Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  There was nothing out of the ordinary about this procedure; it is done all the time. The molecular bond between new steel plates and old can be fine, though it depends on thorough and expert welding to achieve the required strength. Frames and stringers reinforcing the hull must also be welded together perfectly for them to resist the bending, flexing, and torquing forces to which the lengthened ship will be subjected by the sea.

  Given both the high quality of Coast Guard inspections and the general indifference of the American public to maritime matters, what happens if welds and the overall hull structure of a lengthened ship fail is rarely spoken of in the United States. But catastrophic hull failure is a real danger that might, for example, have contributed to the celebrated loss of the American ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, the year of El Faro’s birth;XIV a tragedy burned into America’s consciousness thanks to a hit single by Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot. Catastrophic hull failure is an affliction that has particularly beset large, foreign-registered bulk-cargo carriers, such as the UK-flagged MV Derbyshire, which disappeared in a typhoon in 1980. At one point in the eighties and nineties, bulk carriers were sinking from hull failure at an average rate of one a month. Other types of ships have suffered as well. In 1997 the hull of the MSC Carla, a Panamanian-flagged container ship, split in two in heavy weather at the spot where the ship had been lengthened. The Marine Electric also had been lengthened, like the Carla, like El Faro, and while rotten hatch covers were found to be primarily responsible for her loss, a subsequent report indicated failure of the hull plates might also have been a cause.

  Two sister ships of El Faro’s have suffered serious hull failure. The Great Land was forced to return to Tacoma, Washington, after her main deck and supporting hull structure developed cracks in rough Alaskan seas in February 1998. The Lurline suffered a “class one” structural failure of hull plates and frames in 2008. The Westward Venture once suffered flooding in the bilges of 3-hold. It took over eight hours to evacuate the seawater through rust-clogged pump inlets, or “rose boxes.” One officer says the flooding was never fully explained.

  With these old ships it’s a virtual certainty, especially in areas where complex welding is required, that metal fatigue will occur; in fact, the question is not whether fatigue occurs but whether it happens to an extent that will be problematic. Fatigue happens in two ways: by repeated stress, as when a hull is subjected to uneven cargo loads or to bending in heavy seas; and by “working.” In the first case, the molecular structure of the steel, which in its pristine state is regular and crystalline, after being subjected to the ten thousandth or one hundred thousandth stress event, starts to twist and knot up, opening microscopic pockets in, say, a weld—pockets that will in time widen into a crack. The crack will then lengthen in a typical branching pattern, caused by resistance from a “moraine” made of molecules piled up ahead of the lengthening, which forces the metal to split off in a different direction.

  “Working,” the second form of metal fatigue, describes the tendency of repeatedly stressed steel undergoing similar molecular changes to stiffen instead of flex—anyone who has ever broken a paperclip by bending it back and forth is familiar with such stiffening, which increases until suddenly the metal snaps. This snapping is a quantum event in that the number and state of molecules are not directly measurable. The time and place at which a tipping point occurs and a weld or steel plate actually breaks is dependent (as chaos theory would have it) on the process’s “exponential sensitivity to initial conditions”—initial conditions being the near-infinite number of variables such as metal composition, types of stress, length of exposure, and so on that determine when a break will occur.

  Not everyone places much importance on the presence of water in the bilge. One former chief claims it’s a result of inefficient draining and filling of the tanks of fructose, which after discharge in Puerto Rico are destined to boost the commonwealth’s already astronomical obesity levels via the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Bayamón. Some stevedores, he says, are sloppy when hooking up and disconnecting the hoses, and gallons of the sticky syrup drain into the bilges. The bilges therefore require washing down, and not all of the wash-down water is removed by the pumps, but instead accumulates where an oiler might come across it, under the Tank Top and lower-engine-room deck plates.

  10

  The seas Joaquin churns up at its center, according to the latest forecast received, must by now be well over fifteen feet in height, driven by winds of seventy knots. As night falls El Faro is navigating an ocean environment far less dramatic, but the wind is still increasing in strength. The swells from the northeast have not stopped building, they are approaching ten feet and the ship, which thanks to her sea-kindly lines still rides easily, is nonetheless feeling the storm’s deeper motion the way a person on a king-size mattress will jiggle when her partner, though on the bed’s other side, rolls or shifts.

