On El Faro’s bridge the VHF squawks. Bryson, the bar and river pilot, talks to the pilot on the Kingfish. Quite soon the two ships cross paths, huge dark shapes blanking the suburban glow, port to port. One deck down, the windows in Shultz’s stateroom shine brightly where the mate double-checks the cargo manifest against CargoMax figures; this is their last chance to turn back and reload if something is off. But he finds no discrepancies.
Mile Point Turn, Mayport Cut; finally El Faro moves down a line of buoys and two long breakwaters marking the end of the Saint Johns River. Now the ship, which has been gliding, stable as an apartment building, down the placid river, begins to feel the ocean; starts an almost imperceptible pitch forward to aft as her bow rises and falls, and a tiny roll, left and right, from the echoed waves bouncing off the rocks. A crew member, standing, doesn’t even have to shift his weight, the movement is so small. At the red-and-white sea buoy marking the channel’s end, Bryson radios the pilot boat to pick him up. He shakes hands with the bridge crew and makes his way to the pilot ladder.
The direct course to San Juan is 132 degrees. That number, along with the ship’s speed, is written in greasy felt tip on the course board, which hangs between wheelhouse windows directly ahead of the helm. Riehm programs the course into the autopilot and checks radars, but the only seagoing traffic this evening is the dot, between breakwaters, of the pilot boat speeding back to Jacksonville.
The engine room has been called again and the boilers are pumping more steam, turbines accelerating to roughly 120 rpm, which translates to a little over 20 knots, or 23 mph. Riehm settles himself at the watch keeper’s usual station, on the bridge’s port side, his electronic eyes—two of the three radar screens—within easy reach. The ship rolls a bit more to the northerly swell. Mayport, Manhattan Beach, glow orange, shift rightward as El Faro adopts her southeasterly course for San Juan; to the left, to port, the sky is veiled and there are few stars, only the black, limitless presence of the Atlantic.
It is 10:30 p.m., September 29, 2015. El Faro and her crew have just over thirty-three hours to live.
Theater of navigation: The ship’s command center, known as the bridge or wheelhouse. The windows face forward, over the stacked containers. The mate on watch typically stands on the left (port) side, by the twin radar screens. The ship’s wheel is set low in the console’s center.
PART III
* * *
* * *
THE SAILING
* * *
* * *
You do not ask of a tame seagull why once in a while it feels the need to disappear toward the wide ocean. It goes there, that’s all, and it’s simple as a ray of sun, as normal as the blue of sky.
—Bernard Moitessier
1
To a mariner, even if a storm is out there, and a storm is always out there somewhere, it feels good to cross at last into the zone of deep ocean.
Sailors like to blow a landlubber’s mind with the counterintuitive statement that, to a ship, “the land is more dangerous than the sea,” but this is only partially true. It’s the interface between sea and land, where the ship faces both the sick danger of rocks, reefs, and combers twisted and amplified by shore, and the oceanic perils of wave and wind, that multiplies risk.
In deep ocean those foes do not team up.
Crossing into the deep is not the only reason for feeling good here. Many of her crew take pleasure in the way El Faro moves, they say she shows grace in a seaway. Her “scantlings”—the graceful slope of her stem (the hull’s leading edge), the arc known as “turn of bilge” where bottom curves into sides, the flow of her “buttocks line,” where, underwater, broad hull sweeps into thin stern—all feel like how a man might describe a lover’s curves. All do their bit to make her lift easily to waves coming from ahead or behind, roll gracefully but not too much when they come from the side; steer true. Her hull is long in relation to her breadth, which partly accounts for her relative fleetness. Her sharp bow and relatively low house look better to a sailor’s eye than the floating boxes that are modern container ships, or the obscenely decorated, top-heavy wedding cakes that cruise liners resemble.
Even the skipper who knows her best, who finds her “tender,” or apt to roll too far when maneuvering fully loaded, appreciates her sea-kindly qualities. And Joe Letang, an electrician who worked on this ship till three weeks ago, says he would even now feel ten times safer on El Faro than on the slab-sided, state-of-the-art vessels powered by diesel and natural gas that Tote is building on the West Coast.
