Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  Most of El Faro’s crew know each other well and, after months of working smoothly on this “liner” gig back and forth to San Juan, are quietly proud of the discipline and skills that make it possible. The guard is a reminder that discipline and teamwork are not the whole story, and underneath the groomed slope of smooth routines on this ship lie crevasses and fault lines that are no less deep for being, in the main, unacknowledged.

  Rivera’s routine takes him up the gangway to the Main Deck, to a companionway at the entry level of the house that leads him up two levels to the kitchens, or galley. On Main Deck his route crosses a path obsessively traveled by the ship’s chief mate, Steven Shultz, second-in-command to the captain.

  If Rivera actually sees Shultz, it’s only for a few seconds, a tossed greeting. The chief mate’s job in port is to supervise unloading and loading cargo. Now, in midafternoon, with the 8:00 p.m. departure time posted on a bulletin board, called the sailing board, by the gangway head, Shultz probably feels like the demon charged with running the HVAC of hell—a hell wigged out on methamphetamines to boot, for this must be what Hades is like, in this heat on fried steel decks with 391 heavy containers to be hoisted over and stacked four-deep on Main Deck, plus 118 truck trailers, 149 automobiles, 6 tanks each holding eighteen thousand gallons of fructose syrup, and assorted other loads to be rushed, shoved, pumped, and shoehorned into the three enclosed decks below.

  El Faro was built as a Ro-Ro: a roll-on, roll-off ship whose cargo largely consisted of the kind of trailers you see dragged in eighteen-wheeled rigs on America’s highways, as well as other wheeled vehicles that could be driven aboard and unloaded under their own steam. In 2006 she was modified to carry shipping containers, large rectangular steel boxes full of assorted goods, on the Main Deck, thus increasing her capacity for freight of all kinds.

  Now giant gantry cranes that look like light-blue, mutated Meccano vultures with jibs eighty feet high prey on the box-shaped carrion. They roll on rails and steel wheels as they claw up containers of various lengths—twenty, forty-five, fifty-three feet—and lower them, according to a set schedule, on the ship’s top deck and atop previously loaded containers both forward of and behind the house. Longshoremen fasten the top containers to the next ones down with twist locks, metal mechanisms that insert a thick, half-flanged bolt up and down into adjacent, horizontal ovals on the two containers; when rotated the bolts turn the flange across the narrow sections of oval to lock the boxes together. The lower containers are either locked in the same way or tied down with steel rods hooked in a cross-breast pattern, upper left corner of the container to a purchase under its lower right, top right to bottom left, and tightened with threaded steel tubes the size of a man’s leg, called turnbuckles. The purchases are usually padeyes or D rings—half circles of steel bolted into a mortise that’s welded onto the deck. The turnbuckles, screwed into opposing threads on the rods, are twisted—the dockers use metal “cheater” bars to lever them around—until the lashings are hard and tight as rifle barrels.

  As the containers are being stacked and locked, small diesel-powered tractors, known as yard pigs or hustlers, drag truck trailers to and from giant scales in Tote’s cargo lot. Once the trailers have been weighed, the hustlers haul them fast up the two starboard loading ramps into the depths of El Faro’s highest covered deck, known as 2nd Deck. Those assigned to the two lower decks are either shunted down one of four internal ramps or, for 3rd Deck only, onto a giant, hydraulically powered elevator similar to the aircraft lifts on a Navy carrier. Inside the holds they are parked and chocked in the spaces reserved for them.

  These trailers are secured differently from the containers, with a version of the twist-screw known as a Roloc box, essentially a square, vertical bolt linking the trailer’s hitchpin into “buttons,” slotted steel pads welded, like the D-ring mortises, to the deck; that is, if the buttons are not rusted out. If they are corroded, or no button is available, the trailers are lashed down tight with chains at six different points, front and back, right and left; these in turn are hooked into D rings or more distant buttons to prevent rolling. (If the Roloc is functioning, the trailer is secured with two to four extra lashings.)

