Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Crew of the SS El Faro

  Author’s Note

  PART I The Silence

  PART II Departure

  PART III The Sailing

  PART IV In Harm’s Way

  PART V The Quantum of Shipwreck

  PART VI The Assassin Storm

  PART VII Aftermath

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Sources

  About the Author

  Index

  This book is dedicated to the courageous, steadfast, and skilled men and women of El Faro, and to the families and friends of El Faro’s crew who have honored their memory with grace and fortitude. And to the unsung heroes of the American merchant marine, who work hard, lonely hours, day in, day out—in conditions that are usually unrecognized, often uncomfortable, and sometimes perilous—to supply their country with 90 percent of everything.

  Deadly vortex: Hurricane Joaquin on October 1, 2015. The eye is just visible in the middle of the storm’s swirl; El Faro’s last known position at 7:30 a.m. was almost exactly in the same place.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail.

  —Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

  He said to run it. Hold on to your ass, Larry.

  —Danielle Randolph, second mate of the SS El Faro

  The road not taken: The straight line represents El Faro’s usual, direct route from Jacksonville to San Juan. The dotted line below it shows her final journey. The curved line to the west marks the route via Old Bahama Channel that she took to avoid Tropical Storm Erika, in late August 2015.

  CREW OF THE SS EL FARO

  DECK DEPARTMENT

  Michael C. Davidson, 53, captain: Windham, Maine

  Danielle L. Randolph, 34, second mate: Rockland, Maine

  Roan R. Lightfoot, 54, bosun: Jacksonville Beach, Florida

  Larry “Brookie” Davis, 63, able seaman: Jacksonville, Florida

  Carey J. Hatch, 49, able seaman: Jacksonville, Florida

  Jackie R. Jones Jr., 38, able seaman: Jacksonville, Florida

  Mariette Wright, 51, deckhand: Saint Augustine, Florida

  Steven W. Shultz, 54, chief mate: Roan Mountain, Tennessee

  Jeremie H. Riehm, 46, third mate: Camden, Delaware

  Roosevelt L. “Bootsy” Clark, 38, deckhand: Jacksonville, Florida

  Frank J. Hamm III, 49, able seaman: Jacksonville, Florida

  Jack E. Jackson, 60, able seaman: Jacksonville, Florida

  James P. Porter, 40, deckhand: Jacksonville, Florida

  ENGINE DEPARTMENT

  Richard J. Pusatere, 34, chief engineer: Virginia Beach, Virginia

  Keith W. Griffin, 33, first engineer: Fort Myers, Florida

  Michael L. Holland, 25, third engineer: North Wilton, Maine

  Dylan O. Meklin, 23, third assistant engineer: Rockland, Maine

  Joe E. Hargrove, 65, oiler: Orange Park, Florida

  Anthony “Shawn” Thomas, 47, oiler: Jacksonville, Florida

  Jeffrey A. Mathias, 42, riding crew supervisor: Kingston, Massachusetts

  Howard J. Schoenly, 51, second engineer: Cape Coral, Florida

  Mitchell T. Kuflik, 26, third engineer: Brooklyn, New York

  Louis M. Champa, 51, electrician: Daytona Beach, Florida

  German A. Solar-Cortes, 51, oiler: Orlando, Florida

  Sylvester C. Crawford Jr., 40, wiper: Lawrenceville, Georgia

  STEWARDS DEPARTMENT

  Lashawn L. Rivera, 32, chief cook: Jacksonville, Florida

  Lonnie S. Jordan, 35, assistant steward: Jacksonville, Florida

  Theodore E. Quammie, 67, chief steward: Jacksonville, Florida

  RIDING GANG

  Piotr M. Krause, 27: Gdynia, Poland

  Jan P. Podgórski, 43: Poland

  Rafal A. Zdobych, 42: Poland

  Marcin P. Nita, 34: Poland

  Andrzej R. Truszkowski, 51: Poland

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Run the Storm is a work of nonfiction. The author has drawn on thousands of pages of documentation from three separate hearings and separate working groups conducted by the US Coast Guard and the federal National Transportation Safety Board to solve the mystery of what happened to El Faro. The hearings, conducted by maritime experts, called scores of witnesses and were followed by months of painstaking analysis. The author has supplemented the record with dozens of interviews with family members, former officers and crew, search-and-rescue personnel, government officials and spokespersons, independent mariners, meteorologists, and others.

  This book also draws heavily on the twenty-six consecutive hours of bridge conversation and other data recovered from the vessel’s black box, or voyage data recorder. The drama of hearing the actual voices affords a unique, if emotionally difficult, opportunity to understand firsthand what El Faro’s crew were thinking and doing as they sailed into the wrath of Hurricane Joaquin. The conversations used are all direct quotes; they have been edited only for coherence and to avoid repetition, and occasionally to restore some government-redacted salty language used by the crew. In all cases the guiding principle was to remain faithful to meaning and context.

