The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Since its earliest days Lloyd’s had kept detailed records of ship losses in publications known as Lloyd’s List and Lloyd’s Casualty Reports. The original ledgers were archived in a nearby library; I’d spent previous days poring over their pages. From start to finish, they were testaments to the wisdom of staying on dry land. In a monthlong flurry in 1984, for instance, they recorded the loss of the Marques, “a British barque bound Bermuda for Halifax, knocked down by waves, flooded rapidly, sunk 70 miles north of Bermuda. Crew missing”; the Perito Moreno, an Argentine tanker that broke in two; the Tesubu, a Panamanian tanker carrying a cargo of molasses that began “taking water in No. 1 tank in heavy seas … Not sighted or heard of since”; the Abu Al Khair, a Kuwaiti cargo vessel that capsized in a gale and sank with all hands on board; the Athena, a nine-thousand-ton Greek ship “presumed to have sunk … after leaking in heavy seas”; the Marine Electric, a Panamanian ship “abandoned adrift with No. 1 hold flooded”; and the Venus, a Philippine motor ferry “sunk in heavy seas 110 miles southeast of Manila.”

  The ledgers were thick and dusty, oversize like showy coffee table books but with somber matte covers. Their entries were carefully inked in a courtly calligraphic hand on precisely lined paper, but their content was bare-knuckled and raw. I read through volumes of notations like “Continuous pounding by heavy seas broke her up” and “There was no sign of the other 13 men and because of the 50-foot waves further searching was impossible. It was presumed all had drowned.” There were countless descriptions of tankers that had come apart at the seams: “The bow section drifted away in the storm tossed seas until it sank … some 40 miles away from the position of the stern.”

  The ships that met disaster most frequently were bulk carriers, a type of cargo ship developed in the 1950s to haul commodities like grain, coal, iron ore, cement, and timber. Bulkers were the Clydesdales of the sea, enormous steel workhorses. Three or four football fields in length, they sat low in the water and were flat across their decks. There was nothing supple or nimble about these ships, nothing that allowed them to do anything in big waves but lumber doggedly through them, take a heavy beating, and roll and twist and groan. In port they endured equal abuse: cargo was shot into their holds by high-speed machines, thousands of tons of iron ore pellets battering the boat’s structure. During unloading, huge metal claws reached in and scraped the hull for every last ounce. Even the strongest steel would fatigue under these conditions—and corrode in salt water—and bulk carriers, especially those manufactured after 1980, were often made of something far weaker, a lighter high-tensile steel that cracked and corroded at an even faster clip.

  Compounding these problems, bulk shipping’s mammoth loads had an unfortunate tendency to shift in bumpy seas, causing fatal weight imbalances. While this usually meant that iron ore or a silo’s worth of wheat was jouncing around below deck, a book that Lloyd’s had published called Modern Shipping Disasters described the Alexis, a Greek cargo vessel carrying 2,500 sheep that “developed a list to port caused by the livestock becoming restless.” The fidgeting sheep, it turned out, sank the ship. “A week later Agricultural Department employees began the task of burning or burying the rotting carcasses of 2,000 drowned sheep that had been washed up on western Cyprus beaches.”

  Bulkers have another Achilles’ heel: their hatches, sizable deck openings that enable cargo to be shuttled in and out of the holds with maximum speed. (Time is money on the commercial high seas.) When waves pummel the deck, these hatches can be breached. If that happens, the hold beneath the hatch floods, causing the bulkheads between the various cargo compartments to blow out. From that point it is usually a matter of minutes before the ship goes to pieces.

  The hatch problem was brutally illustrated on March 22, 1973, when two Norwegian bulk carriers, the Norse Variant and the Anita, disappeared at virtually the same time and in the same location. Both ships were carrying coal from Virginia to Europe when they ran into a storm off the coast of New Jersey, with fifty-foot waves and sixty-knot winds. The Anita and its crew of thirty-two disappeared so suddenly there was not even time for an emergency call, leading investigators to believe it was struck by a wave that arose from an unexpected direction, smashing open the hatches. No trace of the vessel was found. The Norse Variant sank with equal efficiency, although one man from among its thirty-one crew managed to survive. He was found two days later, barely alive and floating in the North Atlantic, 120 miles from where his ship went down. His account confirmed that the Norse Variant’s demise also had been caused by waves breaking a hatch cover, allowing water to flood in.