Some of the crew are familiar with her history in the rough winter waters of Tote’s Tacoma–Anchorage run. They know that between 2003 and 2005, under contract to the government’s Military Sealift Command, she ferried war gear to Kuwait for the invasion and occupation of Iraq; there she was drafted into service as a bomb shelter for infantry, came under attack from Scud missiles fired by Iraqi forces, and earned a Navy decoration.
Besides the history, apart from how she feels when moving, there’s a built-in bias that sets a mariner to caring for any oceangoing craft. It is based on a commonality of interests, because from thirty-foot sloop to supertanker she was made to cross wild waters with no outside help and for the duration of the voyage must furnish both community and life purpose for her passengers and crew. The sense of those complex systems, not only machinery and navigation but hull structure and ballast, man-overboard and fire drills, cabin and laundry and food services, all churning and working together 24-7, adds up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a unified expression of living that has much to do with why ships, in English, are given a human pronoun; why mariners will call the ship “her” and love her, sometimes, as if she were alive, or at times hate her guts for being wayward, for being “wet” (because she punches through waves rather than going over them), for being jerky or unbalanced in her movements, for making them seasick—for not taking care of her people.
Some of El Faro’s crew call her a rust bucket, the mariner’s term for an old, beaten-up, rotten-steel ship. But many of those same crew members feel affection for her and stay aboard anyway, year after year.
At night, as land disappears, as the ship relaxes into the longer-wavelength swells of deep ocean, the crew also relax into familiar input. The decks tremble in resonance with the engines’ spin, a cabin’s joinery creaks from the hull’s gentle roll. The ship’s smell: of porthole grease, salt, and detergent; of coffee, fuel oil, and chafing dish; takes on a supplementary waft of iodine and wind. On deck you can smell steam and bunker exhaust, hear a breath of boiler pressure, but the loudest sound is the deep, rhythmic crunch and hiss of sea as the great hull drives through four-foot waves southeast.
Course 132 degrees true,I direct for San Juan, eleven hundred miles away. Speed 21 knots, 24 mph. Wind light from the north. The sky is still overcast. The wheelhouse is quiet; an occasional crackle from the VHF; sometimes, near the coast, the mates will turn on the FM radio and pick up yee-haw country or gospel music from Florida stations; or else a Sirius satellite channel. The only illumination on the bridge is the glow of radar and GPS screens, the dials of gyroscope, gauges, and radios, the red-tinted lights that allow watch standers to work without utterly losing night vision. On the mast above the wheelhouse roof, radar scanners turn steadily, obsessively, providing the mate in charge with short- and long-range images of the sea around, from three to thirty miles off.
El Faro’s bridge is small, roughly thirty feet by twenty-five, a tight theater for the drama of navigation. Seven square windows face forward; a door on each side leads to open air, to the long “wings” like fenced steel observation terraces running to the ship’s edge, from which an officer can see up and down the hull’s length. This is particularly useful when carrying a full load of containers, which block the view for several hundred yards dead ahead.
Under the windows a console holding instruments spans the bridge’s width. The two radar sets the mate uses, one of them calibrated for short range, st
and on the port side. The small steel wheel is set in the middle of the console, along with controls for “Iron Mike,” the ship’s automatic steering system or autopilot, and the gyroscope and compass dials. A third radar screen, set on thirty-mile range, stands near the captain’s chair, by the starboard side-door. A settee and a row of cabinets, and then the Inmarsat terminal, line the port side; the back end of the wheelhouse contains a chartroom, where a navigator can plot courses on an extrawide desk. Bookshelves full of nautical manuals, wooden cabinets holding charts, and various electrical panels and switches are built into the chartroom bulkhead. A curtain screens the area’s lights from the rest of the bridge. Access to the bridge is provided by a companionway, or set of stairs, behind the chartroom.
