Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  2

  It should not happen this way.

  Because of the Jones Act, which has had a whipsaw effect on American maritime transportation by protecting the coastal US market for American shipowners while also forcing them to build their vessels in expensive stateside yards, El Faro is one of many older ships in service between American ports. Yet she was also well built in that Pennsylvania shipyard—more steel, her crewmen tell each other, heavier steel even than in her sister ship, the El Morro.

  US construction and maintenance regulations are among the toughest in the world, another reason El Faro should not suffer the harm she courts; except that she, and other ships of her class, have slipped through loopholes in the laws. The difficulty and cost of maintaining ships beyond their shelf life, or so owners affirm, demands relief in the form of less stringent regulations, and in 1995 they lobbied for and won an exemption in the rules for older ships. It’s called the Alternate Compliance Program, or ACP, and under this regime older vessels are not required to update some of their safety features to current standards. Another loophole superannuated vessels can take advantage of, separately from the ACP, lies in the Coast Guard’s authority to exempt such ships from safety upgrades unless they undergo a “major conversion.” The exact definition of this term became very relevant in 2006, when El Faro was converted from a pure roll-on, roll-off freighter to a Ro-Con, a mixed-container and Ro-Ro ship. The conversion included structural changes to Main Deck and effectively lowered the vessel’s freeboard—the vertical footage between waterline and top watertight deck—by two feet.

  The changes were not insignificant. A high load of containers is apt to make a ship—even if she stays within the stability requirements set by regulatory authorities—more top-heavy than a roll-on, roll-off configuration that keeps her cargo below decks. This was the chief factor cited by Jack Hearn, who commanded El Faro when she was a pure Ro-Ro in Alaskan waters, to explain why the vessel became more list-prone after her conversion. Lowering the freeboard also means more water will come aboard in rough seas. But the Coast Guard, on appeal by Tote, went back on its decision and ruled the 2006 changes “minor.” This was the about-face that allowed Tote to keep running El Faro with antiquated lifeboats.

  The ACP loophole has further consequences. Thanks to this program, much of the inspection of lifeboats and other features of the ship is now carried out by an independent “classification society” instead of by the Coast Guard. These societies are nonprofit organizations that collect fees for carrying out inspections. This builds a conflict of interest into its operation, since the inspection outfit will have an institutional prejudice against being too hard on a given fleet, so as not to annoy a shipowner to the point where he will switch to another society, thus depriving the first of fees. The classification society can examine ships by the standard of an “equivalent level of safety” to government rules, a benchmark that has left room for interpretation.

  The classification society Tote hires is one of the biggest, the American Bureau of Shipping. It also turns out that ABS has been seriously remiss in inspecting El Faro and her sister ships. For example, the society did not advise pressure-testing El Faro’s boiler tubes while the ship was operating, despite their obvious and ongoing problems. And when El Yunque was examined by Coast Guard inspectors following El Faro’s accident, her twenty-two watertight fire dampers and vents were found in many cases to be rusted through or seized up or missing gaskets, and inoperable. The Coast Guard concluded El Faro suffered from the same deficiencies on her last voyage, an assumption clearly corroborated by one AB’s comment on the voyage data recorder: “Vent’s rusted fucking solid, man!”

  One reason for the vents’ poor condition is that they have been left permanently open because closing them has never been necessary in the kind of placid weather El Faro usually experiences on the Puerto Rico run. Why they were left open to begin with is due to a regulatory inconsistency: the ship’s “certificate of inspection” allowing her to sail requires that the vents be kept open to disperse gasoline vapors from the cars below deck. Yet the same rules allow El Faro to be loaded deeper on the assumption that closed vents will prevent flooding of the hull in a storm.

