Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  Once Riehm has left the bridge, though, Randolph seems to fall prey to doubt about the new course. Maybe because she is less focused on the BVS graphics and can pay more attention to the raw NWS text data on the SAT-C, she is starting to doubt her captain’s reasons for not taking more drastic action to evade Joaquin. She acts it out, in a way, for Davis’s benefit, pretending to be Davidson: “ ‘It’s nothing and it’s nothing!’ ” and “ ‘Uh, I’m going up here fucking way off course.’ Of course it’s nothing—then why the hell are we goin’ on a different track line? I think he’s just tryin’ to play it down because he shouldn’t have come this way . . . saving face.”

  “We’re getting sea swells now,” Davis says, referring to the deeper period waves that might be expected from the hurricane.

  “Well, Larry,” Randolph says, presumably showing him a chart or forecast track line, “we are here and the storm is here. . . . We’re entering it.”

  At noon a bell sounds, on the bridge and throughout the ship. It’s the test signal for the general alarm, a ringing that sounds throughout El Faro, which at any other time would signal to everyone that the ship is in peril. At this time also, Davidson, from a computer terminal in his office, sends Tote an email via Inmarsat. This is the routine noon report, a standard form including average speed (19.8 knots), amount of fuel consumed (580 barrels), distance remaining to San Juan (828 miles), as well as various engine temperatures and pressures. In the “notes” section of the report, he adds one terse line: “Precautions observed regarding Hurricane Joaquin.”

  Clouds scud before the sun, the ship seems to rock ’n’ roll from dark to bright sea. Jeff Mathias shows up on the bridge, looking for an update on the storm or maybe just Randolph’s famously excellent coffee. The two are friends and do favors for each other. Randolph once went on a shopping raid into San Juan to buy presents for Mathias’s kids when he was too busy to get off the ship. “Is it gourmet?” he asks now, referring to the java, and Randolph assures him, “It’s freshly ground. . . . We do not joke up here when it comes to coffee.”

  “I guess not,” Mathias agrees.

  As they sip their brew Randolph shows the engineer where Joaquin is in relation to the ship, offering him “the pretty colors,” presumably on the BVS map. If it is the BVS, though, she is not as confident of its accuracy as her superiors, or maybe she’s more aware of the overall lack of comfort in being at close quarters with something so big, the way someone might feel about edging around a bad-tempered gorilla, though the gorilla is just beyond arm’s reach.

  “Okay,” Mathias agrees finally.

  “We’re not going far off course.”

  “Well, hey, this is a fine cup of coffee, so thank you.” As Mathias is leaving, Davis advises him to pack up his metal pipes and conduits, and the engineer replies, “Absolutely. Acetylene bottles secured . . . pipes are all lashed down.”

  “Lash down your workers?” Randolph asks.

  “They’re all excited.”

  “I don’t think they realize what they’re getting into,” Davis comments, and, disgustingly, mimes someone being sick on the deck.

  7

  Down in the hissing, rumbling, wheezing, chugging chiaroscuro of the engine room, though this is its own closed world and you have no visual of the weather or sea state unless you leave it, the ship’s livelier motion is noticeable; you have to compensate a bit more for the deck shifting beneath your feet, rocking fore and aft mostly but lately with a bit more sideways to it; the motion has more of an effect here, lacking a horizon to keep track of what’s up and down, the vestibular system in your inner ear has to work harder. Sometimes it helps to hold the handrail set at waist level on the control panel, not to save you from falling, the motion is not yet so violent, but to hold steady, give the semicircular canals a break while you check gauges in sequence or jot down settings.

  All of this is normal; to the engine-room crew, motion sensed and seen, the shifting dark areas and glaring lights, the gleam of those lights on sleek, oiled machinery casings, warm breeze from fans and vents, the smell of grease, steam, and hot metal wafted on that breeze are all objective correlatives of home—the rocking is as comforting in its way as the rocking of a porch swing. Here amid the regular thrumming sounds of El Faro’s engine room it seems everything is in its place, all of these sense impressions evidence that the engineers’ world is working, doing what it’s supposed to do, turning and pressurizing, spinning and squirting, roaring and driving the ship through whatever the sea might lob at them now.

