Day work on any large steel ship, and especially one as old as El Faro, consists of a lot of grunt maintenance, such as chipping off rust with a clatter-banging hydraulic needlegun in areas with the worst corrosion, ear protection mandatory. No shortage of rust around—the twenty-two big vent openings on 2nd Deck, though always left open to draw fumes from automobiles on the decks below, are supposed to close, but they’ve been corroded so thoroughly some of the baffles that shut them off won’t budge. If in some places the metal has wasted away to paper-thin or nothing, the engineers might be called in to patch and weld.
“They were bandaging that ship with steel all the time,” Chris Cash, a former crewman, says of El Faro later. “They didn’t want to put money into the ship, [they would] patch up instead of fix.” One of the Polish gang tells his wife there is “rust everywhere, I have never worked on such a hulk.”
If the work is done properly, the metal should be ground down, washed with fresh water before welding, protected with primer and heavy-duty oil paint afterward. Today, with swells growing from aft and port, and the occasional crest of a higher wave slurping through the big openings on 2nd Deck, any maintenance on that deck will probably have to be done on bulkheads or elevated areas to starboard, away from the spray; or else on Main Deck or the house or the enclosed lower levels below 2nd Deck.
Shultz will certainly check with Jeff Mathias, who’s organizing the Polish riding gang’s work, to ensure the two gangs don’t get in each other’s way. Then as a matter of routine he’ll make another round of the cargo, running into Louis Champa as the electrician starts his thrice-daily monitoring of the cooling systems on the refrigerated cargo—and these, too, might echo in a mate’s subconscious with how hurricanes work, for like cyclones the reefer units depend on a binary system of heat transfer, through evaporation on one side, condensation on the other. Shultz’s conscious thoughts, though, must be focused on much more obvious mechanisms. His job here is to double-check lashings on every trailer, each container, a task that calls for experience and muscle memory because there is no mechanical gauge to test tension on the lashings. He is well aware how many of them are tied off-button. Some of the D rings, too, were rusted to the deck, but loosened with a sledgehammer to accept a hook and chain to tie down cargo. The mate knows that the percentage of trailers and containers secured off-button and even to relatively distant D rings conforms to the limit prescribed in Tote’s minimalist cargo manual and should be fine for normal sailing and okay even for rough weather.
A hurricane is not “rough weather.”
The men don their hard hats, pick up needleguns, hoses, paint, brushes, tarps, sledges, whatever the job requires, and set off down the deck, walking with the practiced saltwater-cowpoke gait that fits their movements to the ship’s, which with the wind rising slowly but steadily off the port quarter and swells moving with it includes a fair amount of pitch, of bow-stern action. James Porter, quiet and focused on his job; Jackie Jones, Porter’s cousin, an excerpt from the Bible he reads every morning quite possibly still looping in his head; Mariette Wright; Carey Hatch. Those working on lower levels will take the house stairs to 2nd Deck and there, if they’ve been assigned a job in the forward holds—1, 2, and 2A—they’ll thread their way through the massed shadows, the ranked trailers, the humming reefers, the snaking electric cables, the stink of oil and gas, to one of the scuttles, the tight hatchways leading to a ladder that runs to the next deck down.
If Frank Hamm is working overtime today, this will not be his favorite route. These scuttles are scattered, two to each hold,I in alternating pattern on the very outer edge of 2nd Deck. Their coamings, the raised steel lips that prevent water from flowing to the next level down if, as often happens, 2nd Deck gets wet during passage, are just wide enough for the average man’s shoulders, but Hamm is not an average man, he is broad in all dimensions, and getting through requires a certain amount of twisting, of shipboard yoga. The scuttle’s cover opens and closes on a single hinge in the coaming; the silicon or synthetic-rubber gasket underneath seals the circle when it is shut. The cover’s considerable weight is augmented by its locking gears and dogs.