  Often ship losses were blamed on metal fatigue and maintenance shortcomings—the vessel being too tired to withstand the waves’ onslaught—and it was true that older ships tended to be more rust-buckety than younger ones, aging in a marine variation of dog years. Add to this the fact that bulkers were designed during a time when the biggest waves in the ocean had been written off as myth. It made no sense, therefore, for anyone to build ships to meet such Leviathans. This mistake was made clear in 1980, when giant waves wiped out a ship that was far from old and decrepit, a state-of-the-art 186,000-ton bulk and crude oil carrier, the Derbyshire. It was the largest ship to be registered as missing by Lloyd’s, and the largest British ship ever lost at sea.

  Only four years old and well maintained, the Derbyshire, along with its crew of forty-four and its payload of iron ore, went down in the Pacific during Typhoon Orchid. No radio call went out, no distress signal was given. This wasn’t a new story, perhaps, but unlike other lost ships this one wasn’t flying a Liberian flag and manned by Laotian sailors. One would think that any 186,000-ton ship abruptly vanishing would be cause for thorough investigation, but in the past that was usually not what happened. “The world has watched such catastrophes with icy detachment,” British journalist Tom Mangold wrote. “There has been no widespread outrage, not even much demand for explanation. A handful of anonymous Third World seamen drowning in some distant ocean cannot compete with emotive pictures of oil-covered seabirds off the Shetland Islands or polluted coastlines off Alaska.”

  In the Derbyshire’s case, things went differently. The crew’s families formed a lobbying group and forced the British government to conduct not one but three inquiries. The results, at first, did not provide much comfort. “Forces of nature” and “poor seamanship” were blamed: the ship had been “overcome by 80-foot waves.” The story might have ended there, had the families been satisfied by that explanation. They weren’t. The Derbyshire was one of six sister ships built at approximately the same time, all with the same design, and by 1982 some of the siblings had exhibited alarming structural problems, including metal cracking so severe it emitted gunshot sounds. One of the ships had actually broken in half. Determined to uncover more details of what had gone so wrong so fast—and hopefully prevent it from happening again—the families and the International Transport Workers Federation raised money to hunt for the Derbyshire’s remains. Amazingly, they found them.

  The wreckage was located 650 miles southeast of Japan, littered across the seafloor two and a half miles down. The stern had ripped off and lay more than a mile away from the rest of the pieces. Deep submersibles documented the scene with video and photographs, scanning a graveyard of metal that had been sheared and crumpled and torn. When the images were examined, surveyors discovered that, once again, a hatch cover had imploded near the front, causing water to flood the bow. But there was something else too. The type of metal fracturing on the hatches indicated that the ship had been hit by what engineers called “steep pressure impulses,” a type of high-velocity impact that comes from plunging waves. In other words, it looked as though a wave had broken on top of the Derbyshire. And while an army of eighty-footers would assault any ship, it would have required a greater beast than that to deliver a knockout blow from above. Some investigators believed that only a freak wave could have done it, with its abnormally steep, breaking peak and its profound trough for the ship t
o fall into. Of course, there was no way to prove this. “This is still a casualty without an eyewitness,” the British attorney general Lord Williams declared, summing up the obvious: “Those who were on board the Derbyshire were the only persons in a position to know what happened, and all of them have perished.”

  After a decade of effort, the families of the lost crew had succeeded in drawing attention to bulk carriers’ sketchier features, such as hatch covers that were too flimsy to meet extreme waves, and other problems long overdue for fixing. Regulations were tightened, stricter safety procedures advised. There was a chorus among naval architects that, given the wide gap between what the models had pronounced about maximum wave size versus what Nature had to say on the subject, ship design needed more than a little tweaking: it needed a total rethink. “It is true that the loss of the Derbyshire prompted big changes,” Roberts said.