  Most important, this fact remains: there are no witnesses to recount exactly what happened to El Faro as she went into the storm. The VDR gives us a tremendously useful and accurate tool to track decisions and anxiety levels on the bridge, so when an action is clearly implied by both a conversation and the overall likelihood of its taking place—such as when a navigating officer points out course details, implying that he or she is looking at a chart—that action is described accordingly.

  Except in instances when both sides of a phone or radio dialogue could be heard, conversations in the rest of the ship went unrecorded, and so description of what happened in, say, the galley or engine room must be based on guesswork. But any ship relies on solid, recurrent routines to function, and a ship on “liner” service, as El Faro was, making exactly the same passage, week in, week out, year in, year out, enjoys more fixed routines than most. The mariners standing an 8:00 a.m. to noon watch, for example, always woke well before eight to eat breakfast; they always reported to the bridge, or the engine-room control flat, fifteen minutes before their watch started, as is the custom on shipboard. The watch rosters and schedules on El Faro were well-known and apparently adhered to rigidly on all her voyages. The VDR transcript in almost every instance indicates that crew members and officers stuck by those routines exactly, and while the author is careful to indicate that unrecorded events are presumed, rather than certain, he has faithfully described unrecorded actions of the crew based on what they would normally have done aboard El Faro on the southbound leg of her journey.

  Ready for sea: El Faro on a previous voyage. The open ports on 2nd Deck are clearly visible along the hull’s side. On her last voyage, containers were stacked four-deep across almost the entire ship.

  PART I

  * * *

  * * *

  THE SILENCE

  * * *

  * * *

  A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not wh
at ships are built for.

  —John Augustus Shedd

  1

  Toward the end of the 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. watch, on the morning of October 1, 2015, the image of his friend Larry came to Kurt Bruer’s mind.

  Bruer is a five-foot-eleven-inch forty-year-old, of solid build, firm jaw, and an expression, when he’s not wearing sunglasses, that reads both confident and wary. That morning, as an able seaman, or AB in the parlance—an experienced deckhand in the American merchant marine—he was standing watch on the bow of the Texas Enterprise, making sure no traffic got too near his cargo ship, full of bulk-loaded grain, anchored in the flat early-morning light-field of the Mississippi River.

  Bruer’s friend Brookie Davis, known as Larry, was much older. That morning he was AB on a different vessel, the SS El Faro, a giant cargo ship working a bi-weekly shuttle run between north Florida and Puerto Rico. Despite the difference in age Bruer and Davis were as close as mariners got. Bruer had worked for a year on El Faro and on that ship he ate with Davis at mealtimes; sometimes they hung out in the crew’s lounge or talked shop when working overtime together. In Jacksonville, where both lived, the two would occasionally meet for a beer, or for a few hands of poker at bestbet, one of the clubs south of the Dames Point Bridge over the Saint Johns River, close to where El Faro docked. They had not seen as much of each other recently; Bruer had left El Faro the previous year, and his wife and one-year-old son now took up most of his time ashore.

  So seeing Davis’s image pop into his mind that Thursday morning surprised Bruer. “On watch I don’t think about other sailors,” he said later, with a frown that might be construed as distaste. “I never thought about Larry. I think about my family, or what I’m going to do next.” This thought of his friend was not only unexpected; it seemed, as an image, unusually strong, vivid. He would have to call Larry when he got off watch, Bruer told himself; just check in, see what was going on.

  He never talked to Davis again.

  Shortly after 7:39 a.m. on October 1, 2015—toward the end of the four-to-eight watch—El Faro, her crew of twenty-eight American mariners, and a five-man Polish engineering gang vanished from the face of the earth.

  2

  A particular silence forms when you are waiting for a message from a loved one whose whereabouts are unknown, of whose safety you are unsure.

  It’s a silence that alters the fabric of personal time; a silence in which minutes pass as slowly as hours, when even the unavoidable periods of tending to housekeeping details such as paying bills or picking up kids from school are stretched and wracked by an underlying wait—a wait that feels like a screaming in the very bone.

  Such a silence began in the morning of October 1 for the families, coworkers, and friends of El Faro’s crew.

  The owners and operators of El Faro, Sea Star and Tote Services Inc.—both referred to on the waterfront as Tote, part of a spiderweb of interlocking corporations and directorates owned by a single, privately held company in Seattle—were first to learn the ship was in trouble. El Faro’s captain, Michael Davidson, had talked to Tote’s safety manager, John Lawrence, by satellite phone at 7:07 a.m. on October 1. The captain told Lawrence that the ship, at the time forty-eight miles southeast of San Salvador Island in the Bahamas chain, had taken on water, was tilting fifteen degrees to one side, and had lost power. But his crew were pumping out the water, Davidson said, and he had no intention of abandoning ship.

  Davidson’s voice was calm, his words measured, and Lawrence hung up feeling that El Faro was in no immediate peril, though as a matter of “protocol” he called the US Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center in Norfolk, Virginia, to notify them of the incident.