  The scene, if you substitute steel decks and bulkheads for buildings, and orange-jacketed, hard-hatted stevedores for tourists, is as busy as Times Square at rush hour on a Friday evening; everywhere yard pigs snort and roar, dragging in trailers, circling around each other, speeding back down the ramp for another trailer. Containers boom, the gantries whine, cars race down ramps, mates and longshoremen yell; in the thick of loading it gets so loud at times that deckhands use earplugs to cut the noise. It all moves “hard and heavy,” as the saying goes; a foot left too long in one place, a misjudged move can break a leg, cut off an arm. On deck seagulls screech, exhaust is braided into the superheated breeze; and Chief Mate Steve Shultz keeps an eye on all of it, pacing Main Deck, where the boxes are stacked thirty feet above his head, all the way to the raised “forecastle” (pronounced fo’c’sle) at the bow, back to the transom aft; plunging down into the vast echoing neon-shined garage systems of the lower decks, 2nd Deck, then 3rd Deck, to the lowest level of all, known as the Tank Top, set on plates above the ballast and fuel tanks and the steel ribs and shell of the ship’s bottom. It’s a rough job, especially since Tote last month got rid of the shoreside assistant for cargo work, known as “port mate.” Third Mate Jeremie Riehm, who helps out with loading, describes the current process, lacking the extra help, as “a storm of shit.”

  Now and again Shultz consults with Riehm; with Second Mate Randolph, who is on cargo duty in the afternoon; with the chief engineer, Richard Pusatere; and with Louis Champa, the ship’s electrician, whose job it is to hook up every one of the 238 refrigerated trailers and containers to the ship’s electrical system and make sure the reefers’ compressors and evaporators, blowers and pumps, are all working and at the right temperature. Ice cream’s in those freezers, and milk, butter, Halloween candy, frozen waffles; the future happiness of Puerto Rico’s kids depends on keeping the contents cold.

  At regular intervals Shultz scales the nine flights of stairs to the house’s top deck, just under the bridge (or wheelhouse), to his office, to check if emails containing cargo updates have come in from Tote’s shoreside operation; to make sure the loading schedule is going according to plan. For everything that comes aboard his ship has to be choreographed and stowed according to a precise map and timetable in order to preserve the ship’s stability.

  Stability is crucial. This ship took on a tilt, or list, before disappearing; a ship this large and well built should not lean sideways like that, ever—not even, especially not even, in storm.

  2

  A ship’s stability is a function of two components. One is her center of gravity, which makes sense intuitively: a person holding a heavy suitcase at head level will be far more likely to topple over, because of the levering effect of the body’s length, than if the suitcase were somehow fastened at ankle level. The same is true of a ship whose cargo is carried too high.

  The second component is the center of buoyancy, which in turn depends mostly on hull shape. Generally speaking, since light air is what keeps the ship floating on denser water, buoyancy is determined by how much air is contained in the hull. A wide hull tilting (or listing) to port holds a lot more air in the space between its centerline and its port side than would a narrow hull, and all that air will fight whatever force—waves, wind, shifting cargo—is pressing the hull down on that side.

  There’s nothing to be done about hull shape, but the center of gravity depends on weight and location of cargo; in loading, the company’s port engineer and El Faro’s chief mate seek to keep the ship’s burden low and evenly spaced, achieving maximum stability for a given freight. The optimum relationship between buoyancy and center of gravity is expressed by a number called the GM margin.II

  Computing all this with pen and calculator once required hours of intellectual sweat. A shi
p’s officer nowadays figures out stability by plugging cargo numbers, as well as figures representing the weight of stores, equipment, ballast (water pumped into bottom tanks to further lower the center of gravity),III and fuel, into a custom-made program called CargoMax and pressing the enter key on his workstation. The GM pops out within seconds.IV

  At this stage the preliminary numbers are tallied and organized in Tote’s Blount Island office, where trailers are weighed, bills of lading processed, and loading schedules figured out; not an easy task, as was proved earlier in the day when the ship was loaded too quickly on one side, causing a four-degree list to starboard, which had to be corrected by loading to the opposite side.