2
The normal third engineer’s watch is twelve to four, but for greenhorns it’s split six on, six off for training purposes. Anyway it’s likely that Dylan Meklin visits his new world, the engine room, much earlier than any assigned watch. Probably he was told to observe closely the process of firing up the boilers, getting the ship under way; kept safely to one side while the pros deal with different “bells,” the commands rung down from bridge to engine-room telegraph for various speeds, the forward and reverse commands of maneuvering. This means Meklin, a large twenty-three-year-old ex–football player with a thick brown beard, is in double culture shock, wondering why the pretty second mate with the weirdly familiar accent has it in for him; trying to absorb, as well, this universe of machinery that seems half-familiar, because he learned of it in school; half-alien also because it’s a big ship, an old plant, and every ship, every engine room, and especially this one has its own culture, idiosyncrasies, and character dynamics that have to be figured out fast before they get a newbie in trouble.
If cargo loading felt like a hell of heat and frenzied activity for the mates, the engine room takes the prize for all-time Big League Inferno. First, it’s deep—the eighth and ninth circles of this ship, if we’re talking Dante. To get there you open a watertight door on Main Deck and drop down a couple of levels of metal steps into a darkness only partially alleviated by banks of neon lights. An elevator exists, but it’s as old as the ship and judged unserviceable, and anyway it only goes down to 2nd Deck.
Also, it’s hot as the usual nightmare of Hades, well over 100°F in spots in spite of big steel vent openings on Main Deck that funnel air into fans blowing hard and loud in multiple corners of the engine room; despite the watertight door in the forward bulkhead on 3rd Deck, which is almost always hooked open to provide a draft.
Finally it’s unpleasantly, in places even harmfully, loud, from the blast of ventilators as well as the whoosh of steam, the rumble of turbine and gears, the continuous hum of generators and pumps—though modern engine rooms built around giant thudding diesels can be even louder. Young Meklin, as he nervously negotiates the last steps of the companionway to the engine room’s upper level, would be met there by yelled greetings: from the chief engineer, Richard Pusatere; from one of the two more experienced third engineers, Mitch Kuflik, assigned to train the new kid; possibly from the senior third, Michael Holland, another Mainer and a Maine Maritime grad as well.
This upper level of the engine room includes long corridors, nicknamed bowling alleys, on each side, the starboard lane holding a rank of electricity panels plus two two-thousand kilowatt generators, the port a machine shop (including lathe, drill press, welding equipment) and office; but its focus is the main control panel. This functions like the wheelhouse console does for navigation officers. It’s a metal bank of electronics, over ten feet long and six high, holding many dozens of gauges, switches, levers, buttons, and valve controls, with a soundproof booth at one end for telephone conversations with the bridge. Standing at this panel an engineer would face aft, toward the ship’s rear end, the two massive boilers rising at his back and right up through the house toward the smokestack. Though he cannot see them over the banked dials in front of him, the tops of two turbines and then the reduction-gear housing rise like the gray backs of sea monsters into the fraught penumbra. A “gravity-fed” lubricating-oil tank sits well above, in the casing through which the boiler exhaust runs, at Main Deck level; a second, reserve tank containing an extra ten-ton supply of oil lies behind and to port of the turbines.II Every other nook and corner is stuffed full of junction boxes, wire conduits, firefighting equipment, pipes, dials, and valves; everything is painted gray and cream or else color-coded; all is wiped down and shiny.
As Kuflik guides Meklin to the level below, they’d descend into another crowded space containing the cozily insulated lower bulk of the boilers at the engine room’s forward end. Arrayed across the steel plates above, thick, insulated steam pipes hang from spring-loaded brackets. Several of the brackets are rusted, a few broken outright. The main condensers rise toward the ship’s stern; giant pumps and associated controls rise in front of them; more pumps are on the port side, with cooling gear and the two lubricating-oil pumps farther aft. In the rear and middle portion of this level stands the reduction gears’ lower housing. Behind those lie two more workshops, and an emergency escape stairway to 3rd Deck; and finally the propeller shaft, cradled by massive bearings and a watertight housing that leads through the ship’s aft end to the vast propeller, churning away at the dark, warm Atlantic water.