  At 7:15, however, the Coast Guard received an automated distress message via Inmarsat, an international marine satellite communications service, linked to El Faro’s name and identification code. At 7:36, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite picked up a signal from an emergency beacon registered to El Faro. NOAA’s satellite center in Suitland, Maryland, contacted the Coast Guard in turn.

  The signal, which lasted twenty-eight minutes, did not include the ship’s position, and the brevity of the transmission, given that such beacons are built to keep signaling for at least twelve hours, worried Petty Officer Matthew Chancery, the officer on duty in Miami at the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue center for the Florida and Bahamas region. Together with the information Tote had relayed and the Inmarsat signal, the aborted message suggested El Faro might be in more serious trouble than Lawrence seemed to think. Still, based on Tote’s information—the ship was “dewatering,” the source of the flooding was secured, the company was hiring tugs—the Coast Guard officer in charge judged the ship was not in immediate danger and it was not yet time to go into “distress phase.” Following normal procedure, the SAR center immediately began calling El Faro on the Inmarsat satellite communications system and requested that any ships or aircraft in the area do the same.

  But from the ship herself, nothing. Not even a Mayday.

  That serious trouble might be in the cards for a ship located near the Bahamas on this particular morning should have surprised no one, because of Joaquin. Joaquin was a hurricane, and an unusual one; a meteorological freak that had sidled toward the Americas from an area of the Atlantic far north of the usual breeding ground of such storms. Through the waning days of September this freak had seemed unsure of its identity, appearing to hesitate, in the form, first, of a tropical low-pressure zone, and then as a medium-powered gale, without picking up the intensity and defined shape of the mind-bogglingly powerful and self-sustaining machine that is a full-bore hurricane. As a result, various computerized forecast models, including that of the US National Weather Service, had underestimated its potential strength and to a somewhat lesser extent misread its direction. The consensus view of Joaquin therefore, until the day before El Faro sent her messages, was dismissive; like the neighbors’ opinion of an erratic, troublesome child nevertheless deemed unlikely to grow up into a vicious criminal.

  That was also the prevailing view at Tote. Only a month earlier, on August 27, the company had sent Captain Davidson a heads-up email asking what precautions he was taking to avoid Erika, the previous storm that had threatened to disrupt the company’s Jacksonville to San Juan service. Tote’s safety office also sent a flurry of emails recommending precautions to take against Danny, the hurricane that had preceded Erika a week earlier. But there had been no messages and apparently little concern about Joaquin before the morning El Faro went missing. No one at Tote Services’ Jacksonville offices, or Tote Inc.’s corporate seat in Princeton, New Jersey, much less at the holding company’s headquarters in Seattle, was carefully tracking Joaquin’s route, or noting its proximity to El Faro’s. No one among those who knew and cared for El Faro realized that the troublesome, wayward delinquent that Joaquin once seemed had grown up, with exceptional speed and horrific energy, into the meteorological equivalent of a monster, a serial killer whose apparent drive to pursue and destroy El Faro caused not a few to endow the storm with psychotic intent. Indeed, over the night of September 30, Joaquin had swelled to Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale; a status the National Hurricane Center labels a major storm causing “devastating damage,” with thirty-foot waves and winds of up to 129 mph. Around the time El Faro disappeared, Joaquin became a Category 4, with sustained winds over 130 mph, gusts approaching 150, and waves closer to fifty feet—the most powerful storm to hit the area in recorded history.

  Petty Officer Chancery’s worry shot up by several orders of magnitude when he checked the chart and realized, surely with a sickening of the gut, that El Faro’s last position, and that of Joaquin, were virtually the same.

  3

  It is impossible for anyone who has not been in a strong storm at sea to imagine what such conditions feel like, for they are apprehensible mostly in the way physical trauma is read, in eye and ear, muscle and stomach, in the spaced-out limbo of shock. (A NO
AA video illustrating the Saffir-Simpson scale doesn’t try; it merely shows Categories 3 to 4 utterly obliterating houses and trees on land.) And the thought that something as large and fast as El Faro might find herself in danger from mere weather was, for most, just as difficult to imagine. This ship, after all, was as long as an eighty-story skyscraper was tall; she was as high as a twelve-story office block, wide as New York’s Fifth Avenue. Her thirty thousand horsepower steam engine, if you tacked all its components together, was bigger than most houses and could drive her at over twenty knots—almost twenty-five miles per hour—which, for a 31,515-gross-ton merchant ship, put her in the category of a racehorse. She was built in 1975 on the outskirts of Philadelphia, lengthened by ninety feet in 1993, and thus was hardly new, but she bore the usual equipment for a modern vessel, all of it up-to-date: satellite navigation systems that pinpointed her position, radar that tracked traffic and even strong weather events thirty miles out, and communication systems that furnished access to the latest satellite forecasts and weather alerts from various expert outfits such as the National Weather Service, its National Hurricane Center, and even a private marine-forecasting service called Advanced Weather Technologies.