  Not big enough, unfortunately. According to the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO), from 1990 to mid-1997 a total of ninety-nine bulk carriers were lost. Then, in a dire encore, twenty-seven vessels along with 654 people were lost during a four-month period in the winter of 1997–98. Oil tankers slipped from the radar, leaving only black slicks to show they’d ever existed; rescuers responding to emergency calls arrived at the coordinates and found, instead of the vessel, mangled bits of debris. “In some cases ships had simply broken apart like a snapped pencil,” an IMO report read.

  During the twenty-first century, ships have continued to submit to the waves at startling rates. Paging through loss reports from the International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI), Roberts pointed out that statistics might not tell the whole story, given the industry trend toward building ships so gargantuan that special ports must be constructed to accommodate them. (One vanished ship now is kind of like two in the past.) Stormier seas seem to be taking their toll: in recent years losses caused by weather have risen by more than 10 percent.

  Cargo ships weren’t the only ones running into trouble in the swells. Roberts also worried about new trends in the cruise ship industry, notably the ballooning size of the vessels and itineraries to increasingly far-flung ports of call. Engines could fail in remote areas where rescue was impractical or even impossible. “You’ve got five thousand people on some of these cruise ships,” he said. “It’s a high concentration of risk.” In recent years there had been numerous incidents—from pirate attacks to ship-crippling fires to hellacious storms—where cruises had been anything but carefree vacations.

  In 1995 the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth 2, a thousand feet of plush carpets, grand pianos, and soft lighting, was buffaloed by a pair of ninety-five-foot waves that jumped out of sixty-foot Atlantic seas churned up by Hurricane Luis. The captain, Ronald Warwick, was able to determine the waves’ height when they “loomed out of the darkness from 220°” because their crests were level with the bridge. (Ocean buoys moored nearby recorded even higher waves at the time.) “It looked as though the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover,” Warwick said. The waves broke over the bow with explosive force and the ship fell into the trough between them, smashing many of its windows, part of its foredeck, and, one would imagine, all of its crystal stemware. Amazingly, the QE2 survived the encounter.

  Lindblad Expeditions’ Endeavour had its navigation and communications equipment and its windows blown out by a hundred-foot wave near Antarctica but still managed to limp to safety; Holland America’s flagship Rotterdam lost power in four engines in the middle of Hurricane Karl, leaving the sixty-thousand-ton vessel floundering in fifty-foot seas for six hours until backup generators kicked in. In 2007 the 2,500-passenger Norwegian Dawn, en route from the Bahamas to New York City in heavy seas, was struck by a seventy-foot wave that smashed windows, flooded cabins, ripped Jacuzzis off the decks, and hurled passengers from their beds. “The sea had actually calmed down when the wave seemed to come out of thin air at daybreak,” a spokeswoman said. “Our captain, who has twenty years of experience, said he’d never seen anything like it.” Despite offers of free drinks and discount vouchers for future cruises, not every passenger was mollified. A group of them filed a lawsuit against the cruise line, claiming that the freak wave should have been “reasonably expected.”

  We finished our coffees and Roberts offered to give me a tour of Lloyd’s underwriting section, famously known as The Room. It was one level up the crazy escalator and, in fact, wasn’t a room at all. It was a long open space, a hive of brokers, insurers, and clients, buying and selling and totting up risk. Like Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, Lloyd’s is a market; this was its trading floor. Standing quietly in the center of the action was the Lutine Bell. Majestic in its twenty-foot-high circular pavilion made of dark, heavily polished wood, the bell had belonged to a frigate that sank in 1799 with a cargo of gold and silver bullion. Over the years it has served as a combination centerpiece and mascot in every Lloyd’s headquarters. Traditionally it was sounded whenever a ship went missing. Now it was rung only ceremonially, tolling once for bad news, twice for good. On September 11, 2001, Roberts told me, the building heard its single, mournful peal.

