Just as important, El Faro was US-owned and US-registered, which meant that, unlike ships listed with lightly taxed and poorly regulated registries—Liberia, the Marshall Islands, and landlocked Bolivia, to name a few—she was maintained according to tough standards set by the US Coast Guard. Unlike those of many flag-of-convenience registries her lifesaving gear, life rafts, emergency beacons, and survival suits were checked at preset intervals by either the Coast Guard or an approved inspection service. And her officers were all Coast Guard–licensed personnel, all US nationals, all sea-tested, many of them graduates of some of the finest maritime academies in the world, such as the federal Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, as well as Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Maine Maritime, and the State University of New York’s maritime school at Fort Schuyler, the Bronx.
The waters near the Bahamas—the so-called Bermuda Triangle—had over the years seen the disappearance and destruction of thousands of ships, many in hurricanes, but almost all of the vessels involved, even in recent times, were small, relatively unsafe, and equipped with navigational gear unchanged in its essentials from the days of Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria. A ship as huge, fast, and strong as El Faro seemed about as likely to vanish without a Mayday as the Santa Maria was apt to fly out of a time warp and splash down off twenty-first-century Fort Lauderdale.
Thus, when Tote Services began calling contact numbers on the morning of October 1; as the Coast Guard began planning search-and-rescue operations it would not be able to carry out until the hurricane moved away; while most family members of El Faro’s crew were shocked, even afraid for their people, they also expected the crew would soon be found alive.
Rochelle Hamm, the wife of forty-nine-year-old able seaman Frank Hamm, got the call where she worked as a medical data-entry clerk in Jacksonville. She immediately phoned her children and asked them to assemble at her house to pray for Frank’s safe return.
Also in Jacksonville, Pastor Harold L. Green, the father of the ship’s cook, Lashawn Rivera, told a reporter, “We still have to maintain hope that our son and the rest of the crew will be found.” Rivera’s cousin, Schmiora Hill, said, “They haven’t even found both lifeboats. . . . I feel somebody, somewhere, somehow, is still surviving.”
Glen Jackson heard from his sister, Jill, who saw El Faro mentioned on television news; their brother Jack, who was an able seaman on the ship, had given Tote the landline number of Glen’s girlfriend as a family contact, but that line had been knocked out when a car ran into one of America’s last surviving pay phones outside her house in New Orleans. Glen immediately called the Coast Guard, who put him through to their Miami sector.
Late on October 1, Kurt Bruer heard about El Faro from a friend, who’d seen the report on TV news. Bruer at once recalled the image he’d had of Larry Davis on the morning watch. “I thought maybe Larry was trying to tell me something,” he said. But Bruer, too, expected to hear that the ship, or her lifeboats at least, had been located; that the crew were safe.
Jenn Mathias took the call at her in-laws’ house, where she was staying while her own was renovated, next to the Mathias family’s cranberry bogs in Kingston, Massachusetts. As she recalls it, the Tote representative told her they had just lost contact with El Faro but “everything was fine.” Jenn’s husband, Jeff Mathias, was a chief engineer in charge of the “riding gang” of Polish welders and electricians doing conversion work on the ship. El Faro was due to shift to Tote’s Tacoma–Anchorage route at year’s end and needed new deicing and other gear vital to Alaskan conditions. Without letting on what she’d heard to the couple’s three children, aged seven, five, and three, Jenn immediately called a friend on Cape Cod, a marine engineer who had frequently shipped out with Jeff. The engineer tried to reassure her, saying that bad weather could easily have knocked out the ship’s radio antennas. The next morning Jenn was obsessively checking messages, waiting for a report, when an email from Tote finally popped up in her in-box. “Someone at Tote misphrased it, I don’t know who. It said, ‘We are pleased to report . . .’ I screamed for joy when I saw that, thinking they’d found them, [but] all it was, was a hotline and a website for El Faro families.” Still, she went to bed on the night of October 2 thinking, “They’ll find them tomorrow.”
But her father-in-law sensed something was badly wrong. “I could hear him bawling all night,” Jenn said.
