currently in his office, looking for the BVS package, which comes in as a Microsoft Outlook attachment to an email sent via Inmarsat to the office computer; if it’s visible on the bridge, that’s because the captain forwarded it there. This is one of the little quirks of El Faro’s system, not very important in itself, but even the small delay it causes might affect decisions under the pressure of time, on the bridge in later hours. And it prevents mates from reading BVS forecasts if the skipper neglects to send them. “That don’t look too good right there,” Hamm continues. “That red . . . I don’t like that.”
Hamm mentions the CDs, of R&B and house music, that he mixes and sells to crew members; he doesn’t want his stock-in-trade flying around in rough weather.
Shultz points to his coffee mug. “See, this here is my favorite coffee cup. It’s goin’ in the sock drawer. I’m not gonna let it sit out on my deck.” As if it were the same topic, which it is in a sense, Shultz adds, “I’ve seen water chest deep on Second Deck . . . it’s no joke.” Clearly the image of water flooding 2nd Deck triggers another image in the mate’s mind, of what might happen if seawater found access from 2nd Deck, the lowest semi-open deck in the hull, to the supposedly watertight areas below. “Yeah, when I said you know those scuttles need to be dogged—not just flipped down—they need to be spun and sealed.”
Hamm has a similar nightmare running. “I mean—I’ve been on ships . . . ya get your sea legs—and we was like, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ you know what I’m sayin’? And it’s cra-a-azy, spray came all the way like basically over the top . . . of the trailers like this, like when waves and spray just come back.
“I ain’t never seen—these containers with chains—dropping, destroyed,” he continues. “Know what I’m sayin’? Just, I ain’t never been in nothin’ like that before. Knock on wood, I won’t be part of nothin’ like that.”
Then Davidson’s back on the bridge. Shultz looks at him and clears his throat, probably wondering, because of how firm the captain’s been about not giving too much ground to Joaquin, if he should bring up the idea of diverting farther. Finally he does.
“Umm, would . . . would you consider goin’ the other side of San Salvador?”
But if Shultz is worried about the captain’s reaction to such relative prudence, Davidson surprises him: “Yeah, I thought about that.”
The two men move to the chartroom, to a big desk on which the paper chart of the Central Bahamas is laid out; a function, perhaps, of El Faro’s lack of an operational electronic-chart display,XII but also because a paper chart, typically three and a half feet wide by three deep, affords a physically more generous view of the waters they travel in; given their need to take in the big picture, it makes sense. The captain and mate discuss the details of leaving El Faro’s current track, which skirts the Bahamas chain to the northeast and doesn’t break through, in order to cut inside: dip behind the island of San Salvador, through a channel between San Salvador and Rum Cay, and then out to open ocean again.
They work out the changes the detour would entail, where the ship will alter course to steer her half circle around the island, dodging behind land in one of the few places there’s enough deep water to do so.
“That’s what I was aiming for,” Shultz says, “lots and lots of deep water.” And later: “We’ll stay well clear of that shallow spot.”
The dodge is a step in the right direction given that El Faro should be in position to veer southwest behind the island, taking advantage of its protection, at the very time they are due to be close to Joaquin’s projected track. It’s not a big detour, just a tactical dogleg that soon brings them back to their previous track line and will add less than twenty miles to their overall route: a quick duck in, duck out. But if the storm stays far enough northeast it will give the ship a crucial respite from the roundhouse swings of the hurricane’s wind and waves.
Even so, the mate urges Davidson to prolong the detour by a few miles around the next island to the southeast, a glorified sandbar named Samana Cay. “If you agree—well—we’ll stay south of this island as well before we come back out . . . in this area here.”
“I don’t think we’ll need to,” Davidson says.
Possibly emboldened by Davidson’s ready agreement to the San Salvador detour, Shultz proposes extending it through a channel that would take El Faro even farther south, from the San Salvador channel to another skirting Crooked and Acklins Islands, and onward through what’s known as Crooked Island Passage, which finally rejoins the lower portion of the Old Bahama Channel off the eastern end of Cuba. Then they could continue eastward to Puerto Rico.
“No,” Davidson replies curtly.
