Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  And yet Davidson not only rejects Riehm’s idea, he seems to do so summarily. He doesn’t bother climbing one flight up to his bridge to eyeball directly what the situation might be, given the new forecast. (SAT-C data don’t transmit directly to his office computer, though the terminal receives the BVS version; that he asks the mate to do the tracking suggests Davidson doesn’t get out of his bunk to check BVS either.) Nor does Davidson immediately download the BVS forecast that came in at 11:00 p.m. Of course, as an experienced mariner, even one who’s okay with relying on GPS to thread tricky passages in bad weather, he can visualize twenty-two miles, or a hurricane’s swirl, in his mind’s eye and sense on some level the fanged gauntlet of reefs and islands El Faro would have to run to flee south.

  But the human imagination is heavily visual, and eyeballing spatial relationships on screen or paper is important to our understanding of them. With the grace of hindsight, we can imagine that coming up to the bridge and visually measuring the tracks of ship and storm might have allowed Davidson to accord a bit more weight to Riehm’s advice.

  Instead, Captain Mike apparently settles down in his bunk and closes his eyes again.

  We will never know for certain why. We can never be sure why, as Davidson considered his options when safely moored in Jacksonville, he seemed so convinced that taking the inside route through Old Bahama Channel, traveling at the greatest distance possible from Joaquin, was an option not even worth considering, except for the return trip. He had done it once before, in August, when Tropical Storm Erika threatened, although in that case he probably felt encouraged to take the longer route south because of emails from Tote that strongly counseled safety precautions. Faulty forecasts, unrefreshed BVS track lines, and the momentum of habit certainly played their part in his thinking for this trip. So, perhaps, did overconfidence in navigational options: the tendency, as Delgado says, to forgo the ordinary, cautious practice of seamen and “tickle the dragon’s tail.” Davidson also seems excessively confident of El Faro’s overall strength in stormy seas, due perhaps to the relative unfamiliarity of a hands-off skipper with the salt-and-steel vulnerabilities of his ship. He may not realize that the Ponce-class ships he knew in Alaska handled better because they didn’t carry a tall deck cargo of containers.

  Michael Davidson’s insecurity about his job at Tote clearly played a major role in his initial decision. He knew from his experience at Crowley Maritime, and possibly from scuttlebutt surrounding Hearn’s dismissal from Tote, how professionally risky it could be to make decisions based solely on safety concerns that would cost a shipowner money; his near-obsessive reiteration of how he asked Tote for permission to take the safe route back seems evidence enough of that. All these factors combined would provide strong psychological pressure for Davidson to focus hard on his ongoing “shoot under” strategy, to the detriment of other options and of El Faro’s eventual safety.

  Deeper yet, among the complexities of the captain’s mind; lower than those synaptic annexes of fear and confidence, lies a subtler and possibly just as fateful psychological quirk. For Michael Davidson, according to several crew members with whom he discussed the subject, was a “doomsday prepper,” one of that subgroup, more common in America than anywhere else, that expects the end of civilization to occur quite soon, and possibly tomorrow, from any number of causes: nuclear war, economic, social, and political breakdown, global pandemic, widespread terrorism, peak oil, rising sea levels, earthquake, meteor strike—even, on the fringes of the group, alien invasion and zombie apocalypse.

  Preppers believe also, and this is just as important as the fear component, that the end is survivable as long as one gets ready for it. To that end they dig blastproof bunkers, buy canned foods and water filters, stock up on guns and ammo. More productively perhaps, they learn how to grow vegetables, set up solar panels, and generally live off-grid.