Laurie Randolph Bobillot, too, guessed the truth. An hour before El Faro’s last signals, her daughter, Danielle Randolph, the ship’s second mate, had sent her mom an email over the ship’s Inmarsat link: “I don’t know if you’ve been following the weather, but there’s a hurricane out here and we’re heading straight into it. Winds are super bad and waves not great. Love to everyone.”
“She never, ever signed letters or emails with ‘Love, Danielle,’ ” Bobillot said. “Never ‘hugs and kisses.’ . . . When I read that, I knew she was gone.”
The officers at Coast Guard search and rescue, who knew better than most what manner of monster Joaquin had become, took all reasonable action. They requested assistance from the Bahamas Defence Force, whose officers replied that they themselves were locked down by the hurricane’s shrieking winds and giant waves and could do nothing. The nearest US Coast Guard cutter, the 270-foot Northland, though she was steaming toward the Bahamas, was too distant to be of immediate use. An MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, the Coast Guard’s workhorse of urgent rescue, was stationed at Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas, relatively close by; it, too, could not move because of Joaquin. The USCG asked an Air Force Hurricane Hunter, a C-130 aircraft currently airborne, to overfly the ship’s last known position, calling for El Faro on the emergency VHF channel. Its calls drew no response.
Only two other merchant ships were in the area. One was a 494-ton coastal freighter named Emerald Express; she was being washed by storm waves into a mangrove swamp on Crooked Island in the Bahamas, her crew unable to move or think of much beyond their own survival. But the obligation to help other ships in trouble is drilled into mariners, and her skipper began calling El Faro over VHF. He, too, heard only storm static and, behind that, silence.I
Another coastal freighter, the Haitian-owned Minouche, was farther away from the storm, between Haiti and Great Inagua. But the Minouche was sinking.
Late on October 2, Joaquin, having slowly circled El Faro’s last position as if to make sure of the kill, had finally tracked north, moving far enough away that the Coast Guard Jayhawk out of Great Inagua and another out of a Clearwater, Florida, base could fly over El Faro’s last position, starting a search pattern to encompass a wider and wider area of sea. They, and Coast Guard and Air Force C-130s also sent out to search, saw nothing.
On Saturday the third, a Jayhawk crew, at a position 120 miles northeast of Crooked Island, spotted and retrieved an orange life ring bearing the words EL FARO—SAN JUAN—PR.
On the fourth, not far from the ship’s last reported position roughly forty nautical milesII north of Crooked Island and forty-eight southeast of San Salvador, aircraft discovered a debris field and an oil sheen. On the same day a salvage tug hired by Tote located a container from the missing ship. On the fifth, aircraft spotted a damaged lifeboat from El Faro, and a body floating inside an orange survival suit.
On October 7, the Coast Guard determined that El Faro had sunk with no survivors and called off the search. Coast Guard experts assumed the debris field and oil sheen off Crooked Island must mark where the ship had gone down. The area was located on the southwestern edge of the Nares Plain, an undersea plateau stretching from Bermuda to Georgia to the Bahamas Rise, on which the Bahamas Islands sit. At that position the water was fifteen thousand feet deep.
The grave of El Faro and her crew, it seemed, was almost three miles down. The hulk of a ship whose name means “lighthouse” in Spanish lay in the abyssal zone of utter darkness, in deep silence and the coldest of waters, at pressures in the vicinity of seven thousand pounds, equivalent to a
human body supporting one Lincoln Town Car per square inch of skin; conditions so extreme that only specialized forms of life can survive, often by generating their own light. It was the worst seagoing, nonmilitary disaster involving a US ship since World War II.III
The loss of an American ship and crew drew attention briefly, but in a country so focused on its internal riches and conflicts, the news made front pages only in Jacksonville, San Juan, and the other coastal communities, such as Rockland, Maine, from which many of El Faro’s crew came. The Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board planned expeditions to find the wreck, hearings to parse disaster.
For the families and friends of El Faro’s people, the silence of waiting was now replaced by a ringing void of absence, of unanswered questions. Why had El Faro sunk? Why had she gone in harm’s way to begin with? If mistakes had been made, who was responsible? And most of all, why had a ship so large and well equipped, with so experienced and professional a crew, disappeared in Atlantic waters as utterly and abruptly as a tossed stone, without even time to transmit a Mayday?