The two men plug course changes and waypoints into the ship’s GPS, and in the midst of navigating, perhaps because Davidson finally got his reply from Fisker-Andersen, their dialogue veers to head office and scheduling, and from there to the opinion both believe their corporate superiors at Tote have of them.
“When they lay this up [in shipyard], they’re not gonna take us back,” Shultz says.
“No, I know.”
“. . . I hear what you’re sayin’, Captain. I’m in line for the chopping block.”
“Yeah, same here.”
“I’m waitin’ to get screwed,” Shultz says, and “Same here,” Davidson says again.
One can imagine the two men staring forward out the bridge windows as they talk, looking into what they see as overcast, even stormbound career paths; observing the sea, always, for they are mariners. Even with the bridge’s air-conditioning the air is dense with humidity the hurricane is pushing ahead of itself, vapor drags at the men’s clothes and weighs down their lungs a bit. It is almost 7:00 p.m., and the sun setting behind and to the right of El Faro stabs blades of light, sharp and sparkling as a killer’s knife, between the thick ribs of clouds, bloodying the sky above, the dance of whitecaps below.
9
Back in the engine room, Schoenly and Thomas are on watch this evening, their rounds not limited to the second engineer’s sphere; they cover the system entire. The gauges at the control station show the different working pressures of water and steam, tracking the change of state as water turns to vapor to superheated steam, then cools back to water again. The gauges show the various temperatures of fuel and lube oil, pumps and bearings; the wellness of the electrical circuit, the rpm of gears and shaft. Glass bull’s-eyes through which the golden fuel, the darker lubricating oil, can be observed show no evidence of movement, which paradoxically means the oil, the heavy fuel, are in fact flowing well, without visible interruption or air bubbles. Everything is okay, no one has to call the bridge to report problems, as the chief would certainly do if necessary; personal issues, such as not getting along too well with Davidson, are irrelevant to a guy who does things as conscientiously and by the book as Pusatere does.
Schoenly might not be interested in the bureaucracy of higher rank, but that doesn’t mean he’s uninterested in his duties as second engineer, his experience having given him the sense of balance all good engineers must have, of how any one component of the plant depends on the rest, of how malfunction in one part can weaken or bring another down. Therefore he more than likely pays particular attention to the reduction gear, which has been vibrating more than usual of late. He looks closely, as well, at the gauges monitoring lube-oil flow in three areas: the main turbine’s forward “journal” bearing (a circle of ball bearings surrounding a shaft), which is running six degrees hotter than normal; the strut bearings in the propeller-shaft tube; and the sump under the reduction gears. Much as a doctor sends patients’ blood and urine samples to Quest, samples of lube oil from different parts of the machinery are sent at regular intervals to a shoreside laboratory for testing. The strut bearing is a stout steel appendage under the ship’s stern through which the propeller shaft runs, spinning on those oiled bearings, and the results for that area came back with an “alert” score for high levels of tin, indicating the metal there was breaking down. All of these items have been scheduled for inspection at the Bahamas shipyard.
