Generally there’s a feeling that it’s not a good idea to lodge complaints, even about safety issues, with Tote reps ashore, because doing so can lead to retaliation against the complainer.XV “You could get fired if you call the DP [Designated Person], that’s on any ship in the fleet,” Hearman will say later. Even the company’s human-relations officer, Melissa Clark, will admit in subsequent testimony that crew members are reluctant to stick their neck out to raise issues. The only way to report violations anonymously is on land, on a secure phone, to Tote’s safety hotline. Emails and sat-phone calls from the ship are under the master’s control.
The company denies targeting whistle-blowers. While Tote is aware of the crew-officer tensions, the in-house title of its recent policy aimed at defusing strain between officers and crew, “Divide and Conquer,” is not such as to inspire confidence in HR’s goodwill. And this localized tension rides piggyback on a light but pervasive sense among American merchant mariners of being ignored or even disrespected by the general population, despite the vital importance of their work.
7
The United States as a whole, like Puerto Rico, relies on the world trade in household goods and commodities, 90 percent of which are shipped by sea; but the nation traditionally is inward-looking, both fattened and stoned on the shoreside riches of the continent it dominates, hooked on the increasingly illusory ideal of economic self-reliance. “Go West, young man,” Horace Greeley thundered in print, not “Go to sea.” Every man and woman on El Faro has got used to explicating her or his job description because everyone, everyone not in the trade—everyone in America it seems—assumes that if you work in the “merchant marine,” then you are in the “Marines,” the Marine Corps, and the next phrase uttered will be the facile and automatic “Thank you for your service.” When ships docked in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco they used to be a presence, the mournful lowing of a foghorn part and parcel of the urban experience, but now they are by and large quarantined like lepers in those faraway automated docklands, and the landsmen’s ignorance of merchant mariners is on a par with their indifference.
This attitude, or ignorance, pervades Washington, too, and has solid consequences: from 1951 to 2011 the fleet of US-registered and crewed ships, which at its zenith totaled almost 1,300 vessels, declined by 82 percent to 166 ships, less than 1 percent of the world’s total.XVI The decline is due to a strict safety environment and high labor costs in both shipbuilding and crewing in the United States, compared to places such as China and Indonesia. In 2015 the average daily cost of running a flag-of-convenience ship is $9,600, compared to $21,200 for a ship flying the Stars and Stripes. But the decline is also a function of deregulation and neglect: while domestic airlines and trucking companies benefit from tremendous subsidies and protection in the form of modern highways, air traffic control, landing rights, and overall public attention, Washington has largely thrown in the towel when it comes to protecting American shipping. That American-flagged merchant ships survive at all is due to three factors, first among them the evisceration of maritime unions, such as the SIU, which represents El Faro’s crew, and the American Maritime Officers union, representing licensed personnel, to the point where they largely exist and negotiate at the sufferance of the shipowners; their ability to leverage higher wages suffers as a result. “Ass-kissers” is how one ex-sailor succinctly describes his union’s officials. It’s no coincidence that there has not been a strike by American deep-sea mariners in half a century.
The second reason for the merchant marine’s survival is the American war machine, which through its federal Maritime Administration (known as MARAD) and subsidized maritime academiesXVII seeks to keep a bare minimum of US-run ships and crews available for the country’s next overseas adventure. The third reason is the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, aka the Jones Act, a bill passed just after World War I by congressmen who, rendered nervous by the demonstrated ability of German U-boats to sink ships and strangle commerce, felt laws were needed to ensure the United States maintained a sufficient supply of American merchant ships for future wars. To that end the act reserved intra-American shipping, which is to say commerce from US port to US port, exclusively for vessels built, owned, and operated by Americans.