  After El Faro’s accident ABS will recommend repairs to El Yunque, which will supposedly be carried out before the ship is reassigned to the Alaska route, but a diligent Coast Guard inspector examining the ship in Puget Sound will find that her vents still exhibit “longstanding uncorrected wastage”; Tote will promptly send El Yunque to the junkyard. After El Faro’s last voyage, other ships sailing under the ACP will be inspected; three will be found in such poor condition that they have to be scrapped, two others will be banned from sailing without repairs, and several others exhibit “significant deficiencies,” according to the Coast Guard. One maritime expert, Captain William Doherty of Nexus Consulting Group, says of the ACP, “What they have done over the past twenty years is lower the bar. Their definition of seaworthy gets lower and lower because the ships are getting older and older.”

  In 2016, 10 percent of ACP ships were prohibited from sailing by the feds. And all this happened under rules set up after the Marine Electric disaster, which were supposed to make it impossible for vessels with rusted-out working parts to venture seaward at all.

  Following what will happen to El Faro, the ACP program as a whole will be judged “not effective” by the NTSB.

  3

  Shortly before midnight on September 30, Randolph and Davis appear on the bridge to relieve Riehm and Jackson. Riehm shows Randolph a new band of rain and clouds on the radar, then leads her to the back section of the bridge, to the chart table, closing the curtain behind them. Together they look at the ship’s current track, course, and projected stroll around San Salvador Island in relation to the latest forecast, which shows Joaquin bearing down in roughly the direction of that island, though still with that twenty-five-mile error allowing a thin belief they could squeak past. And Randolph starts laughing uncontrollably.

  “We would have been better off staying on our old track line,” she says.

  “It’s gonna be a party in a few hours,” Jackson tells Davis.

  “I know,” Davis agrees. “I just seen a little TV.” (El Faro is at the outer limits of TV broadcast range from South Florida stations; reception will shortly fail.)

  The two mates are still leaning over the chart, probably touching the paper as they point out different positions, a finger on Joaquin’s predicted track, another on the ship’s course. “Here you are at zero-four-hundred [October 1],” Riehm says. “All right, so this is twenty-five miles.”

  “So you think that’s gonna happen at two?” Randolph asks.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “About two hours.”

  “Gettin’ my flashlight—life saver—my Gumby suit out,” Jackson tells Davis.

  Davis worries about his TV set. “It ain’t tied down or nothin’—but I gotta feelin’ it’s gonna bite the dust.”

  “At oh two hundred,” Riehm suggests, “you could head south.”

  “This is the second time we’ve changed our route,” Randolph comments, referring to their dip around San Salvador, “and it [just] keeps comin’ for us.”

  “Well, anyway,” Jackson says, heading for the stairs, “we’re the only idiots out here.” And like any competent seaman handing off the watch, he repeats the course to his replacement: “One fifty.”

  Riehm and Randolph earlier talked about the third mate’s idea, that apparently he will not let go of despite Davidson’s stubborn adherence to plan, to escape down the route behind San Salvador, running a southward gauntlet between the shallows near Crooked and Acklins Islands on one side, Rum Cay and Long Island on the other, to finally rejoin the Old Bahama Channel off Cuba.

  Now Randolph fixates on this idea as well. “I was looking at the chart,” she explains to the AB at twenty minutes to one, “we can try to connect with the Old Bahamas Channel if we, I don’t know . . .
go due south. . . . We wouldn’t have to worry about it until two o’clock. Our tentative position—our dead reckoning for zero-two-hundred gets us in a good angle, in a good spot that we can alter course south to one eight six, and that course line . . . keeps us five miles away from any kind of shallow area, which is . . . not a lot of wiggle room, but right now where we’re going, we don’t have much wriggle room right now. We got land . . . coming up on either side of us.”

  The ship, following the course Davidson and Shultz set out earlier, is now running into the narrow slot of deep water between San Salvador Island, Cat Island, and Rum Cay.

  Randolph must take a breath after that long and, so it feels, passionate explanation; yet Joaquin and its perceived obsession with pursuing El Faro has prompted doubts again. “Unless . . . this damn storm goes further south. Can’t win. Every time we come further south the storm keeps trying to follow us.”

  “It ain’t gonna do nothin’ but sit down here, growin’ up. Keeps getting stronger and stronger,” Davis agrees.