The oil lubricating the turbines themselves, as dripped down and collected in the engine’s lowest sump, deep aft under the reduction gear, tested fine; and the electrically powered oil pumps, two DeLaval-Imo screw-type machines each big as a full-grown man, whine smoothly, powerfully moving the pure, viscous fluid through a spiderweb of yellow-colored pipes. The pumps’ operating principle, supposedly invented by Archimedes in the third century BCE, is as reliable as it is ancient, one or more screws (or helices) driven by a shaft that scoops up, at one end, liquid that is carried along on a screw’s continually winding thread to the other end. In these machines the oil is sucked into a pipe that hangs ten inches over, and twenty-two inches to starboard of, the sump’s base in the lowest part of the gear housing. The oil is then “screwed” upward, splurting over the pump’s innards as well as up and over the turbines. Like the turbines and boilers these pumps are part of the original plant; but with few moving parts, and all of them self-lubricating, they usually cause no trouble. The seal on the forward pump is due for replacement, and this is standard maintenance. The aft pump is running 3 psi lower than normal, which calls for a complete rebuild. But even if trouble were to occur in one pump, setting off multiple alarms at the control console, the second would kick in and take over; and if for some reason both pumps went off-line at the same time, the backup, gravity-fed tank would dump its load of oil into the turbine, giving engineers between two and ten minutes to shut down the turbine before it seized up.XIII
Still, an unexplained leak occurred in one of the pumps several months ago, with a significant quantity of oil lost, lowering the level of oil in the sump to twenty-two inches. The incident, according to a Tote manager, was probably due to malfunction of a seal or gasket. Reporting it to the Coast Guard would not have been required. But history such as this causes an engineer to gaze carefully and long at the machinery responsible, feeling under it for leakage, resting his hand almost sensually on the casing to check for arrhythmia. Like any engineer he thinks his way inside the pump, imagining its guts, from the suction pipe that dips into the sump, siphoning oil, to the whirling helix that drags the thick fluid to spray over the hot spinning machines. As he works he might well discuss what he’s doing with Mitch Kuflik, come down from the gym a little early for his eight-to-twelve watch to see how everything’s going and lend a hand if needed. Kuflik’s sense of involvement, of responsibility, is strong; like Davidson, Kuflik’s normal schedule should have taken him off El Faro this trip, but he opted to stay on because Dylan Meklin was joining the ship. Training a greenhorn third takes a lot of time, and Kuflik didn’t want to saddle Mitch Holland, the other third engineer, with extra work.
Mathias, too, has a strong sense of responsibility and doesn’t mind extra work. Anyway, it could be that the headaches of maintaining an old plant, like keeping used farm machinery running, give him pleasure; at any rate he rarely complains about them. The oilers are sometimes less reticent. Eddie Pittman, a former oiler on El Faro, said of the ship’s engine room, “The question was not what wasn’t working, the question was what was working.” He describes part of his job as standing at the console to keep an eye on the gauges, then making rounds to see what problems are surfacing up close and personal. “Anomalies all the time; if the vacuum pump’s gauge goes down, if a feed pump leaks, you go to see what’s happening.” But the complaints rarely go beyond the griping stage. “You don’t want to be, ‘Why’m I doing this?’ If it’s working, I’m not going to be a nuisance about it, anyway I didn’t feel it was that much of a danger. . . . It’s a steam culture, everyone knows what to do.”
Below the pumps and the deck plates under the engine room’s nether level is the dark underworld into which oiler Shawn Thomas sometimes peers to check for telltale leaks from engine systems or from the hull itself. Some oilers do not much trust the hull. They have found water in the bilges, over and above what one might expect from condensation or wash-down pumps or from spray that somehow made its way through the vent openings on 2nd Deck all the way down to the Tank Top. El Faro is strongly built compared to some modern ships, but even in deepest steel her age shows: last January, a classification society inspection revealed holed and wasted steel in a transverse bulkhead in the forepeak. And a 2015 hull survey found that fillet welds—joins burned into the trough between two angled slabs of steel—had fractured over a length of several feet in a portside ballast tank, causing the tank to crack away from two supporting frames. These flaws are due to be repaired in shipyard.
Also, El Faro was lengthened. That extra section of hull, 90.9 feet in length and 92 feet wide, was constructed in 1993 at the Bender Yard, in Mobile, Alabama. El Faro (or Northern Lights, as she was called at the time) was then dry-docked next door and sliced clean in two at the forward bulkhead of 3-hold, between frames 134 and 135. The two halves were dragged apart and the new section rolled into place and welded, front and back, to the corresponding sections of the ship.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about this procedure; it is done all the time. The molecular bond between new steel plates and old can be fine, though it depends on thorough and expert welding to achieve the required strength. Frames and stringers reinforcing the hull must also be welded together perfectly for them to resist the bending, flexing, and torquing forces to which the lengthened ship will be subjected by the sea.