  Captain Mike came down earlier, in the second watch, to warn of heavy weather, and everything loose that can be stowed or tied down is secured, so that even in the context of the upcoming storm everything is right with this world, top to bottom—top being the uppermost level of the engine room, just a platform and steel stairs, but the flat includes a space with a good selection of gym equipment, Exercycles, weights, StairMasters; though the third engineers are not on watch between four and eight, you might well find Mitch Kuflik here, working out. Maybe because he’s six foot four and there’s more of him to feel confined and bogged down by shipboard claustrophobia, he likes to stretch his muscles and spends more time exercising here than most; just as, having recently moved with his fiancée to Brooklyn, he spends a lot of his spare time out of the city, hiking in the summer, skiing in winter. He proposed to Brittany on Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, prepared the whole thing with an engineer’s attention to detail, delegating friends to shepherd her to the mountain’s very top just before sunset so he could pop the question with half of New England shining in blue-tinged snow and golden light beneath them. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t foresee everything, couldn’t know beforehand that Brittany, a ski novice, though more than willing to learn a sport her future husband loved, by the time late afternoon rolled around would have hit the wall of chill and muscle cramp and would flatly refuse to ride back up to the mountaintop. Eventually, worn down by the weird insistence of Mitch’s buddies, she consented to do one more run on the bunny slope, and Mitch ended up proposing to her on the kiddie lift while his chums, chortling, snapped pictures of them from the next chair.

  Next level down, to the control bank between the mass of boilers and sloped housing of the reduction gear. The second engineer, Howard Schoenly, earlier was busy blowing tubes, channeling steam at high pressure back into the boilers to knock accumulated soot, the carbon detritus of burning, off the pipes through which water circulates. Diverting steam in this way reduces the amount driving the turbine and therefore brings down rpms, something the bridge noticed and took in stride, though speed is a big part of the captain’s safety equation, the ability to zip quickly around Joaquin implied—but blowing soot is necessary to avoid the fire-side clogging up, which eventually would slow the system down anyway.

  At this hour Schoenly is probably busy on the engine room’s lower level, cleaning out the strainers on the fuel-transfer pump. El Faro, per company policy, did not fill her fuel tanks to the brim; she took on eighty-five hundred barrels of RMK 500, a viscous golden liquid, known as bunker oil, somewhere between regular diesel fuel and home heating oil, from a barge at Blount Island; enough for the Puerto Rico round-trip plus a 50 percent safety margin. Most of that is stored in four tanks, two on each side in the lowest part of the ship, below the Tank Top Deck; it is then transferred to a service tank as needed. The company mandates the partial fill-up, some say to preserve its ability to top up the tanks at lower cost if bunker prices drop, although to anyone with awareness of seagoing stability, the idea of half-full tanks is bothersome because of “free surface motion.” In a full (or “pressed-up”) tank the liquid, whatever it is, stays put because it has nowhere to move. In a half-full tank, if the ship tilts to one side, the liquid follows gravity and sloshes to the downhill side of the tank, adding weight to that side and causing the vessel to list farther in an exponential, self-sustaining chain reaction that can have serious consequences for a ship already in trouble
. It is not clear however, now or later, whether free-surface motion in the fuel tanks is an active factor in what is going to happen, now only fourteen hours in the future.

  The burn-off of several thousand barrels of fuel also affects stability, decreasing weight low in the hull and raising the center of gravity so that the ship’s average GM margin, when arriving at destination, typically decreases to .25, still safely above the minimum. One ex-captain believes this change also is noticeable on the bridge, the ship becoming more tender as her roll period, the time she takes to tilt from side to side, increases from roughly ten seconds to twelve or fifteen.