4
A ship, to paraphrase the architect Le Corbusier, is a machine for navigation, and it is in the nature of a machine to work. More precisely, it is in the nature of how we perceive a machine to equate its identity with its functioning. To the driver, a smoothly purring car is escape, motion, sex, speed. But once it breaks down, it’s a hunk of useless metal.
Seen from another angle, what we know of a functioning car or aircraft or ship, or indeed their operators, is a list of units, often expressed in acronyms—mpg, rpm, psi, bmi—all of which are quantified and replicable. They move separately and apart in a limited number and along a replicable spectrum of ways.
When the machine starts to break down, however, it does so in forms and volumes we did not predict, in spurts of cracked tolerances we’d not bargained for, in a cascade of off-key interactions far too numerous to track. Function, in the sense of routine operation, is digital and quantifiable, but disaster is analogue. In the analogue cosmos of accident exists an infinity of space, between hordes of still-moving but increasingly skewed subsystems, in which failure breeds and exponentially multiplies.
A giant merchant ship such as El Faro is not just a machine, it is a world of systems both mechanical and human: steam boiler and reduction gear, cargo stability and hull design, storm forecasts and navigational computers, psychological stress and metal fatigue, corporate pressure and maritime tradition. Each of those systems seems quantifiable when working but hosts a galaxy of analogue details, of variations in bounce and smash, as it begins to crash.
In that sense, by studying what happened to El Faro we are seeking to understand a quantum world, of details that are the smallest possible expression of, say, the molecules of silicon or synthetic rubber in a gasket that fails to seal a manhole in the deck. And this can only be apprehended by a discipline that takes into account not just the complexity of such systems but also a higher level of rules that must apply as breakdown occurs, as a chain reaction of quantum-level events begets a further cascade of accidents; until entities as large as a 40-foot cargo container, a 30,000-horsepower engine, a 790-foot hull, or a human mind are dragged helplessly down in an ever-accelerating rush toward destruction.
The quantum chain reactions that would end in shipwreck began individually and at varied locations, at different hours, sometimes on separate days; but they started to come together most concretely in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 29, 2015, as the SS El Faro prepared for sea.
Stability issues: Before she left Jacksonville on September 29, too much cargo was loaded on El Faro’s starboard side, causing a four-degree tilt, or list, in that direction. Though the list was corrected before departure, the ship’s stability would soon become cause for concern.
PART II
* * *
* * *
DEPARTURE
* * *
* * *
Ship and boat diverged: the cold, damp night breeze blew between . . . the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
1
Lashawn Rivera shows his TWIC, the federal Transportation Worker Identification Credential that allows him into secure harbor areas, to the guards at the Blount Island Marine Terminal checkpoint. He drives down four-lane roadways through flat country quivering with Florida heat; past warning signs and CCTV cams, a totem anchor, cargo areas for different companies, to his company’s zone at the island’s southwest corner. There he parks in a slot reserved for mariners, between Cyclone fences topped with barbed wire, stacks of white containers marked TOTE, and the company’s harbor office.
Rivera is thirty-two, maybe five foot ten, of medium build; he has a trimmed beard and mustache and hair frizzed in dreadlocks to his shoulders. He is chief cook on the SS El Faro, and this does not afford him a lot of time ashore, given that he must ensure a lunch of cold cuts, sandwiches, and a salad bar is available for the unloading crew and for shipmates who stay on board for loading.
Maybe, before opening his door to the late-September heat, Rivera takes a minute in the arctic air-conditioning of his Dodge muscle car to look at this ship, docked “starboard-side-to”—the right or starboard flank of her hull snubbed in close against the south-facing wharf. Moored in this way, her sharp bow points upriver, as if reluctant to face the direction in which she is due to sail a few hours from now.