  Shultz’s job now is to make sure that what went into the CargoMax program is accurate, that the six fructose tanks up forward in the lowest levels of 1- and 2-holds have been pumped as full as possible; that the containers containing hazardous materials have been parked in designated areas and locked down. At least on this trip no cattle or horses are aboard; loading livestock would require that an area aft be set aside for their trailers and feed, and a cabin prepped for their wranglers.

  Everywhere Shultz double-checks to make sure the twist-locks are engaged, that chains, bolts, and rods holding down the cargo to buttons and D rings are bar tight, that everything is lashed as strongly as it should be. This is hurricane season, and the National Weather Service says a tropical storm is out there somewhere, though it’s not supposed to amount to much. The Tote ships on the Puerto Rico run are fast; if a hurricane develops, they can easily outrun it, and therefore they are rarely affected by dangerous weather. But rough seas are always possible, and loose lashings on any one of the stacked containers topside, or the lined-up trailers below, can have a domino effect as the container or trailer works against its lashings, loosening them further, and then the cargo slides harder and faster and in the end breaks what ties it down. “It’s only seventy [-gauge] chain,” says Olabode “Odd Rod” Borisade, a former longshoreman who used to tie down cargo on El Faro. “It’s not going to hold a forty-thousand-pound container.” Chain of this strength is commonly rated to hold up to sixty-six hundred pounds working load, with a breaking strength of twenty-six thousand pounds, insufficient to restrain a large box. Once adrift the container will start to bang or roll into the cargo beside, the lashings of which will loosen in turn, and so forth.

  Tote apparently has printed a short “lashing manual” to ensure consistent tie-down, but several longshoremen say they’ve never seen it. And no one has ordered extra securing gear, called storm lashings, which would require that more chains, rods, and hooks be brought to the ship and fitted. This would mean a lot more work; with no clear and present threat on the horizon Shultz has gone along with this decision and runs the usual sailor’s controlled tumble down the steep companionways to check again the situation on 2nd Deck, where the second mate is working.

  3

  Shultz, along with everyone else, likes working with the second mate, and not just because Danielle Randolph is cute and female in an industry where, even now, women are rare as snow in Florida; there is one other female aboard El Faro, Mariette Wright, an AB. In this environment guys can get sick of the preponderant locker-room maleness, the harsh angles and fart jokes. Danielle Randolph, sometimes called Dany, is “five foot nothin’,” her mother’s description, of rounded, compact build, hair either light brown or dirty blond depending on how much sun has got to it; a heart-shaped face, slightly aquiline nose, and a wide-open smile that narrows her North Sea–hued eyes into an expression that seems to say, “Mischief? Bring it on!”—or if not mischief exactly, certainly a joke. She likes cracking one-liners as much as she enjoys fielding them and is quick as hell at getting any joke you throw at her.

  Randolph, like most, is the balance of her contradictions. She is gregarious, cheerful, easy to get along with; open to everyone, officers and unlicensed mariners alike. But when it comes to her job she is dead serious. Her MO is to define exactly what has to be done and then do it now, all the way and right. Although she was brought up in Rockland, Maine, a town still hungover from the hard-ass cultural brew of coastal schooners and the lobster fishery; though both her parents are ex-military and she was raised in a house where orders were orders and you obeyed first and asked questions later; although, like Captain Davidson and two of the engineers, she graduated from Maine Maritime Academy, which like other US maritime academies is run along military-service lines with half an eye to spawning tame naval officers, which means in turn that discipline is prized as much as or more than other qualities; she is not afraid to speak up when she sees a better way of doing things.

  At work she wears a worn jumpsuit, construction boots. Under a hard hat a faded kerchief lashes down her hair. Yet her mother, Laurie Bobillot, describes her as “a real girlie girl,” who once painted her cabin pink and collects Barbie dolls; who sells Mary Kay cosmetics in her spare time;V who loves dressing up in 1950s skirts, makeup, and heels, and riding around in her dad’s 1948 Chevy Fleetside.