  In the galley, Lashawn, Quammie, and Jordan have prepared and served a supper menu featuring jerk chicken, rice and peas, a dish popular with the unlicensed crew, though less so with some of the mates—“It’s just food,” one of them comments dismissively. After the meal is officially over at seven thirty, they load the dishwashers and once again secure for weather, stowing anything loose or breakable in lockers or refrigerators.

  Captain Davidson is still on the bridge when the watch changes at 8:00 p.m., and he oversees the transition from Chief Mate Shultz and four-to-eight deckhand Frank Hamm to Third Mate Riehm and AB Jackson. Davidson briefs the incoming mate on the San Salvador detour: “Before it got dark we altered course, picked a new route to get farther from the hurricane,” he explains.

  The new course is 150 degrees. Their present speed is nineteen knots, which, as the captain remarks, is a good clip, though the ship is capable of more. The diversion should keep them well away, or forty miles in any case, from the storm’s center. “San Salvador is gonna afford a lot of lee. . . . We’ll just bust on to get down. . . . We’ll be passing clear on the backside of it. Just keep steaming, our speed is tremendous right now. The faster we’re goin’ the better,” the captain insists. “This will put wind on the stern a little more, it’s gonna give us a push.” Even tomorrow morning Davidson will repeat, almost as if he’s trying to convince himself, his ship “will be on the upside”; the storm will have raged on past.

  In most disasters there exists a moment in the timeline, of which observers say later, “Here is where such and such a factor might have halted the chain reaction of accident.” And it’s tempting now to refer back to the broken anemometer, because if Davidson had benefited from a constant, accurate read of wind direction, coupled with data from the (working) barometer, he soon would have realized that a consistent northeast wind and falling atmospheric pressure meant that the ship could not be “clear on the backside” of a tropical cyclone. But the anemometer is broken, and the idea of coming safety remains intact, for the captain at least: and surely the image in everyone’s mind as they hear the captain talk must be of clearing skies, a horizon-wide brilliance of sun striking sparks of warmth and colors of jade and lapis from the softening seas, a welcome injection of ease after a dark night fighting clear. Yet despite or because of what sounds almost like a pep talk, the captain warns his third mate, “The safety of the ship comes first.” He also advises, “Keep one foot on the deck,” a mariner’s way of advising caution.

  And then at 7:57 p.m., 19:57 in ship’s time, Davidson descends the single set of companionway stairs to his stateroom. He will not come out until over eight hours later—4:19 the following morning—when the ship is fully engaged with the lethal weather system he believed they would avoid.

  Riehm has listened respectfully to the ship’s master, only once remarking that the Weather Underground website has predicted the storm’s winds will blow harder than forecast. “They’re saying it’s more like eighty-five . . . ,” he said. Once Davidson has left, Riehm checks the forecast against the chart. At 2:00 a.m., he
calculates, the ship will be seventy miles from Joaquin. Referring to the Weather Underground prediction, still marking positions on the chart, he says to Jackson, “If [the forecast] is off by forty knots, then—sixty, here. . . . It’s just, I don’t like being so close to something here.”

  Checking the chart would put Riehm in the classic navigator’s stance, bending over the big chart table at the bridge’s aft end, perhaps walking the dividers: a brass instrument, like a compass used to trace circles in geometry, with which to measure distances. Though the chart table faces forward, he would draw the curtain behind him, once the AB has returned to lookout position, to keep the chart light from opening Jackson’s pupils and harming his night vision. The rasp of rings on metal rod as the curtain is opened and shut is a chronically recurring sound in the voyage-data recording. . . . The meat and potatoes of watch keeping in the twenty-first century is electronic, with electronic chart display and GPS, along with autopilot, steering the ship, and radar furnishing distance off and relative bearing of obstacles and traffic; yet tradition and practical experience require keeping physical lookout as well. The GPS, usually reliable, can nonetheless go off-line, and radars can miss a target, especially in rough seas.