These 2nd Deck scuttle hatches are built of heavy-gauge steel in case rough weather should drive seas deep among the hatchways. Unlike the watertight doors such as those between the different holds, or between 3-hold and the engine room, they are not routinely listed in any checklists as open or shut, since they will be in fairly constant use throughout the voyage. Also, because the rules requiring it apply only to ships built after 1992, they are not fitted with electronic sensors that would indicate, on a panel on the bridge or engine-room consoles, whether they have been dogged.
The gaskets in particular are not inspected. They are made of either heavy silicon, a polymer that is normally resistant to salt, ultraviolet rays, and rushing water; or EPDM (for “ethylene propylene diene monomer”), a hard synthetic rubber. But neither substance is eternal, and both have been known to fail. When serially washed in water that contains chemicals, the component molecules of silicon, aligned in a polymer chain, can be cut, in a process known as chain scission, by the corrosive molecules of solvents and hydrocarbon compounds. And EPDM is highly vulnerable to erosion by gasoline and motor oil. Seawater sprayed or slopped onto 2nd Deck, with the fuel and oil drips of yard pigs, of old automobiles (around half of the cars shipped to Puerto Rico are used), of exhaust residue, of cleaning fluids used to wash the deck, quickly becomes a light cocktail of such chemicals. Presumably, over a long time, the cocktail saps a gasket’s integrity, its insulating qualities. And a “long time” is what El Faro’s all about.
“Set,” too, will reduce the seal’s effectiveness. Set is the effect of strong compression, in this case the repeated dogging down of heavy steel hatch on hard steel lip with the gasket buffering the two, not to mention the sailor’s habit of letting the hatch slam on its bed. All this will tend to change the gasket’s shape, the way a pillow crease leaves its line on a sleeper’s cheek, and such change also lessens the sealant qualities of polymers. But why should anyone pay attention to something that routinely works wellII—why, with everything you have to do, and maybe some constant irritation at the mate or bosun to bug you, or perhaps a shoreside issue elbowing in on your concentration, look twice at the scuttle hatches as they are opened, banged shut, opened again; reliable, sturdy, ignored?
“Ignored” is not a term that can be applied to the lifeboats, which theoretically are the principal means of escape off the ship. Lifeboats have ranked high on the list of international inspection rules since the loss of the RMS Titanic in 1912. El Faro’s are two nearly identical boats, twenty-three feet long, made of heavy, cored fiberglass, and suspended from twin sets of cranes, called davits, one on each side of the engineers’ level of the house. The boats are open, meaning they afford no shelter from the elements. The starboard boat is capable of holding forty-three people, the other forty-eight. They are painted white outside, orange inside, with benches, or “thwarts,” arranged across the boat’s width. The portside boat is powered by a diesel engine, the starboard by a construct of gears and push bars, called a Fleming system, moved back and forth by crew seated on the thwarts the way slaves pushed and pulled at oars in Roman galleys. The Fleming gear, like the diesel, turns a shaft and propeller at the stern. Except for the propulsion, however, and the davits’ electric motors, El Faro’s lifeboats are little different in design or in their launching systems from the lifeboats of the Titanic, and they suffer from the same drawbacks, in particular the near impossibility of launching an upslope boat, or loading on the downslope, if the ship is leaning heavily to one side.
Modern cargo ships don’t use these antiquated boats. Today’s American ships are legally mandated to be equipped with totally enclosed, engine-powered boats, often launched like a torpedo down a chute off the ship’s stern. In this system, when abandoning ship, crew members climb through a hatch into the boat, lock the hatch, strap themselves in, start the e
ngine; then the boat’s coxswain hits a switch that triggers the unlocking device. The lifeboat, acting more like a rocket at this stage, plunges into the sea, its tapered bow allowing the craft to dive briefly, damping the shock. When the lifeboat bobs back to the surface, the crew member in charge revs the engine and speeds his boat away from the distressed ship.