Tote’s ships are all Jones Act ships, and there’s a causal relationship here with El Faro’s age. Like her sister ship El Yunque, she is forty years old when the usual life span of a merchant ship is twenty years or less, and the average age of merchant ships worldwide is eleven years. But it costs three times more to build new hulls in the few US shipyards left, as opposed to building them in China or Korea, so Jones Act owners keep their vessels going as long as possible to avoid the expense of replacement. In 2015, one-third of the remaining US-flag merchant ships are over twenty years old. And since American mariners earn much more than foreign mariners hired on the free market—an American AB earns around $50,000 annually, as opposed to the $18,000 his Filipino equivalent makes—seamen’s unions don’t complain too much. The Jones Act has hardened institutional arteries on both the owners’ and mariners’ side, and the frail health of ships such as El Faro is the result.
All this is background: stuff known, digested, and assumed by the crew, barely thought about consciously on another day at sea, as the unlicensed mariners coming off the four-to-eight watch, AB Frank Hamm and oiler Shawn Thomas, enter the mess with stomachs growling for breakfast; as Hamm, a large man with an appetite to match, over eggs or waffles probably resumes chatting up his shipmates to buy the rap, house, and rhythm ’n’ blues CDs he mixes himself at home, cracking jokes all the while. Hamm is one of the ship’s funny guys, usually he shoots off pleasantries about sports that only the initiates fully get but nobody can mistake his laugh, his good nature, his love of dance steps, or his generosity—nobody can think of a bad thing to say about him, and in this closed seagoing environment where petty resentments fester easily, that is praise indeed.
Hamm is a serious churchgoer, like many of El Faro’s black contingent; he attends prayer meetings every Sunday he’s at home and never fails to give money to the same homeless guy who sets up near his church in North Jacksonville. Though his eyesight is far from perfect and he chronically wears glasses, Hamm was the one who, while standing watch with the chief mate as the ship came into San Juan, spotted a fishing boat in trouble miles distant from the Faro and calmly helped direct the rescue. The fishermen waved for assistance; the ship slowed and stopped; and the fishermen climbed up a Jacob’s ladder set by Jackie Jones on the ship’s lee side, as if they were pilots.
The eight-to-twelve watch, consisting of Jack Jackson and oiler German Solar-Cortes, finish their plates and head for bridge and engine room, respectively. The Polish steelworkers, at their own table, swallow coffee dregs and walk to the outside deck on the aft part of the mess level for a prework cigarette. The day crew—Mariette Wright, Jackie Jones, James Porter, and Carey Hatch—probably pour one last java before reporting to the bosun’s store on the port side of Main Deck for the daily muster and assignment of jobs.
But the chronic, low-level tension must have an effect somewhere, even though these men, this woman, are all pros, all proud of their skills and the work they do—this lathe curl of injustice, this thin-sliced tinge of disrespect coming from their officers, their company, their country, can result in a daydream of darker, cooler shades that affects the work environment; that results perhaps in a little less attention paid, a double check to see if a hatch or gate is securely shut waived or dismissed with a shrug; and this can happen even in the shadow of awareness that a storm is out there, because after all, a storm is always out there, somewhere, at sea.
8
Joaquin would be bad enough as forecasters think it is, with winds rising from forty-five to sixty-odd knots (but no higher, or so it’s believed), circling obsessively around and around a thousand square miles of ocean, riling up the water into hungry ten-foot combers of somber blue, spitting foam across the jaws of dark between; a big
ship could take that in stride, though a small sailing vessel might well find herself in trouble, hove to and trying to ride the waves with a handkerchief of sail bent, her crew tethered by lifelines to avoid being dragged overboard when a wave washes the deck.
But Joaquin, as usual, is not what everybody thinks. Three hundred and eighty miles to the southeast of El Faro’s position, the storm has shape-shifted into an early version of the assassin it’s destined to become. The shape-shifting, a sixty-hour process, started early the previous morning, on September 29, when much of El Faro’s crew was asleep, when the ship herself was moored in still water at her berth on Blount Island.