  A lot of bullshit is spoken and written, mostly by people who don’t ship out, about the lure of the sea, the romance of seafaring. Any merchant mariner knows only too well how hard, boring, lonely, and sometimes cruel the trade often is; most everyone on commercial ships would not be out there if the job didn’t pay pretty well. But if anyone has a calling for this trade, and a feel for how ships work, it is this thirty-four-year-old woman. “Her first day of kindergarten I took her to school,” Laurie Bobillot recalls. “I was crying like a damn fool; she looks up at me and says, ‘Mommy, how’m I gonna learn about boats and the sea if I don’t go to school?’ ” Randolph applied to one college only. Ever since graduating from Maine Maritime she has worked on ships happily, enthusiastically. She once consoled her mother, who was worrying about some of the risks her daughter took at work, by saying, “Shipping out is dangerous, life is dangerous. But if something happens to me when I’m at sea, it’s where I want to be.”

  And yet, before she boarded the flight to Jacksonville for this last rotation, Randolph for the first time expressed doubts about going; even thought, or so she told her mother, of asking Tote to find another mate to replace her for this trip. Partly it’s because she loves Christmas, all the snow and carols and sugared cookies of it, and this cycle will keep her away from home for the holidays. And partly it’s just a funny feeling. Randolph is the opposite of psychic, she is focused on tools and jobs and conscious logic; she knows that everyone gets a weird feeling now and again on the order of “Maybe this will be the plane that crashes and I really should change my ticket.” But you don’t want to lose your fare and you don’t change your reservation, the plane lands safely, and the feeling disappears like a dream you neglected to write down.

  In any case, a big ship loading for departure—her navigation, cargo, engine, and steward departments all buzzing, thumping, racing, humming with the urgency of getting a job done now because once you’re out there it’s too late—tends to swamp doubt and the luxuries of fantasy in a torrent of deadlines. Randolph, who splits a twelve-hour loading watch with Shultz, must also remember to take a break before her bridge duty starts at midnight. Like many watch standers she takes over-the-counter meds, such as ZzzQuil or Tylenol PM, to sleep; like Riehm and Shultz in particular, she has trouble getting enough snooze-time over her standard four-hours-on, eight-hours-off cycle. When she leaves the ship, her mother says, Randolph spends at least a week sleeping ten to twelve hours a night to catch up. In hearings later, the question of watch officers’ fatigue will crop up again and again.

  Today Randolph has another goal to fulfill, one that has no bearing on ship’s business, and to do that she needs to keep an eye out for a new third engineer, Dylan Meklin, who was supposed to report for duty early but did not show up as scheduled.

  4

  Most of the containers have been loaded by now, almost all the trailers jockeyed into place by dockworkers and lashed down. The Jacksonville
stevedores are used to this work and know their jobs, and they know Shultz and Randolph and Jeremie Riehm, the third mate, and in that knowledge of shared competence Shultz and the mates get along with shoreside but still everything has to be double-checked. At forty years of age El Faro is an old lady, and old ships rust, and a lot of the buttons and D rings are clogged with rotted metal and, if they’re seized up, have to be reamed out with a specialized tool, designed and hammered into a combination crowbar and pick by the previous captain, Hearn. Not all can be rescued, however; no one even knows how many D rings are deficient, since no program is in place to log, test, or replace them; and for this voyage a number of containers and trailers have been secured “off-button,” meaning they are not lashed to anything more secure than the next container over, or (in the case of trailers) to a chain stretched to a working D ring. Most of the cars are stored on the lowest deck, Tank-Top, where chains are stretched across the ship’s width and the cars then individually lashed to the chains; a method that speeds up the loading process, but contravenes Tote’s own guidelines.VI

  Now the nine watertight gates that section off the vast parking spaces of the lower decks are hydraulically shut and locked, thus defining 1-, 2-, and 3-holds, counting aft.VII The closing and bolting—“dogging,” in the lingo—of both the massive gates (all are over two hundred square feet) and of smaller watertight access doors within those gates must be carried out, verified, and logged by a mate. One former bosun describes the process as complicated enough that the gates between 2A- and 3-holds are at times not securely locked. Kurt Bruer says two of the nine gates seldom closed completely. In March of 2014 El Faro’s gates failed inspection due to significant leakage around the doors’ seals and dogs.