  “Now we’re gonna hit it at four o’clock in the morning.”

  “What’s he thinking?” Davis asks rhetorically, about Michael Davidson. “Jack said he had his survival suit ready to go,” he adds, and Randolph chuckles.

  One reflex Randolph has in order to deal with tough situations is to laugh. The other is to make coffee, and she does so now. The sound of a coffee grinder takes over the bridge.

  “I don’t know if he can sleep, knowing all this,” Randolph says later of the captain. She yawns, adding, “I slept pretty good last night until nine o’clock. I guess that’s when my ZzzQuil wears out. It’s just like, Bing! I’m awake.” She chuckles, and adds, “They were doin’ that work”; she’s referring to the riding gang. “Bangin’ around.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I put in my earplugs,” Randolph continues “. . . tossed and turned for a little bit, and fell back to sleep. . . . Earplugs—ZzzQuil. That ZzzQuil knocks me out. I love it.”

  Later, Coast Guard investigators will focus on fatigue as a factor in what happens to El Faro. The frenetic pace of loading, in particular for the third mate who has to be on his feet all day in Jacksonville and then take the first navigating watch till midnight, has to be exhausting. Randolph’s usual watch-standing routine is four hours on, eight off, but at sea she is expected to put in an extra couple of hours doing inspection and maintenance chores after her midnight-to-four shift. This works out to six hours on and six off.

  International regulations specify a minimum period of rest, for mariners as for air crews, but the inspectors will find serial flouting of these rules on Tote’s Puerto Rico run, as well as deficient keeping of records intended to document and enforce rest periods.II That being said, what constitutes sufficient rest for watch-standing officers at sea—when even a four-hour-on, eight-off routine, not counting time needed for eating or personal chores during break, plays hell with normal biorhythms—is a tricky question. Were consistent and sufficient rest periods enforced consistently, it would still be hard to find an officer to swear he has never stood watch when sleepy or exhausted. That a former chief mate on El Faro was discovered at least thrice to be sleeping on watch and was not reported by the captain possibly speaks to two issues: first, Davidson’s lenient treatment of rule-breaking crew; and second, an empathy, however misplaced, for the stress and fatigue involved in watch-keeping routines, especially for navigating officers. The chief mate, for example, works at least twelve hours unloading and loading cargo; the third works a twelve-hour cargo shift, followed by his four-hour bridge watch; and Randolph has confessed to a Maine Maritime friend that, working under Davidson, she is forced to put in twelve-hour shifts on a regular basis. “She couldn’t stand it,” her roommate testified. “. . . She was always exhausted and tired.”III

  One should also bear in mind that, while Davidson is the single officer who appears to get sufficient snooze-time during El Faro’s final voyage, judging by the VDR record he’s also the only navigating officer impervious to the clear peril the ship invites by running so close to a major storm. Meanwhile his mates, Riehm and Randolph, neither of whom benefits from the long stretches of rest Davidson enjoys, display “situational awareness”: they are alert, cautious, and clued in to what’s going on.

  This brings up another issue: Why do Riehm and Randolph not challenge Davidson on a question that objectively threatens the safety of every man and woman aboard? Again, the tradition of a captain’s inviolable authority is a sound one, especially in emergency situations, its importance attested to by the severity of punishments reserved for those who infringe it. To defy an order from your superior at sea defines you as a mutineer who, in time of war, would be shot; in the merchant marine you probably won’t get shot, but your career will end.