El Faro, however, is grandfathered. Because of her age, her owners are not legally obliged to replace these old boats with the modern, chute-launched version. This grandfathered status, and the lack of obligation to modernize, must be key to Tote’s bottom line; when the vessel was converted from pure roll on, roll off to Ro-Ro/container in 2006, the Coast Guard initially flagged the work as a “major conversion,” which could have required, among other safety-equipment changes, a lifeboat upgrade. State-of-the-art lifeboats cost upward of half a million dollars each. But Tote fought that designation, lodging a protest that resulted in a turnaround by the Coast Guard Marine Inspection Office, which eventually ruled that the work had been, technically, a “minor” conversion and thus did not mandate safety upgrades. And so the antiquated lifeboats remained. So did all other safety features that conformed to the 1975-era “International Safety of Life at Sea,” or SOLAS, regulations, even if they did not meet modern standards.III
Third Mate Riehm, inspecting the boats, must clamber inside to check the stores: filtered water, rations, first-aid kit, emergency flares, fuel for the diesel. He makes sure the electric winches that lower the boats are working properly and carefully inspects the davits themselves, including the padeyes, half circles of steel, welded to the deck, that anchor some of the cables. A short time ago the old padeyes, rusted out, were replaced. El Faro’s sister ship El Yunque had to obtain temporary permission to sail from classification-society inspectors because her davits were corroded. But El Faro’s davits have been inspected recently, new clutches and brake pads were installed on the electric winches just before sailing and the system seems to be in good shape.
Riehm, with his usual diligence, would also check out the life rafts, of which there are five, all of the sturdy, tent-covered variety, orange-colored and self-inflating:IV two, capable of holding twenty-five people apiece, are strapped inside protective fiberglass shells to cradles just behind the lifeboats, one on each side of the house. Two more twenty-five-man rafts are lashed to railings or brackets near the boat deck, and a six-person raft added as a precaution when El Yunque’s lifeboat system was found to be deficient is stowed up forward. The third mate, like every other mariner aboard, is aware of the lifeboats’ shortcomings and knows the rafts offer his best chance of survival if things really go south.
2
For a stateroom captain, or at least what Tote considers to be a stateroom captain, Davidson is pretty active on deck today as El Faro steams farther to the south and east, skirting the Bahamas chain. Early this morning he went four levels down from the bridge to the galley and spoke to Lashawn Rivera and the stewards about securing their china, sauces, and cooking equipment for rough seas ahead; he is conscious of the mess that happens when a violent roll sends jars of mayonnaise and catsup flying to the deck.
Then Davidson took the stairs another four levels deeper to the engine room to carry the same message to the engineers. The mates worry about the Polish riding crew. “They leave pipes lying around,” one of them remarks, and someone will mention this to Jeff Mathias, the chief engineer in charge of the conversion work the Poles are doing, though it’s almost certain that Mathias, with his experience and sea savvy (“A born sailor,” Hearn says of him later), is already conscious of what’s going on and will be taking safety measures accordingly; making sure any equipment not currently being used among the welding cables and bottles of oxyacetylene, the spools of wire, the hulking new winches and heater, are securely tied down and out of the way.
The winches and heater in particular would need to be lashed down hard because they are heavy. The heater is a big steel furnace called a Butterworth, used to make steam for deicing the regular ramps as well as the five extra ramps that will be added to El Faro for use in Alaska; the vessel is due to go to shipyard shortly for a final overhaul before traveling to Alaska the following month. The eighteen winches, with electric motors that will raise and lower those ramps or cinch the ship in tight against ice-encrusted docks, all add up to several tons in weight, and it’s not clear, then or later, if their combined weight and location have been added to the CargoMax stability algorithm.
The presence of five Polish men adds an extra zest of the surreal to El Faro’s human soup. Because of the language barrier, communication is rare or nonexistent between the riding gang and the ship’s regular crew. Some bridge watch keepers refer to them as Team Poland and make jokes, not unkindly, about their tastes and proclivities. Describing Team Poland at mealtimes, an AB says, “The cook or the steward comes out and goes, ‘Do you want meat or fish?’ . . . And they all go ‘Fish! Fish! Fish!’ ” And when later the likelihood of their coming close to a hurricane is explained to them, one of the mates says the foreigners seem excited, smiling, not concerned, even eager to undergo the experience, crying, “Hurricane! Yes!” . . . “Ah, if they only knew,” the mate adds wryly.