No one was around to see, no one had dropped data-gathering instruments close enough, the NOAA weather buoys were elsewhere, no experts fully understood what was happening, and what was happening was this: If warm water is what injects strength into an incipient hurricane, Joaquin was spiking into epic overdose. The surface temperature of the waters Joaquin now entered stood at 31.1°C, or 88°F, the warmest ever measured in that area and 1.1 degrees over the previous record; a function, meteorologists agreed later, of overall climate change, the gradual warming of Earth’s atmosphere that not only deepens the El Niño effect, which allowed Joaquin to be born in the first place, but contributes to warmer seas overall.
Global warming, aka the “greenhouse” process, is driven by the same physics of heat transfer and changing chemical states that in another form turn El Faro’s propeller. The sun blasts “visible” shortwave radiation through the accumulated carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere to heat the planet’s surface—which bounces much of it back, at cooler temperatures, in longer-wavelength radiation (for wavelengths lengthen with lower temperatures, and Earth is cooler than the sun). Then it becomes a matter of music, almost, of both sympathetic and off-key tuning: longer wavelengths of light make carbon dioxide molecules vibrate in a way the shorter wavelengths do not, and that vibration bounces light rays off-center, deflecting them from their passage back into space; the radiation thus retained mostly stays in the planet’s atmosphere, heating it up, cycling it back down to warm the seas beneath.
And so, Joaquin explodes. Its heat pump speeds up, the pressure in its hollow core dropping, sucking in more wind from the surrounding atmosphere and even more heat from the sea, which causes the wet hot air inside its core to rise more quickly in turn, spiraling out the top faster than inrushing winds below can compensate for—although they try, since nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum. All this increases wind speed further still, while the system releases yet more energy, more lightning, thunder, and overarching rain clouds, at the top. At this point the hurricane is an engine that accelerates its fuel pump faster than it runs itself and must speed up to compensate, which only makes the fuel flow faster. At 2:00 a.m. on the thirtieth, while Randolph and Davis are on watch, unbeknownst to them or to anyone else, Joaquin’s winds top the 64 knot, 73 mph, mark that officially defines a hurricane. And still Joaquin is not finished, it is right in the thick of this lovely superheated stretch of ocean, and expecting such a storm to slow or stop now is like assuming a thirsty drunk will turn his back on an open bar, an indulgent bartender.
Here lies one reason almost no one saw Joaquin coming, a source for one of the most grievous mistakes in meteorological forecasting of the last decade. While no hard-and-fast rules exist to predict where a system as hugely complicated as a hurricane will go next, one reliable guideline ties the strength of wind shear to the altitude of guiding winds, the airflow that blows it in a given direction. Wind shear saps a storm’s strength, or “intensity.” If wind shear is low, and the storm thus relatively strong and its massive thunderheads riding high, the hurricane will tend to follow high-altitude winds; conversely, if shear is high and the system weak, it will be pushed around by winds at lower altitudes.
No one, however, knows the specifics of the waters in which Joaquin now thrives, no one realizes how hot they are, and few imagine the storm will develop the intensity it is acquiring. Shear conditions are detected in its vicinity on September 28 and 29 and many forecasts deduce from this that the storm will weaken and drift with the lower airflow, which is driven by a trough over the eastern United States, to the west and north. But a ridge of high pressure over the Atlantic is blocking part of the jet stream and diverting higher-altitude winds toward the south. In retrospect it seems likely that the unexpected bolus of warm-water energy has made Joaquin more resistant to wind shear and therefore more intense—and thus more inclined to follow the higher winds trending south and west.
The lack of understanding is not for want of effort. The National Hurricane Center runs its millions of bits of storm info through a forecasting program powered by two Cray XC40 supercomputers: twin rows of linked, metal-sheathed mainframes, each forty feet long, located in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida. As of tomorrow—October 1, 2015—the two Crays are due to be goosed to a maximum capability of 2.5 petaflops apiece, one petaflop being equal to one thousand million million floating-point operations a second. A floating point is the smallest unit of coding, equivalent to a single synaptic connection, the simplest form of neural “idea” in the computer’s brain, and it all adds up to a total that is mind-boggling: five thousand million million digital ideas, or minicalculations, processed every second.