  The strainers Schoenly is working on are part of the pump that moves fuel from storage to service tank, from which it is squirted into the boilers. They screen out impurities to prevent clogging in the burners; the burners atomize the fuel that, once lit, heats the steam that keeps the turbine spinning. It’s therefore important to clean the strainers daily, even more vital to do so if heavy weather is anticipated, since a lot of rolling and pitching will stir up accumulated rust and other sediments in the main fuel tanks, which will clog the strainers’ pores. There are two strainers, one of large mesh set at the suction end of the pump, where the raw fuel comes in; the other, of finer mesh, screens the discharge end, whence the fuel goes straight to the burners. Each strainer has two baskets, one in use and one off-line: turning a handle between them diverts flow to the second filter, which allows removal of the first for cleaning. The engineer then cleans the used filter and replaces it in the unused basket, ready for the next switch tomorrow, or sooner if the pressure differential between suction and discharge ends of the pump starts to climb, indicating blockage.

  And Schoenly can do this in his sleep, having been a second engineer for so long. Like Jackson in his able-seaman’s post, Schoenly has reached the level of responsibility he’s content with and has no desire to become chief or even first engineer and no fondness for the paperwork those posts entail. He is a large man with a big salt-and-pepper mustache, a fondness for beer, and, ironically perhaps, a near-total lack of filters when it comes to saying what he thinks. One engineer he has worked with says that if you ever want to vent, but don’t know how to do it diplomatically, tell Howard; he will do it for you, in the whaddya accent and high volume of his native New York but usually in such a manner, laced with insults that are not really offensive—“Ya snapperheads,” he calls the deck officers—that no one gets truly pissed off. The targets of his harmless abuse just shake their heads and mutter, “That’s Howard,” although they’ll have heard the message, too.

  The second engineer has his own spectrum of duties, most having to do with the boilers: fuel and strainers are part of that, as is checking the “water side” of the system, the vacuum feed pumps on the lower, portside level that supply water to the boilers, the condensers that capture and cool the steam. He might have Griffin, the first engineer, working with him or elsewhere in the engine room, since engineers often stand normal watch at the controls then add on two hours for maintenance duties. Schoenly’s regular assistant on the four-to-eight watch is Shawn Thomas, a hardworking oiler, or engine-room hand, a man who’s as quiet as Howard sometimes is loud and knows the routine as well as Schoenly. The routine on this ancient ship is a bit more heavy-duty than it would be on a modern vessel; it’s like crossing the street with your grandmother as opposed to a buddy you’re going to play squash with, you know you have to take more care, look out for the old lady, be a bit more attentive to avoid granny breaking her hip—shun a malfunction that might shut down propulsion.

  As regards the boilers, two hoary Babcock & Wilcox D-type supersized kettles, the granny analogy is no exaggeration. They are original, like the rest of the main propulsion plant, thus forty years old. They were checked at the end of July by an inspector from Walashek Industrial & Marine, an engineering firm that specializes in seagoing boilers, and reinspected earlier this month. During that process the portside boiler was cooled down over a day and a half so that engineers could crawl inside and directly examine the pipes and burners. The starboard was not inspected that way, but the chief assumes it’s in the same shape, since it suffered from even worse problems on a previous inspection.

  Those problems do not prevent the boilers from working at their present capacity, generating steam at a pressure of 850 to 900 pounds per square inch, a somewhat lower level than their original rating of over 1,070 but adequate for pushing the turbines. Deterioration of the boilers, as of granny’s innards, is a foreseeable consequence of age: the “throats” of the burners, where fuel is sprayed into the heating chamber, are worn, and the tubes that hold the water as it’s heated to steam are bending outward because the wall of insulating bricks lining that chamber is also starting to bow outward. Although a September survey cited concerns about oil buildup on all three burners because of cracks in the metal, nobody seems to think the problem is grave enough to stop the ship from sailing. The company has deferred repair till El Faro goes to shipyard for her refit in November, before she goes to Alaska. The Walashek inspector has advised that the repair be seen to as soon as possible—“not prudent to leave” is how he puts it—but it’s also true that he has pressed no panic buttons, does not foresee an immediate danger to the ship, and his report was sent to no one excepting his supervisors at Walashek and Tote.