  The traditional language a mariner is trained to obey, like the tradition of a captain’s absolute authority, is unchanged from the days of sailing ships. Rule 5 of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, aka COLREGs, the corpus of basic traffic and navigation rules that ships’ officers must obey at sea, states “Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate . . . so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and the risk of collision.” COLREGs concludes, “Nothing in these Rules shall exonerate any vessel, or the owner, master or crew thereof, from the consequences of any neglect to comply with these Rules or of the neglect of any precaution which may be required by the ordinary practice of seamen, or by the special circumstances of the case.” The “ordinary practice of seamen” is usually interpreted to mean physical lookout and other traditional methods of keeping watch and tracking position and weather.

  Riehm keeps up his commentary to Jackson. Perhaps by talking out his thoughts he can clarify his doubts to himself and strengthen his resolve, should it come to that, to question his captain.

  “It’s more powerful than we thought. It’s supposed to . . . stop . . . getting any closer, it’s gonna turn toward the north. What if it doesn’t? What if we get close—we get jammed in those islands there and it starts comin’ at us? . . . Maybe I’m just being Chicken Little here,” he adds gloomily, “I don’t know.”

  Riehm’s commentary has vector, and following the direction of his spoken thoughts, he starts to imagine an alternative course.

  “There’s a gap in the chart,” he adds, apparently referring to the passage Shultz spoke of, south of San Salvador, that leads southwest past Crooked Island and eventually to a continuation of the Old Bahama Channel. He starts to plug waypoints for the new course into the GPS, ready for use should the need arise.

  “Some captains,” Riehm remarks, “would have taken one look at that and said, ‘We’re gonna go the Old Bahamas Channel—we’re not takin’ any chances here.’ ”

  “That’s what I thought we—we were gonna do,” Jackson says.

  “ ‘And we’ll go well south of it,’ ” Riehm continues, still quoting a hypothetical captain, “ ‘and we’ll be gettin’ in a little bit late. We’ll be off schedule . . . but we’ll catch up.’ ” A few minutes later though, as if to reacknowledge his captain’s authority, he vows, “I’m not gonna second-guess somebody.”

  “Well, I’ll never have faith in the fuckers like I used to though,” Jackson remarks, chuckling. “The captain of [name redacted]XV sailed us right through one.” He describes Hurricane Hugo and the ship’s path through it in 1989. “I got thrown to the deck—I could hear the captain screamin’, ‘Yaaaah!’ ” Jackson laughs as he mimics the terrified skipper. “We were goin’ over though, this big wave. . . . It came in and slammed us. . . . I mean, we came to this shuddering stop. I mean, I was sure we were goin’ over—positive. . . . It’s like death was actually—I mean, it was—we were fated to die. . . . No one hardly spoke for like about two, two to three days, before people even started talkin’.

  “I mean,” Jackson continues more somberly, “everyone felt death was like right on us, man. It was like this presence, you know?”

  Jackson, it seems, cannot let go of this memory. “Oh, man, that thing—first it started you know—pitchin’ and rollin’, and then it got worse, it started, like some kind of wild animal, just tryin’ to break out of its—like a fuckin’ bull in a stall, you know. . . . Then all the cargo broke loose and, aaah my God.

  “Speaking of cargo lashings,” Jackson adds, “I found two little [twist] screws stripped . . .” The two men talk of there not being sufficient spares to replace broken twist screws on the container lashings, and how they don’t complain at safety meetings for fear of being labeled “that troublemaker.” Riehm is still focused on the storm.

  “I was just walkin’ up Second Deck this afternoon,” he says a little later, “and just goin’, ‘Oh, man.’ Guess I’m just turnin’ into a Chicken Little, but—I have this feeling like something bad is gonna happen.”

  At 10:53 p.m. the latest SAT-C forecast comes in over the printer. This forecast is far more accurate than the ones preceding, placing the storm only twenty-five miles too far northwest, a mere five knots too low in intensity. Ten minutes later Riehm gets on the phone to the stateroom where Davidson is sleeping.