  Yet a precedent exists for opposing a captain’s decision that is considered clearly wrongheaded or dangerous by his junior officers. Merchant marine academies, with their federal funding and strong Navy connection, drill uniformed cadets on the parade ground, encourage enlistment in the naval reserves, and pound into students’ heads the duty to unquestioningly obey orders from a superior.IV It seems likely that for Randolph at least—less so for Riehm, who did not attend an academy—the habit of obedience slammed into her by military-service parents as well as by Maine Maritime prevents the second mate from kicking up the kind of fuss that would at least get Davidson out of bed to deal with her. While the US Navy Code does not condone disobedience on grounds that an action ordered by an officer is perceived as dangerous, it is generally accepted that on commercial ships a mate has the right, not to mutiny, but to disagree with a superior’s order and officially note his or her objection in the ship’s log—before obeying the order anyway.V Such behavior, of course, would have knock-on effects in terms of corporate evaluation, promotion, and overall reputation, and maybe this is where the fatigue factor truly comes into play, because it takes not only great self-confidence but a boatload of energy to butt heads with your commanding officer—especially one who is in bed, rested, and apparently quite convinced of the rightness of his actions.

  * * *

  El Faro’s motion quieted down to some extent as she approached the channel between Rum Cay and San Salvador. Now she starts to roll and pitch harder. Randolph and Davis sip coffee, watching the radar screens as ghost shadows of land slide by on either side, keeping a close eye on the next waypoint that will swing them around the western arc of San Salvador and back into the Atlantic. One of them turns on the Sirius XM satellite radio. The brash banter of an advertisement fills the bridge, followed by a news bulletin. She, or he, turns up the volume. The announcer speaks of Joaquin. “ . . . Category Three storm . . . expected to pass near the Bahamas before heading toward the East Coast of the US.”

  “Oh my God,” Randolph says, “. . . now it’s a Category Three.”

  “A hundred and thirty-five miles an hour?” Davis says of the wind speed.

  “I have it to a hundred and twenty.”

  “Biggest one since I’ve been up here.”

  “We’re right between the islands—so-o-o. Wonder why we’re rolling?” Randolph laughs.

  “This is fixin’ to get interesting.”

  “Mista-a-ake,” Randolph drawls, “yes.” Then, a few minutes later: “I’m gonna give the captain a call and see if he wants to come up and look at it.” She rings Davidson. And waits, phone pressed to her ear. And waits. Finally, Davidson answers.

  “We’ll be meeting the storm,” she tells the captain. “. . . It’s up to Category Three.” She then suggests the Crooked Island escape route. “Alter course straight south and then we’ll go through all these shallow areas . . . umm . . . and the next course change gonna be through the Bahamas and then just gonna turn.”

  A short pause as the captain replies.

  “Okay, thank you,” Randolph says finally, and hangs up the receiver. She turns toward Davis.

  “He said to run it. Hold on to your a
ss, Larry.”

  And Randolph laughs.

  “So we’re gonna stay on this course?” Davis asks.

  “Yeah. The one you see programmed on the radar.”

  El Faro is now at the waypoint, after passing San Salvador, at which she is supposed to turn toward the ocean again. Together Randolph and Davis go through the routine of course change, a swerve eastward from 150 to 116 degrees. It’s what professional mariners do, take care of ship’s business no matter what their thoughts or opinions, fears or doubts.

  But these few minutes—as Davis turns the wheel leftward, to port, steering El Faro onto her next programmed course and then setting the autopilot for that heading; as Randolph watches the radar picture change, San Salvador the pivot point of the ship’s swerve to east-southeast—mark a passing of the last chance El Faro and her crew have to escape the increasingly powerful, grasping talons of the hurricane advancing on them from the northeast. With the San Salvador feint over, and the one feasible escape route, to the south, finally nixed by Captain Davidson, ship and crew are returning to the track line that brings them back into the domain of storm. Into a trap—of space, for El Faro is reducing, instead of increasing, the distance between her and the storm; of time also, for starting now the effects of the hurricane will only grow until, quite soon, wind and waves will be so powerful that the ship will have no option but to confront them as best she can, in whichever direction causes least harm, because any other direction could sink her. And then the ship will no longer be running the storm, she will have been taken into the hurricane. Escape will no longer be an option, and her only chance for survival will be to ride it out and hope to come out the other end alive.

  “Things are fixin’ to change here,” Davis comments as the ship turns onto her new course. “Here we go . . . a little rougher.”