  It’s not clear how far down the prepper road Davidson has traveled, but he has talked about building bunkers before. And he listens to the podcasts of Alex Jones—the same Alex Jones who, when he is not deriding the murders of Sandy Hook’s children as a government hoax, is selling prepper products online: packs of iodine tablets for use in case of nuclear fallout ($19.95 a twenty-pack), tactical body armor ($1,400-plus per vest), bottles of “male vitality” ($59.95 apiece) for guys who can’t really get it up for The End.XVII

  At first glance, preppers such as Davidson would strike one as being more, rather than less, aware of coming disaster; more apt to take measures to neutralize the effects of a coming holocaust. “Holocaust” in the original Greek means the burning of everything, and if one substitutes water and wind for fire, and drowning for cremation, then Joaquin, even if not worldwide in scope, possesses all relevant attributes in as much terrifying volume as one might ever wish for or fear.

  But psychologists who have examined the issue have found that, curiously, many preppers are committed optimists. “When an unpredictable or painful experience . . . is predictable, we relax. The anxiety caused by uncertainty is gone,” a Scientific American article opines.XVIII If one thinks about it for more than five seconds, the idea that a nuclear holocaust, for example, could be survivable thanks to thyroid tablets and a bunker dug in New England clay truly represents an act of optimism, not to mention naive, even illogical, faith. And with such faith comes a curious peace, even complacency, because one has prepared—as if preparation in and of itself has satisfied some moral code only the community of preppers can appreciate; as if the quantum sum of tiny factors that contribute to taking further action, or not, has just shifted by one psychological unit to the “chill out” side.

  Safe in that knowledge, peaceful in his complacency, the prepper can pull up the covers, close his eyes, and finally sleep.

  Old-style lifeboat: El Faro’s lifeboats, of the same basic design as the Titanic’s, could not be launched in a hurricane. (The boat pictured here, nearly identical to El Faro’s, was carried by her sister ship, El Yunque.)

  PART V

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  THE QUANTUM OF SHIPWRECK

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  The sea—this must be confessed—has no generosity. No display of manly qualities—courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness—has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

  —Joseph Conrad

  1

  The ocean is so vast, deep, and complex—so infinitely varied in the way its black canyons and pulsing life, its currents and dolphins, rages and calms, moon and weather, all interplay—that no mariner can afford to go to sea while thinking about or trying to fathom such scale and infinite roil. It’s just too big. He or she deals with the unknown inherent in the marine environment by focusing on what can be measured and understood, weighed and manipulated. She or he cuts down the infinity of sea to a smaller, digital view, of ship and crew, task and routine, coffee, food, and cabin; confident in the great likelihood that discipline, tradition, and the sheer scale and strength of a ship such as this will see her safely to harbor.

  The wind, though still northerly, has yet more east to it now; blowing probably twenty-five or thirty, gusting to forty. The swells, northerly earlier, are also starting to swing east a bit but El Faro, on her new course of 150 degrees, a little east of south for the channel behind San Salvador, still drives mostly perpendicular to the long ranks of dark rising water. The waves are more than ten feet high, long ridges increasingly driven by the southwest spin of Joaquin approximately 120 miles to the northeast; they are barely visible in the night except for where a porthole’s glint touches froth whipped up by wind or wake or the smash of a wave collapsing, but the wind is starting to draw out the crests into streaks of foam that run like thin groping claws down the combers’ flanks. Ten- to fifteen-foot waves are nothing to a ship this size—as Davidson says, she used to plow through twenty-footers on a routine journey between Tacoma and Anchorage—but waves are not reducible to their official height. They are no
t, in fact, waves in the sense we imagine them, as serried crests marching like soldiers from horizon to horizon, but rather a heaving of the sea itself, rubbed harshly by wind into humps that rise in a roll of trillions of individual molecules of water, salt, weed, plankton, and amino acids that shift on the vertical, describing a circle that brings them back to the same place, but which shoves at the next stretch of water so that the action itself, the humping up of water, continues in a forward surge of unfurling liquid, a tumbling rhythm of great might—a single storm wave, by some calculations, carries 1.7 megawatts of potential power in its every square meter.I

  The varying rhythms of waves, tuned by the strength, direction, and duration of wind, not to mention the area and topography of the ocean they inhabit, can interfere with each other, causing rips and cross seas. Or they can join forces as two oscillations of water, period shrinking to nothing and amplitude rising commensurately, almost double in height to create a rogue wave. The general rule is that one in a hundred waves will be a third higher than the average of higher waves, and one in a thousand will be double the size; thus even now, if the waves average thirteen feet, El Faro will occasionally be riding nineteen-footers, and twenty-six-footers more rarely.