Given both the high quality of Coast Guard inspections and the general indifference of the American public to maritime matters, what happens if welds and the overall hull structure of a lengthened ship fail is rarely spoken of in the United States. But catastrophic hull failure is a real danger that might, for example, have contributed to the celebrated loss of the American ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, the year of El Faro’s birth;XIV a tragedy burned into America’s consciousness thanks to a hit single by Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot. Catastrophic hull failure is an affliction that has particularly beset large, foreign-registered bulk-cargo carriers, such as the UK-flagged MV Derbyshire, which disappeared in a typhoon in 1980. At one point in the eighties and nineties, bulk carriers were sinking from hull failure at an average rate of one a month. Other types of ships have suffered as well. In 1997 the hull of the MSC Carla, a Panamanian-flagged container ship, split in two in heavy weather at the spot where the ship had been lengthened. The Marine Electric also had been lengthened, like the Carla, like El Faro, and while rotten hatch covers were found to be primarily responsible for her loss, a subsequent report indicated failure of the hull plates might also have been a cause.
Two sister ships of El Faro’s have suffered serious hull failure. The Great Land was forced to return to Tacoma, Washington, after her main deck and supporting hull structure developed cracks in rough Alaskan seas in February 1998. The Lurline suffered a “class one” structural failure of hull plates and frames in 2008. The Westward Venture once suffered flooding in the bilges of 3-hold. It took over eight hours to evacuate the seawater through rust-clogged pump inlets, or “rose boxes.” One officer says the flooding was never fully explained.
With these old ships it’s a virtual certainty, especially in areas where complex welding is required, that metal fatigue will occur; in fact, the question is not whether fatigue occurs but whether it happens to an extent that will be problematic. Fatigue happens in two ways: by repeated stress, as when a hull is subjected to uneven cargo loads or to bending in heavy seas; and by “working.” In the first case, the molecular structure of the steel, which in its pristine state is regular and crystalline, after being subjected to the ten thousandth or one hundred thousandth stress event, starts to twist and knot up, opening microscopic pockets in, say, a weld—pockets that will in time widen into a crack. The crack will then lengthen in a typical branching pattern, caused by resistance from a “moraine” made of molecules piled up ahead of the lengthening, which forces the metal to split off in a different direction.
“Working,” the second form of metal fatigue, describes the tendency of repeatedly stressed steel undergoing similar molecular changes to stiffen instead of flex—anyone who has ever broken a paperclip by bending it back and forth is familiar with such stiffening, which increases until suddenly the metal snaps. This snapping is a quantum event in that the number and state of molecules are not directly measurable. The time and place at which a tipping point occurs and a weld or steel plate actually breaks is dependent (as chaos theory would have it) on the process’s “exponential sensitivity to initial conditions”—initial conditions being the near-infinite number of variables such as metal composition, types of stress, length of exposure, and so on that determine when a break will occur.
Not everyone places much importance on the presence of water in the bilge. One former chief claims it’s a result of inefficient draining and filling of the tanks of fructose, which after discharge in Puerto Rico are destined to boost the commonwealth’s already astronomical obesity levels via the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Bayamón. Some stevedores, he says, are sloppy when hooking up and disconnecting the hoses, and gallons of the sticky syrup drain into the bilges. The bilges therefore require washing down, and not all of the wash-down water is removed by the pumps, but instead accumulates where an oiler might come across it, under the Tank Top and lower-engine-room deck plates.
10
The seas Joaquin churns up at its center, according to the latest forecast received, must by now be well over fifteen feet in height, driven by winds of seventy knots. As night falls El Faro is navigating an ocean environment far less dramatic, but the wind is still increasing in strength. The swells from the northeast have not stopped building, they are approaching ten feet and the ship, which thanks to her sea-kindly lines still rides easily, is nonetheless feeling the storm’s deeper motion the way a person on a king-size mattress will jiggle when her partner, though on the bed’s other side, rolls or shifts.
In the galley, Lashawn, Quammie, and Jordan have prepared and served a supper menu featuring jerk chicken, rice and peas, a dish popular with the unlicensed crew, though less so with some of the mates—“It’s just food,” one of them comments dismissively. After the meal is officially over at seven thirty, they load the dishwashers and once again secure for weather, stowing anything loose or breakable in lockers or refrigerators.
Captain Davidson is still on the bridge when the watch changes at 8:00 p.m., and he oversees the transition from Chief Mate Shultz and four-to-eight deckhand Frank Hamm to Third Mate Riehm and AB Jackson. Davidson briefs the incoming mate on the San Salvador detour: “Before it got dark we altered course, picked a new route to get farther from the hurricane,” he explains.