But the SISO rule of computing applies here, too: Shit In, Shit Out. While the data NHC is gathering are far from “shit,” neither are they, in hindsight, complete enough; they do not take into account the über-warmed patch of water, they don’t predict the right intensity, and as a result they do not get the trackline right. The SAT-C and TAFB forecasts the hurricane forecast center is generating are therefore far more inaccurate than usual.
NHC experts are not fools; they are dedicated and savvy scientists who are well aware that any model has flaws. Therefore they make sure to incorporate in their final forecast package not only their own model but a spectrum of models run by other forecasting centers, of which the United Kingdom Meteorological Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (known as Euro) models are two of the more influential. The resultant “spaghetti” forecast displays tracks of a hurricane, as predicted by a half dozen different organizations, winding in and out of each other like strands of linguine forked dripping from the bowl, and teasing out more and more as the time frame lengthens and uncertainty factors grow.
Most of the predicted tracks up to September 30 are in line with the NHC’s: the storm will skim but not reach hurricane strength; it will continue mostly westward and then veer north as it’s steered by winds coming off the inland trough.
There is one exception. The Euro model through September 30 does not see Joaquin turning northward or remaining weak; its track bears southwest instead and is close to the direction that Joaquin, relentlessly strengthening and coasting along with higher-altitude winds, is actually following now, on a collision course with El Faro.XVIII
Collision course: Initial forecasts showed Joaquin weakening and moving west, then north, but the storm’s actual track shows a steady progression south and west, as if it were deliberately aiming to meet the El Faro.
PART IV
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IN HARM’S WAY
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And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through. . . . You won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about.
—Haruki Murakami
1
The day’s work begins for the watch standers as they go to their respective posts in the engine-room control station and the bridge for the morning’s eight-to-twelve shift. This September 30 the “day” deckhands—Hatch, Porter, Wright, and Jones—also start at 8:00 a.m., but will work right through a normal daytime routine, like their counterparts on any land-based crew, like the Polish riding gang, since much of the work they do is on deck and often requires sunlight; they will knock off in
the evening. Sometimes off-duty watch standers, such as Frank Hamm on the four-to-eight, will join the day crew to work an extra four hours of overtime, if Shultz has okayed it.
The day gang shapes up by the bosun’s store, coffee breath strong, hair maybe still wet from the shower and drying in warm, oil-and-paint-perfumed wind. The store consists of the outermost port container in a row of three permanent and dedicated freight containers lined up fore and aft on Main Deck’s breezeway, one on the port side and two starboard, under the sheltering house. (The other containers hold safety gear such as CO2 foam and other firefighting equipment.) Deck work is organized by Chief Mate Shultz, and he is there to assign overtime, if any, and generally oversee the shape-up, distributing scratch-pad notes as he organizes the crew. The work itself is run by the bosun, Roan Lightfoot; he holds the same rank and authority as a chief petty officer in the Navy, a master sergeant in the Army, the highest unlicensed position aboard.
Lightfoot is fifty-four years old. One of the crew has described him as an “aging surfer” type—stubble-cut blond hair losing the battle with male-pattern baldness, shortish and muscled and squat—a guy who like some others in the crew likes hanging at Angel’s Bar in San Juan, where the beer is cool and the Friday-night strippers are, sort of, hot. Lightfoot is another who jokes around a lot, but not enough to fool anybody: like many bosuns this guy’s a hard-ass and it’s his way or the highway, and he doesn’t care much if the crew likes him or not, and some of them do not. Still, he knows his job and people respect that, just as some deckies don’t speak too fondly of Shultz either, but they’re aware he knows his stuff. The shape-up, often enough, is a binary theater of surface “yessir” and subsurface “fuck you,” but orders are orders and even grumbling the crew will do what they are told.
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