  The waves’ rhythm can determine how a vessel will move as it navigates a rough ocean. For container ships, with their relatively high center of gravity—and specifically, container ships heading perpendicularly into or away from the watery ridges—the interval between waves can matter a lot.

  A ship moves in six different ways: pitch, as bow and stern alternately lift; the sideways roll; “yaw,” as her direction changes port to starboard and back. “Surge” is a longitudinal movement of the entire vessel; “heave” is the vertical equivalent, and “sway” is a bodily movement sideways. For a ship heading perpendicularly into or away from a wave field the most important motion would probably be pitch, but if the waves’ period, the space between them, is equal to the ship’s length, and if the ship is traveling at more or less the same speed as the waves’ motion, and if the waves are big enough, she can start to roll with great violence. That’s because the waves curling from aft give her stern a shove at the same time as her bow plunges into the next crest forward (or vice versa); the ship’s two extremities being shaped very differently, they react differently to the two humps of water, and that difference twists the hull and causes it to roll hard to one side. Such movement, unless heading and/or speed are changed, can become self-sustaining and self-aggravating to the point of peril. This is known as a synchronous roll.

  The ship’s motion can also be affected by parametric roll; basically, a bad tuning between the vessel’s roll period (the time she takes to roll to one side and back) and the rate of encounter with swells; if the period of encounter corresponds exactly to the vessel’s roll period, and she’s traveling at the same speed, the roll can also deepen.

  El Faro, right now, moves easily enough. Despite his earlier concern Frank Hamm has cut down worry to the scale of his CDs and likely stashes them carefully in a drawer, or in a box he stows in his closet or under the bunk.

  In the galley Lashawn Rivera, Ted Quammie, and assistant steward Lonnie Jordan have put the last of dinner’s dishes in the industrial washer. To prepare for heavy weather—they have been warned several times now, by Davidson, by the mates—they must already have triple-checked that everything loose, including the sauces Davidson particularly worries about, has been stowed; that the lockers holding china and pans are closed and latched tight. They have prepared the usual “night lunch”—sandwich rolls, cheese, roast beef, sliced turkey, mayo, lettuce, tomatoes, and the like—for the crew on watch, maybe less copious than usual so the chow won’t overflow serving trays if the ship rolls hard. The night crew can take more food if they need it from a fridge in the mess. The coffee urn is strapped down. The stewards can’t be sure what the weather will be like tomorrow, but they know the crew will want breakfast, and the galley staff will have pancake batter and scrambled-egg mix ready to go, covered and sealed in the galley fridge.

  Back in his cabin Rivera makes sure to put extra towels under a deckhead that always leaks when it rains. As a native Floridian he knows full well that hurricanes, even if they don’t hit you directly, will bring rain, crazy amounts of it. As most mariners do, he has pictures of his family, his girlfriend and son and two daughters. Maybe he gives them a longer look than usual, utters another silent prayer for his people and himself as he makes sure nothing important lies within range of the leak, and that the breakable items in his cabin are as well secured as those in his galley.

  Jackie Jones, as a day man, is quite possibly still up; in the crew’s mess maybe, playing dominoes with Carey Hatch or shooting the shit with his cousin James Porter; most likely of all, with this crew of family men all doing their own thing, he’s in his cabin, tending a Crock-Pot of beans and rice, playing video-football games, or watching DVDs of classic Super Bowls, and videos of his sons throwing passes.