The new course is 150 degrees. Their present speed is nineteen knots, which, as the captain remarks, is a good clip, though the ship is capable of more. The diversion should keep them well away, or forty miles in any case, from the storm’s center. “San Salvador is gonna afford a lot of lee. . . . We’ll just bust on to get down. . . . We’ll be passing clear on the backside of it. Just keep steaming, our speed is tremendous right now. The faster we’re goin’ the better,” the captain insists. “This will put wind on the stern a little more, it’s gonna give us a push.” Even tomorrow morning Davidson will repeat, almost as if he’s trying to convince himself, his ship “will be on the upside”; the storm will have raged on past.
In most disasters there exists a moment in the timeline, of which observers say later, “Here is where such and such a factor might have halted the chain reaction of accident.” And it’s tempting now to refer back to the broken anemometer, because if Davidson had benefited from a constant, accurate read of wind direction, coupled with data from the (working) barometer, he soon would have realized that a consistent northeast wind and falling atmospheric pressure meant that the ship could not be “clear on the backside” of a tropical cyclone. But the anemometer is broken, and the idea of coming safety remains intact, for the captain at least: and surely the image in everyone’s mind as they hear the captain talk must be of clearing skies, a horizon-wide brilliance of sun striking sparks of warmth and colors of jade and lapis from the softening seas, a welcome injection of ease after a dark night fighting clear. Yet despite or because of what sounds almost like a pep talk, the captain warns his third mate, “The safety of the ship comes first.” He also advises, “Keep one foot on the deck,” a mariner’s way of advising caution.
And then at 7:57 p.m., 19:57 in ship’s time, Davidson descends the single set of companionway stairs to his stateroom. He will not come out until over eight hours later—4:19 the following morning—when the ship is fully engaged with the lethal weather system he believed they would avoid.
Riehm has listened respectfully to the ship’s master, only once remarking that the Weather Underground website has predicted the storm’s winds will blow harder than forecast. “They’re saying it’s more like eighty-five . . . ,” he said. Once Davidson has left, Riehm checks the forecast against the chart. At 2:00 a.m., he calculates, the ship will be seventy miles from Joaquin. Referring to the Weather Underground prediction, still marking positions on the chart, he says to Jackson, “If [the forecast] is off by forty knots, then—sixty, here. . . . It’s just, I don’t like being so close to something here.”
Checking the chart would put Riehm in the classic navigator’s stance, bending over the big chart table at the bridge’s aft end, perhaps walking the dividers: a brass instrument, like a compass used to trace circles in geometry, with which to measure distances. Though the chart table faces forward, he would draw the curtain behind him, once the AB has returned to lookout position, to keep the chart light from opening Jackson’s pupils and harming his night vision. The rasp of rings on metal rod as the curtain is opened and shut is a chronically recurring sound in the voyage-data recording. . . . The meat and potatoes of watch keeping in the twenty-first century is electronic, with electronic chart display and GPS, along with autopilot, steering the ship, and radar furnishing distance off and relative bearing of obstacles and traffic; yet tradition and practical experience require keeping physical lookout as well. The GPS, usually reliable, can nonetheless go off-line, and radars can miss a target, especially in rough seas.
The traditional language a mariner is trained to obey, like the tradition of a captain’s absolute authority, is unchanged from the days of sailing ships. Rule 5 of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, aka COLREGs, the corpus of basic traffic and navigation rules that ships’ officers must obey at sea, states “Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate . . . so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and the risk of collision.” COLREGs concludes, “Nothing in these Rules shall exonerate any vessel, or the owner, master or crew thereof, from the consequences of any neglect to comply with these Rules or of the neglect of any precaution which may be required by the ordinary practice of seamen, or by the special circumstances of the case.” The “ordinary practice of seamen” is usually interpreted to mean physical lookout and other traditional methods of keeping watch and tracking position and weather.
Riehm keeps up his commentary to Jackson. Perhaps by talking out his thoughts he can clarify his doubts to himself and strengthen his resolve, should it come to that, to question his captain.