To Meklin this would all seem both strange and familiar: strange because his school’s training ship, the State of Maine, runs a diesel engine instead of the more complex steam plant—in this she reflects a contemporary reality, for modern ships are almost exclusively powered by giant diesels, fueled by oil or liquid natural gas, and Tote itself is phasing out its steamships in favor of new, environmentally friendly, hybrid LNG-diesel-powered vessels. But it would also seem familiar because steam remains part of the academy curriculum, and Meklin would have had to memorize every aspect of this type of plant to pass his Coast Guard license. It’s not unusual for new third engineers to seek assignment on a steam-powered vessel, just for the experience. If this is the case, Meklin is lucky in the officers he will be working under because the chief, Rich Pusatere, and Third Engineer Kuflik—not to mention Jeff Mathias, the chief engineer responsible for the riding gang—are near-fanatical devotees of steam, of the elegance and power of its systems. The chief and his first and second engineers all have over ten years’ experience on steam plants. “It was a steam culture,” a former first engineer on El Faro says of the ship’s engine room. “If you want to be an automobile mechanic,” Pusatere is fond of quipping, “sail diesel. If you want to be an engineer, sail steam.” Ironically perhaps, the chief has been selected to sail on one of the new Tote ships but needs more time on diesels to qualify; that is one reason he’s still on El Faro today. To these three men the interlocking cycles of a marine steam system evoke, if in more prosaic form, the divinity Rudyard Kipling wrote of in “McAndrew’s Hymn,” his paean to marine engineers:
Lord, Thou hast made this world below the shadow of a dream,
An’, taught by time, I tak’ it so—exceptin’ always Steam.
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God—
Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’-rod.
The poetry is not hard to identify with because a certain beauty does exist in the way these thousands of components, changing from one chemical state to another then back again, bursting with fire and pressure, function in even balance—El Faro’s propulsion system is called, in the trade, a balanced system—as they pull together to turn a bronze prop taller than many town halls at over 100 rpm, driving a ship big as four city blocks at 24 mph through the indifferent ocean.
The other side of a balanced system is that if one part of it goes down the rest, suddenly unbalanced, goes with it. To train for such breakdown, Pusatere, who is known as Mr. Policy for his love of unbending routine, regularly schedules pop drills, watching his crew go through the various steps necessary to get propulsion back in case of, for example, sudden elect
rical failure, a breakdown in the lubricating system, or a shutdown in pumps feeding water to the boilers.
So Meklin knows the theory: that the guiding principle behind El Faro’s propulsion plant comes down to a closed, two-phase cycle. The first phase, evaporation, consists of taking purified water, heating it up in two boilers, and then superheating it till the H2O has totally evaporated into high-pressure steam, thus vaporizing even the tiniest drops, which at high pressure would fly hard and sharp as shrapnel. Then the steam is blasted through the delicately ranked propellers of a turbine that spin shafts, which, after passing through a series of gears, rotate the ship’s massive propeller shaft.
The second phase is the condensation cycle, in which used steam drains from the turbine, as well as from the ship’s main generators, which also run on steam. The vapor passes through a seawater-cooled condenser and reverts to water. The recycled water is then pumped back into the boilers to start the steam cycle again.III From this perspective also, the similarities with a hurricane’s cycle are not hard to spot.
The lubrication system runs on the same dynamically self-sustaining principle. Even outside the boilers, pipes, and turbines, the components of a steam cycle—including the valves and gears that control it—generate tremendous heat, and it’s the job of the lubrication cycle to lower that heat, reducing the friction of turning parts. This cycle is not much different from a car engine’s. Thick, viscous lubricating oil is pumped over every square inch of madly spinning steel, the turbines, gears, and bearings especially; and after cooling, buffering, and greasing the machinery, the used oil is collected in a sump underneath the machines, then chilled, filtered, and pumped back over the system.
Run the Storm Page 6