Generally, the Poles are looked on by the rest of the crew with the sort of bemused tolerance that characterizes Americans forced to deal with non–English speakers, people who don’t understand what quarterbacks do. The general impression of the riding crew is that, though foreign, they’re good-natured, assiduous, too. Piotr Krause, the twenty-seven-year-old pipefitter, seems particularly easy to get along with; he loves cars and history programs and is liked for his sense of humor, though his recent jokes might conceal an underlying tension. Krause and his wife, Anna, are devoted to each other and to their one-year-old son, Viktor; he took the job on El Faro because his family needed the money and the pay was good compared to similar work in Poland, but the long months he spends working on another continent have been hard on all of them. Krause longs to leave the ship and find work in Europe; he is thinking of looking in Norway, where he could make good money and live with his family as well. Krause is happiest working with his hands, fixing stuff. He spends a lot of time with Jeff Mathias, the conversion supervisor. Mathias has no problem working with Team Poland, but Mathias tends to get along fine with most people and especially people who care about machinery as much as he does.
Mathias grew up in Kingston, one of the more rural areas of southeastern Massachusetts, not far from where the Pilgrims got off the Mayflower mumbling prayers of thanks for their salvation from the sea. His family owns cranberry bogs and, as with most farming, the care and maintenance of working acreage requires a lot of machinery: excavators and front-end loaders to overhaul the bogs, pumps to flood the plants over winter, rolling pickers, mechanized conveyor belts to load the harvested berries, trucks to carry them, tractors to drag the machinery from bog to bog. Cape Cod Bay isn’t far from Kingston and Mathias did his share of sailing small boats, but what fascinated him was engines. He grew adept at running bog machinery, fixing it when it broke, scouting around for replacement parts; little pleases him more than scoring what he calls a “smokin’ deal” on a used fuel injector or water pump, unless it be creating hayrides and other kid-oriented events the Mathias farm puts on around Halloween. When he applied to “Mass. Maritime,” only twenty miles south of his home, on Buzzards Bay, the engineering department was what interested him. And there, like Rich Pusatere, he came under the spell of steam engines, to the point where he chose the Tote assignment deliberately so that he could work on a steam plant—although he, like others on El Faro, has no illusions about the ship’s condition and talks of it openly with fellow engineers. He once asked rhetorically, “How long will Tote keep spending money to keep this ship running?”
Today, despite the freshening wind and the subtly increasing freshness of the ship’s motion, he supervises the Poles as they configure overhead cable conduits and new steam lines for the ramps; tells h
is crew also to weld on a new railing below the bridge, for which the paint and underlying steel must be ground down to bond clean metal to clean metal. Most of this should be dockside or shipyard work but Tote, having recently sent El Morro, one of its three ships in the “Ponce” class, which includes El Faro, to the scrapyard, is scrambling to get El Faro to Tacoma for the Alaska run by December 8.. This is so that one of their Alaska ships, in turn, can be sent to Singapore for conversion to LNG-powered diesel. Dry-docking for El Faro is scheduled for early November, the time slot already reserved at the Bahamas shipyard where she is to be worked on. The Coast Guard and Tote’s client regulatory body, the American Bureau of Shipping, have been notified so inspectors can be on-site to sign off on repairs. That inspection is scheduled for November 6 to 19. According to Mathias, the decision to scrap one of El Faro’s sister ships, Great Land, was made too quickly, without any plan to cannibalize the decommissioned ship for spares, which means a lot of unnecessary hours must be spent finding used parts elsewhere or jury-rigging others to refit the Faro. This is work in which Mathias, the widget wonk, finds pleasure, but still . . . Because of the extra duties, Mathias recently chose not to stay shoreside, but to ride with the ship to make sure the conversion is pushed through on time. “How do I know what needs to be done if the ship’s only in port for one day?” he explained to his wife.
Run the Storm Page 10