  8

  Through early afternoon the wind does not stop freshening. The barometer drops, which is hardly a surprise to anyone, given that a cyclonic system revolves around a node of deeply low atmospheric pressure, and the first effects tend to spread far from the actual storm. Davidson comes back to the bridge.

  “Weather pattern . . . is crazy erratic,” he comments.

  “It’s a good thing I’m the swell whisperer,” Randolph quips. “. . . I can feel it.” She taps a rhythm with her fingers. “Like, this way.” Tap, tap, tap. Then she asks if their sister ship El Yunque took the Old Bahama Channel on her opposite trip, northbound, and Davidson says, “She did not,” and explains: by speeding up (which is possible in part because, Puerto Rico’s resources being what they are, the ships on the northbound route carry less cargo and so can move faster) they have stayed ahead of the storm—and yet they encountered gusts gauged at one hundred knots on their anemometer. Because El Yunque was driving at twenty-plus knots into the wind, this meant the wind was blowing at less than eighty knots, but it was still hurricane force.

  Randolph points at the anemometer dial. “That’s not been workin’ accurately so it’s not—” Now she points at Larry Davis. “We’ll just stick Larry out there; we’ll do the Larry gauge.” Still looking at Davis: “If you get blown off the bridge, we’ll be, like, ‘Aah, it was about a hundred, ninety.’ ”

  “We’re gonna be far enough south,” Davidson says confidently, “not gonna hit the damn thing. Watch . . . these ships can take it.”

  The waves galloping around are increasingly crowned with white, they tumble into troughs already laced with the torn shrouds of previously broken combers. The wind has picked up further. The VHF, always tuned to 16, the marine call-up and emergency channel, crackles as a Coast Guard aircraft, invisible above the hurrying clouds, sends out the latest brief for mariners: a warning for the central Bahamas, including San Salvador Island. A warning, though it is exactly that, announcing merely the possibility of a hurricane’s reaching a given area, is a step up from “watch” status.XI

  Davidson, speculating now, says that when they get closer to the storm, they might have to alter course to steer into the waves. “I’ll be up all night for the most part,” he promises. “. . . We may just steer one twenty-five [roughly southeast, riding with the wind and waves as they would be when the hurricane was past]. Or we may just steer one thirty . . . get us through the storm. Weather ride.”

  “Might as well be comfortable,” Randolph agrees.

  Chief Mate Shultz and AB Frank Hamm relieve Randolph and Davis just before 1600 hours, 4:00 p.m. El Yunque is over the horizon, ste
aming on the opposite track; Shultz knows when she left San Juan and can figure out when El Yunque will be within range of VHF radio, which, as a line-of-sight transmission system, has a maximum range limited by antenna altitude and Earth’s curve, in this case roughly thirty or forty miles, more if the corresponding ships bear their antennas high. He calls the other ship, therefore, on Channel 16. On the Yunque, thirty miles to the east, the chief mate, Ray Stith, immediately answers, and they switch to the channel used for normal traffic.

  After a few minutes of chitchat, of ribbing about mislaid supplies and broken lightbulbs, Shultz says, “Ya know we’re watching the weather, uh, you guys are all in the clear, right?”

  “Yes,” El Yunque’s mate replies, “don’t worry, we sped up just ahead . . . of the storm.”

  “And that’s why,” Shultz says, “we’re not side by side here, ’cause we’re tryin’ to give it an extra thirty to fifty miles from the predicted center as we, uh, scoot around here.”

  “The captain,” Stith comments a little later, referring to El Yunque’s master, “says you’re going the wrong way.”

  “No, you know, we’re really loving that BVS program now.”

  “Okay,” El Yunque’s mate says, and adds, with irony perhaps intended, “bon voyage.”

  Shultz, having repeated Davidson’s term for the hurricane evasion plan, goes back to the BVS, gauging the ship’s distance from the cyclone as the storm, proceeding southwestward and spinning counterclockwise, conceptually at least skirts the left-hand facet of El Faro’s track, sideswiping the ship with the outer skein of winds rocketing off its own left hand and then lower-left arc, on El Faro’s backside.