  “Hey, Captain—sorry to wake ya. . . . The latest weather just came in, and, umm, I thought you might wanna take a look at it.” He listens to Davidson’s response, then continues, “Just lookin’ at the forecast and lookin’ at our track line, which way it’s goin’, and, uh—thought you might wanna take a look at it. . . . The current forecast,” he goes on, “has it . . . maximum winds, umm, one hundred miles an hour at the center, and if I’m lookin’ at this right, umm, it’s moving at—at two thirty [degrees] at five knots. So I assume it stays on that same—moves that same direction for say the next five hours and . . . so it’s advancing on our trackline and puts us real close to it. I could be more specific—”

  Escape routes: El Faro could have taken the Northwest and Northeast Providence Channels, and finally Crooked Island Passage, to escape Joaquin’s clutches; she did not have time to make the Mayaguana Passage. Shaded areas mark both solid land and shallows El Faro could not navigate.

  Davidson tells Riehm to plot out the new forecast against the ship’s planned track and to call him back. Riehm plots the bearings, commenting to the AB, “Well, he seems to think that we’ll be south of it by then—so the winds won’t be an issue.”

  A half dozen minutes later the third mate rings Davidson again.

  “So at oh four hundred we’ll be twenty-two miles from the center with, uh, maximum hundred with gusts to one twenty and strengthening so—the option that we do have . . . is at oh two hundred we could head south. And that would open it up some—so I mean of course I’d want you to verify what I’m seeing. I do understand you expect us not to get into the quadrant dead ahead and expose us. Just so you know that—that’s how close we’ll be.”

  A pause in Riehm’s run-on as Davidson replies.

  “You’re welcome,” Riehm says at length, and puts the phone down. The two men are silent for several minutes. Eventually Riehm speaks up.

  “We’ll be as close as we’re gonna get,” he tells Jackson, “according to the forecast—four, four thirty.”

  “And the wind speed now?”

  “One hundred max—gusts to one ten.”

  “Shit,” Jackson says. “Shit.”

  “. . . What he’s saying is, ‘Well, we’ll be in the southwest quadrant, wind will be coming from the north.’ ”

  “Nantucket sleigh ride,” Jackson comments,
referring to the headlong trip endured by an old-fashioned whaleboat roped to a harpooned, wildly fleeing whale.

  “I trust what he’s saying,” Riehm says. “It’s just being twenty miles away from hundred-knot winds—this doesn’t even sound right.”

  “No matter which way it’s hittin’ ya—still hundred-knot winds. I got a feelin’, gonna get my poopy suitXVI and my life jacket—laid out. . . . It’s good to know,” Jackson continues, laughing, “that Lonnie and Lashawn will get the EPIRBS, man.”

  EPIRBs are emergency position-indicating radio beacons, self-contained transmitters usually stowed on an open deck, that broadcast automatic distress signals when activated manually or after immersion in salt water. El Faro has one; it’s unclear whether anyone else aboard owns a personal beacon.

  A little later, watching the radar, spotting a band of rain that might be one of the first signs of the actual hurricane, Riehm says, “We don’t have any options here. We got nowhere to go.”

  “Jesus, man,” Jackson replies, “don’t tell me any more. I don’t even wanna hear it,” and the third mate laughs. Jackson continues, “Th-th-th-th-th-these are ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-big waaaves.” He’s imitating Elmer Fudd: “Jesus, it’s a hurricane!”

  11

  Investigators will later determine that the gut feelings of Riehm and Jackson are far from misguided. Most prudent mariners would agree with Riehm and aver Davidson is making a mistake. With just one glance at the chart, even the flawed weather charts El Faro has been receiving, a cautious skipper would react instinctively to that angry red swirl apparently coming after him and decide not to try outguessing the storm, just get the hell out of the way and never mind the bureaucratic consequences.

  Earlier Riehm talked about Davidson’s experience as captain, and even now he seems to have faith in his skipper’s overall judgment; he certainly does not put up a fight when Davidson dismisses his suggestion to escape the storm by steaming southwest through Crooked Island Passage. Taking that channel, or else turning tail and fleeing at full speed back to Jacksonville, are probably the only two paths to survival left open to El Faro at this point.