El Faro, seen this close, is a massive flat blue-painted cliff of hull, rising nearly forty feet overhead to the Main Deck. That deck carries a narrow steel balcony all around the hull, the better to support containers. The hull just under the Main Deck is punctuated at intervals by boxy ventilation ducts, as well as by fifteen large rectangular ports through which someone ashore can catch glimpses of work lights and moving truck trailers inside, as of chthonic behemoths restlessly shifting in a cave. The blue cliff is so long it seems to extend, behind a latticework of thick mooring lines, halfway down the island.
To Rivera’s right the ship’s bow, which has a graceful reverse curve to it—like a clipper’s, the top reaching forward much farther than at the waterline as if eager to ride over waves—imparts a feeling of forward motion. The back end, or stern, is flat and vertical, shaped in cross section like the cup of a wineglass. Up two long steel ramps leading to a pair of particularly large openings in the middle and back sections of the starboard side, tractors drag more trailers into the hull.
A stack of seven accommodation decks, usually called the house, painted white, is piled roughly three-quarters of the way down the hull, atop the Main Deck toward the stern; these decks are crowned by a boxy wheelhouse and reach, in a maze of portholes, windows, stairs, and lifeboats, seventy feet over the Main Deck. Atop the wheelhouse an array of radar scanners, satellite receivers, and radio antennas bristle on a tripod mast, almost a hundred feet over the water, near a thirty-foot smokestack rising behind. A chaff of grayish smoke wisps from the red-white-blue-painted stack and is dispersed toward Saint Augustine by a light northerly breeze. SEA STAR is painted in boxy blue letters ten feet high on a steel panel shielding the lower levels of the house. Invisible from where Rivera sits, on the stern, under an American flag flapping listlessly in the near calm, the ship’s name is painted: EL FARO, and her home port, SAN JUAN, PR.
The sight of a great ship getting ready for sea, no matter how often a crew member observes it—even if he, or she, is sick to death of the work and the lonely separation from friends and family it entails and would far rather stay home with a brew in one hand and a loved one in the other—nevertheless triggers a kick of excitement, however habitual and mundane, because of the scale, energy, and organization involved; because this ship constitutes a giant, self-contained world that is busily preparing to come into its own, its true reason for being. Because this blue-hulled world is leaving land, and places that are safe and fixed and known, and wandering
onto the face of the deep.
The cook has two daughters of grade-school age; a one-year-old son, Yael; and a fiancée, Vana Jules, who is eight months pregnant. This will be his last round-trip on El Faro for a while since he plans to be home for the birth; he and Jules are due to marry shortly thereafter. Rivera, like many of the ship’s unlicensed crew—the ordinary seamen, engine-room oilers, stewards, and other nonofficers—grew up in North Jacksonville, a rough, largely poor, mostly African-American part of town. It’s a place about which his stepfather, Pastor Robert Green, says, “kids medicate, and someone gets bumped every night.” Rivera was good at sports but rambunctious. “As a boy,” his stepfather says, “he’d fall, hit his head, be bleeding and still going.” In North Jacksonville, clawing clear of the local drugs-crime-prison subculture often goes hand in hand with getting religion, and that was the route Rivera, with the help of his stepfather, ended up taking. In this case, following Jesus also took him to sea. It’s more likely than not, while getting out of his car, that Rivera, who is still highly religious, mutters a quick prayer for his family, for his own safe travels, before hoisting his bag and walking to the gangway.
Two men stand guard at the gangway’s foot. One is the able seaman on watch; the other is a private security guard. The AB on watch for the noon to 4:00 p.m. shift is Larry Davis, and Rivera perhaps shows surprise since everyone knows Larry, who is sixty-three, was planning to retire after the next trip or maybe the one after that, so a shipmate might wonder, “Why is he still here?” Behind the banter, though, lies a darker awareness of the guard, and why he’s checking IDs. Two years ago when El Faro’s sister ship El Morro, under El Faro’s former captain Jack Hearn, docked at Fort Lauderdale, a team of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed aboard and busted two seamen and a bosun,I along with the forty-three pounds of cocaine they were smuggling into Florida. The smugglers went to prison. Tote fired Hearn, as well as another captain and two mates, though it was clear they had nothing to do with the smuggling and had no suspicion of it. Tote did not sack the current captain, Michael Davidson, who was also aboard but not in command at the time.
Run the Storm Page 2