  Assuming Larry Davis took Randolph’s advice, he is fast asleep, storing up energy for the midnight-to-four watch. Davis is a veteran, not just of the merchant marine but of commercial fishing boats as well, and knowing what rough water is like he will have taken out the bulky orange life jackets stored in his closet with his Gumby suit and wedged them against the bulkhead on one side of his mattress. By narrowing the bunk’s width to that of his own body he ensures that he won’t roll around as the ship moves. If she rolls too hard your body will rattle like popcorn in a hot pan, and you won’t sleep, and sleep is precious at sea. Right now the motion isn’t so bad and anyway, to a sailor, the rock and pitch of a moving ship, like servosystems’ noise to an astronaut, can feel comforting, reassuring. With the rattle and creak of joinery and machines, it says the ship’s world is doing what it’s supposed to do, moving fast and consistently in the direction of shelter.

  At the heart of El Faro’s world, however, some of the quantum details that must stay in order, lined up within the spectrum and parameters of safety to work right, instead are starting to skew—to pass from the known quadrant of tolerance, the okay strains and foot-pounds, to the unfathomed, the quantum possibilities of breakdown.

  Here’s one example: the gasket between lid and lip in one of the scuttles on 2nd Deck, those hatchways leading from the cargo sections on 2nd to the watertight holds below. It could be that the serial wash of hydrocarbons onto the scuttle, and the ongoing scission or wastage that derives from it, has cut one chain of silicon molecules too many or eroded a wider patch of synthetic rubber on this particular gasket, which has created a tiny void in the seal. Hardly a big problem, or not at first. Except that this deck, though covered, is open to the elements through those fifteen wide ports on each side of the ship, several as big as a car or pickup truck. As soon as the waves reach a certain height they wash through the ports across the decks; and because of the dearth of bulkheads on this deck, they have more room to run. The trailers slow them down inboard, but the scuttles are all set at the deck’s outer edge, an area that, except for the occasional vent housing protruding from the side shell, is as open as it gets in a cargo hold. In heavy weather big waves will find the scuttle, smash against the coaming, build up against a nearby vent housing, and submerge the hatch; they will blast into any void or pocket in the gasket and exert strong pressure there, widening the pocket. In a big enough void this pressure can grow fierce and repetitive enough to shift the dogging mechanism, especially if that mechanism has not been fully engaged—it can even move the bolts themselves, if they’re already worn, just enough so that they barely touch the coaming lip. When that happens, a strong wave jetting against the damaged hatch is enough to flip it open.

  And maybe, much deeper in the ship’s structure, beside one of the longitudinal stringers that reinforce the section between ribs 134 and 135—the spot where a section of hull (subsequently named 2A-hold) was inserted between 2- and 3-holds when El Faro was lengthened in 1993—in one of the plates of the hul
l at that point, here, too, a void has formed. Molecules of steel, their crystalline structure perhaps uneven to begin with because of a faulty weld, have been subjected to repeated and uneven stress. Possibly a crack has branched outward from that void. The crack is tiny, undetectable; it’s not even big enough—assuming it’s within, or affects, a hull join—to allow water through. But it weakens the metal and in an environment of increasing stress, weakness must feed on weakness. This is a classic example of chaos theory, a branch of complexity studies that seeks to understand situations in which a near-infinite, and infinitely complicated, number of elements and physical relationships too small to see or analyze—elements that normally work together within a certain framework and rhythm—start to collapse under stress, one grain of dysfunction weakening the structure and pulse of the next, making it easier for the grain neighboring it in time and space to break or malfunction in turn. When and how the exponentially growing cascade of breakdowns reaches a tipping point at which the whole structure fails, given the endless number of variables, is impossible to determine except in calculations of probability.

  But however the math of chaos works, breakdown has started. The waves and wind are building relentlessly, water spraying then sloshing then cascading onto 2nd Deck as the ship pitches and rolls, harder and harder. And deep down the hull moves; a hull is a living thing, it flexes and twists, which is right and desirable as long as the welds are healthy. But if there is a flaw, the hull’s torque in heavy weather weakens it further.