“It’s more powerful than we thought. It’s supposed to . . . stop . . . getting any closer, it’s gonna turn toward the north. What if it doesn’t? What if we get close—we get jammed in those islands there and it starts comin’ at us? . . . Maybe I’m just being Chicken Little here,” he adds gloomily, “I don’t know.”
Riehm’s commentary has vector, and following the direction of his spoken thoughts, he starts to imagine an alternative course.
“There’s a gap in the chart,” he adds, apparently referring to the passage Shultz spoke of, south of San Salvador, that leads southwest past Crooked Island and eventually to a continuation of the Old Bahama Channel. He starts to plug waypoints for the new course into the GPS, ready for use should the need arise.
“Some captains,” Riehm remarks, “would have taken one look at that and said, ‘We’re gonna go the Old Bahamas Channel—we’re not takin’ any chances here.’ ”
“That’s what I thought we—we were gonna do,” Jackson says.
“ ‘And we’ll go well south of it,’ ” Riehm continues, still quoting a hypothetical captain, “ ‘and we’ll be gettin’ in a little bit late. We’ll be off schedule . . . but we’ll catch up.’ ” A few minutes later though, as if to reacknowledge his captain’s authority, he vows, “I’m not gonna second-guess somebody.”
“Well, I’ll never have faith in the fuckers like I used to though,” Jackson remarks, chuckling. “The captain of [name redacted]XV sailed us right through one.” He describes Hurricane Hugo and the ship’s path through it in 1989. “I got thrown to the deck—I could hear the captain screamin’, ‘Yaaaah!’ ” Jackson laughs as he mimics the terrified skipper. “We were goin’ over though, this big wave. . . . It came in and slammed us. . . . I mean, we came to this shuddering stop. I mean, I was sure we were goin’ over—positive. . . . It’s like death was actually—I mean, it was—we were fated to die. . . . No one hardly spoke for like about two, two to three days, before people even started talkin’.
“I mean,” Jackson continues more somberly, “everyone felt death was like right on us, man. It was like this presence, you know?”
Jackson, it seems, cannot let go of this memory. “Oh, man, that thing—first it started you know—pitchin’ and rollin’, and then it got worse, it started, like some kind of wild animal, just tryin’ to break out of its—like a fuckin’ bull in a stall, you know. . . . Then all the cargo broke loose and, aaah my God.
“Speaking of cargo lashings,” Jackson adds, “I found two little [twist] screws stripped . . .” The two men talk of there not being sufficient spares to replace broken twist screws on the container lashings, and how they don’t complain at safety meetings for fear of being labeled “that troublemaker.” Riehm is still focused on the storm.
“I was just walkin’ up Second Deck this afternoon,” he says a little later, “and just goin’, ‘Oh, man.’ Guess I’m just turnin’ into a Chicken Little, but—I have this feeling like something bad is gonna happen.”
At 10:53 p.m. the latest SAT-C forecast comes in over the printer. This forecast is far more accurate than the ones preceding, placing the storm only twenty-five miles too far northwest, a mere five knots too low in intensity. Ten minutes later Riehm gets on the phone to the stateroom where Davidson is sleeping.
“Hey, Captain—sorry to wake ya. . . . The latest weather just came in, and, umm, I thought you might wanna take a look at it.” He listens to Davidson’s response, then continues, “Just lookin’ at the forecast and lookin’ at our track line, which way it’s goin’, and, uh—thought you might wanna take a look at it. . . . The current forecast,” he goes on, “has it . . . maximum winds, umm, one hundred miles an hour at the center, and if I’m lookin’ at this right, umm, it’s moving at—at two thirty [degrees] at five knots. So I assume it stays on that same—moves that same direction for say the next five hours and . . . so it’s advancing on our trackline and puts us real close to it. I could be more specific—”
Escape routes: El Faro could have taken the Northwest and Northeast Providence Channels, and finally Crooked Island Passage, to escape Joaquin’s clutches; she did not have time to make the Mayaguana Passage. Shaded areas mark both solid land and shallows El Faro could not navigate.
Davidson tells Riehm to plot out the new forecast against the ship’s planned track and to call him back. Riehm plots the bearings, commenting to the AB, “Well, he seems to think that we’ll be south of it by then—so the winds won’t be an issue.”