  Roberts, a nautical history buff, led me to a glass display case near the bell containing, among other artifacts, the original logbook from the Battle of Trafalgar. It was an astonishing thing to see, set among hundreds of blinking computer screens on the trading floor, relics from the oceans of the past transported centuries into the future, reminders that although humans and their ships might come and go, the seas will always remain.

  Next to the case, two large ledgers lay open on a table. They were identical to those I’d seen in the library, except that the one in front of me bore the current date. Its companion ledger was labeled with the same day and month—but from one hundred years ago. I was staring at these books, both of which were filled, like all the others, with ocean mishaps, when a startlingly tiny man walked up, leaned over the current ledger, and began to carefully write in the familiar calligraphy:

  Northsea

  Cambodian ship

  Sank following a fire on board in Lat 04 44N

  N long 0234 W

  22 crew rescued

  4 dead, 3 missing

  As he inscribed the loss his face was serious, and when he was finished, he nodded at what he had written and walked away.

  Shipping will continue to be treacherous, Roberts said as we made our way back to the lobby. There were always fresh worries, the latest ones including a global crew shortage. This lack of expertise was especially troubling given the next-generation ships, floating colossi with complex computer navigation systems to master, not always a snap when the manual’s written in German and you speak only Tagalog. “The number of adequately experienced mariners will be spread even more thinly,” Roberts noted.

  Along with the classic marine perils of yore, now Lloyd’s also had to weigh modern risks of terrorism, pandemics, cyberattacks, and climate volatility. Meanwhile, they expected not only snarlier oceans and elevated sea levels, but more hurricanes, windstorms, storm surges, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, droughts—all affecting more people and more property. I could see what Roberts was trying to explain. Yes, ships had it rough out there, and sure, the losses were astonishing, but these were dwarfed by Lloyd’s nightmare scenario: a disaster impacting the eastern seaboard of the United States, where over eight trillion dollars’ worth of coastal property, 111 million people, and half the U.S. gross domestic product would be exposed. A larger-scale repeat of Katrina or a steep sea level rise, or even—as outlandish as it sounds—a tsunami would make things like freak waves and missing cargo ships seem pretty unimportant.

  I thanked Roberts and left the Inside Out building, exiting into a brilliant, windswept afternoon. Behind me the risk business continued its work and its bets—for or against—the continued well-being of celebrity body parts, valuable ships, and vulnerable cities. I walked back to my hotel, realizing that there was someone else I needed to see in London. As I was leavin
g Lloyd’s, Roberts had asked: “Have you been to Benfield Hazard Research?” When I said no, he raised an eyebrow. “Bill McGuire,” he said. “He’s someone to talk to about waves. I heard him speak at a conference. Now there’s a man who knows how to worry all of us.”

  The University College London campus sprawls through the center of the city, blocks and compounds of classic, if slightly sooty, Georgian buildings. “College of this, college of that,” my taxi driver said dismissively, pulling up to the Lewis Building on Gower Street. It was an academic-looking place, deceptively peaceful given the chaos that was being studied behind its staid limestone facade. After trailing through a maze of corridors, I found the entrance for the Benfield Hazard Research Center. The center (now called Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research) specializes in analyzing and forecasting geological upheavals like tsunamis or earthquakes, and meteorological hazards such as hurricanes and floods. A red sign on the wall said: “Reception Area: Please Do Not Enter.”

  As Roberts suggested, I had come to meet Bill McGuire, the center’s director, a prominent volcanologist, geophysical hazards expert, and media personality whose predictions of biblical-scale natural disasters had earned him the nicknames the Prophet of Doom and Disasterman. In his lectures, scientific papers, and radio and television appearances, McGuire routinely set forth a buffet of unappetizing future scenarios that all corresponded to the same theme: watch out. “So far we have prospered,” he had written in his book Apocalypse, “but the greatest battles with Nature are yet to be fought, and the final outcome remains in the balance.” The author of several popular books, he had a way of outlining the most horrific disasters in jaunty, accessible prose. “The big problem with predicting the end of the world,” he’d mused, “is that, if proved right, there can be no basking in glory.”