A half dozen minutes later the third mate rings Davidson again.
“So at oh four hundred we’ll be twenty-two miles from the center with, uh, maximum hundred with gusts to one twenty and strengthening so—the option that we do have . . . is at oh two hundred we could head south. And that would open it up some—so I mean of course I’d want you to verify what I’m seeing. I do understand you expect us not to get into the quadrant dead ahead and expose us. Just so you know that—that’s how close we’ll be.”
A pause in Riehm’s run-on as Davidson replies.
“You’re welcome,” Riehm says at length, and puts the phone down. The two men are silent for several minutes. Eventually Riehm speaks up.
“We’ll be as close as we’re gonna get,” he tells Jackson, “according to the forecast—four, four thirty.”
“And the wind speed now?”
“One hundred max—gusts to one ten.”
“Shit,” Jackson says. “Shit.”
“. . . What he’s saying is, ‘Well, we’ll be in the southwest quadrant, wind will be coming from the north.’ ”
“Nantucket sleigh ride,” Jackson comments, referring to the headlong trip endured by an old-fashioned whaleboat roped to a harpooned, wildly fleeing whale.
“I trust what he’s saying,” Riehm says. “It’s just being twenty miles away from hundred-knot winds—this doesn’t even sound right.”
“No matter which way it’s hittin’ ya—still hundred-knot winds. I got a feelin’, gonna get my poopy suitXVI and my life jacket—laid out. . . . It’s good to know,” Jackson continues, laughing, “that Lonnie and Lashawn will get the EPIRBS, man.”
EPIRBs are emergency position-indicating radio beacons, self-contained transmitters usually stowed on an open deck, that broadcast automatic distress signals when activated manually or after immersion in salt water. El Faro has one; it’s unclear whether anyone else aboard owns a personal beacon.
A little later, watching the radar, spotting a band of rain that might be one of the first signs of the actual hurricane, Riehm says, “We don’t have any options here. We got nowhere to go.”
“Jesus, man,” Jackson replies, “don’t tell me any more. I don’t even wanna hear it,” and the third mate laughs. Jackson continues, “Th-th-th-th-th-these are ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-big waaaves.” He’s imitating Elmer Fudd: “Jesus, it’s a hurricane!”
11
Investigators will later determine that the gut feelings of Riehm and Jackson are far from misguided. Most prudent mariners would agree with Riehm and aver Davidson is making a mistake. With just one glance at the chart, even the flawed weather charts El Faro has been receiving, a cautious skipper would react instinctively to that angry red swirl apparently coming after him and decide not to try outguessing the storm, just get the hell out of the way and never mind the bureaucratic consequences.
Earlier Riehm talked about Davidson’s experience as captain, and even now he seems to have faith in his skipper’s overall judgment; he certainly does not put up a fight when Davidson dismisses his suggestion to escape the storm by steaming southwest through Crooked Island Passage. Taking that channel, or else turning tail and fleeing at full speed back to Jacksonville, are probably the only two paths to survival left open to El Faro at this point.
And yet Davidson not only rejects Riehm’s idea, he seems to do so summarily. He doesn’t bother climbing one flight up to his bridge to eyeball directly what the situation might be, given the new forecast. (SAT-C data don’t transmit directly to his office computer, though the terminal receives the BVS version; that he asks the mate to do the tracking suggests Davidson doesn’t get out of his bunk to check BVS either.) Nor does Davidson immediately download the BVS forecast that came in at 11:00 p.m. Of course, as an experienced mariner, even one who’s okay with relying on GPS to thread tricky passages in bad weather, he can visualize twenty-two miles, or a hurricane’s swirl, in his mind’s eye and sense on some level the fanged gauntlet of reefs and islands El Faro would have to run to flee south.
But the human imagination is heavily visual, and eyeballing spatial relationships on screen or paper is important to our understanding of them. With the grace of hindsight, we can imagine that coming up to the bridge and visually measuring the tracks of ship and storm might have allowed Davidson to accord a bit more weight to Riehm’s advice.
Instead, Captain Mike apparently settles down in his bunk and closes his eyes again.
We will never know for certain why. We can never be sure why, as Davidson considered his options when safely moored in Jacksonville, he seemed so convinced that taking the inside route through Old Bahama Channel, traveling at the greatest distance possible from Joaquin, was an option not even worth considering, except for the return trip. He had done it once before, in August, when Tropical Storm Erika threatened, although in that case he probably felt encouraged to take the longer route south because of emails from Tote that strongly counseled safety precautions. Faulty forecasts, unrefreshed BVS track lines, and the momentum of habit certainly played their part in his thinking for this trip. So, perhaps, did overconfidence in navigational options: the tendency, as Delgado says, to forgo the ordinary, cautious practice of seamen and “tickle the dragon’s tail.” Davidson also seems excessively confident of El Faro’s overall strength in stormy seas, due perhaps to the relative unfamiliarity of a hands-off skipper with the salt-and-steel vulnerabilities of his ship. He may not realize that the Ponce-class ships he knew in Alaska handled better because they didn’t carry a tall deck cargo of containers.
Michael Davidson’s insecurity about his job at Tote clearly played a major role in his initial decision. He knew from his experience at Crowley Maritime, and possibly from scuttlebutt surrounding Hearn’s dismissal from Tote, how professionally risky it could be to make decisions based solely on safety concerns that would cost a shipowner money; his near-obsessive reiteration of how he asked Tote for permission to take the safe route back seems evidence enough of that. All these factors combined would provide strong psychological pressure for Davidson to focus hard on his ongoing “shoot under” strategy, to the detriment of other options and of El Faro’s eventual safety.
Deeper yet, among the complexities of the captain’s mind; lower than those synaptic annexes of fear and confidence, lies a subtler and possibly just as fateful psychological quirk. For Michael Davidson, according to several crew members with whom he discussed the subject, was a “doomsday prepper,” one of that subgroup, more common in America than anywhere else, that expects the end of civilization to occur quite soon, and possibly tomorrow, from any number of causes: nuclear war, economic, social, and political breakdown, global pandemic, widespread terrorism, peak oil, rising sea levels, earthquake, meteor strike—even, on the fringes of the group, alien invasion and zombie apocalypse.
Preppers believe also, and this is just as important as the fear component, that the end is survivable as long as one gets ready for it. To that end they dig blastproof bunkers, buy canned foods and water filters, stock up on guns and ammo. More productively perhaps, they learn how to grow vegetables, set up solar panels, and generally live off-grid.
It’s not clear how far down the prepper road Davidson has traveled, but he has talked about building bunkers before. And he listens to the podcasts of Alex Jones—the same Alex Jones who, when he is not deriding the murders of Sandy Hook’s children as a government hoax, is selling prepper products online: packs of iodine tablets for use in case of nuclear fallout ($19.95 a twenty-pack), tactical body armor ($1,400-plus per vest), bottles of “male vitality” ($59.95 apiece) for guys who can’t really get it up for The End.XVII
At first glance, preppers such as Davidson would strike one as being more, rather than less, aware of coming disaster; more apt to take measures to neutralize the effects of a coming holocaust. “Holocaust” in the original Greek means the burning of everything, and if one substitutes water and wind for fire, and drowning for cremation, then Joaquin, even if not worldwide in scope, possesses all relevant attributes in as much terrifying volume as one might ever wish for or fear.
But psychologists who have examined the issue have found that, curiously, many preppers are committed optimists. “When an unpredictable or painful experience . . . is predictable, we relax. The anxiety caused by uncertainty is gone,” a Scientific American article opines.XVIII If one thinks about it for more than five seconds, the idea that a nuclear holocaust, for example, could be survivable thanks to thyroid tablets and a bunker dug in New England clay truly represents an act of optimism, not to mention naive, even illogical, faith. And with such faith comes a curious peace, even complacency, because one has prepared—as if preparation in and of itself has satisfied some moral code only the community of preppers can appreciate; as if the quantum sum of tiny factors that contribute to taking further action, or not, has just shifted by one psychological unit to the “chill out” side.
Safe in that knowledge, peaceful in his complacency, the prepper can pull up the covers, close his eyes, and finally sleep.