“One-one-six,” Randolph reminds him.
“Wind heel,” Davis announces, shifting his weight as El Faro, coming out of the shelter of San Salvador, shoved by the wind now blowing against her port side, her high wall of containers, leans to starboard. “Yea-a-ah.”
“You can hear it,” Randolph says, looking at the radar screen. “Rain squall comin’ up.”
At 1:33 a.m. the engine rpm dial shows a drop in speed. The ship meets a big wave, staggers. A loud clunk sounds on the bridge wing. “Not too bad,” Randolph jokes. “I can stand up straight.”
Flashes of light briefly light up the clouds dead ahead of the ship. Joaquin’s collection of secondary storms, their lightning and thunder, vortices and rain, is within sight. Randolph asks Davis if he wants more coffee. The ship seems to stumble again.
“Whoa, that was a good one,” Randolph says. “Definitely lost some speed.”
“Damn sure don’t wanna lose the plant.”
“Nah,” Randolph agrees.
“Do a lot of things,” Davis adds, “but you don’t wanna do that.”
More clunks. Some damage is starting to happen. The waves are suddenly a lot bigger; in the light of the forward range light they can see a swell crash over the ship’s Main Deck, water “breaking green” in a muscle of dark motion topped by froths of foam over the railings. The ship’s speed falls again, to sixteen knots. The wind, still mostly from the north, is picking up significantly, Randolph remarks. At 2:47 a.m. she adds, “We’re pretty much committed now.”
“Figured the captain would be up here,” Davis says.
“I thought so, too. I’m surprised.”
“He’ll play hero tomorrow.”
Randolph laughs, then something else breaks.
“Oh!” Davis exclaims.
“Shit, oh, shit,” Randolph groans.
“That was a big wave.”
“She won’t be able to take more of those.”
The waves—no surprise here—keep building; they’re probably approaching fifteen feet much of the time, coming at the ship’s left rear, her port quarter. El Faro may be starting some parametric or synchronous rolling, the period of waves front and back accentuating her rolls port and starboard, but if so she breaks out of it serially and never gets into the self-fueling, lethally increasing cycle of bad rolls characterizing that condition.
In any case the ship reacts gamely, pitching and rolling yet moving steadily forward. “I had to sit down for that one,” Randolph comments, laughing; then the helm alarm goes off. The ringing signals a wave has knocked this 790-foot ship more than three degrees off a course the autopilot is trying to hold. There’s another sound, of something coming loose outside the bridge, and inside, an ashtray, a water bottle, go flying.
Randolph mimics the voice of Scooby-Doo, the dog who is first in his team of ghost-busting cartoon detectives to spot trouble and get the hell out:
“Rhut-row,” the second mate says.
“Yeah, it’s startin’ good,” Davis agrees.
And Randolph greets the hurricane: “Hello, Joaquin!” she says.
4
Thus in the early hours of October 1 the navigating officers of El Faro are split, mostly between their own doubts as to the wisdom of playing footsy with a hurricane, and the stubborn confidence displayed by their captain that this storm will stick to its predicted track—will hew to timetable as well and by dawn have spun off north and west of El Faro’s track, allowing her to be flicked out of Joaquin’s swirl of winds in the southwest quadrant like a kid slung by centrifugal force off the edge of a merry-go-round.
But Joaquin seems to have no such doubts. Later evaluation of the hurricane’s track shows it continues to resist wind shear and is therefore steadily following the upper-level flow of Atlantic air currents from the northeast, trundling southwest in the direction of the lower Bahamas so single-mindedly as to appear to be driven by its own internal scheme.
The storm has been moving in one direction long enough now that forecasters (other than the European, who were onto it from the start) are starting to catch on. The NWS predictions thirty-six hours out were wrong by a wide margin: this was the early forecast on the twenty-ninth that was 180 miles too far north and sixty knots too low. By the night of September 30 the error had shrunk to twenty-five miles, with wind speed five knots too low. But the predicted direction, twelve and even eighteen hours before, turns out to be about right and is reflected in the NWS and BVS packages El Faro is receiving. With the 4:00 a.m. watch change on October 1, therefore, her officers and ABs poring over weather charts can visualize the vast, circling, blood-hued wound that is the hurricane staining thousands of square miles of Atlantic only slightly north and east of their intended course; they can eyeball the increasingly turgid bands of rain that mark Joaquin’s outskirts, and gauge the narrowing gauntlet between island chain and storm their captain reckons they can safely run.
What they cannot visualize, for none of the people on watch have gone through a full hurricane before, is the raw power of this storm. By now Joaquin, as a Category 3, spins sustained winds of 100 knots, or 115 mph, and gusts far stronger. The huge thirst of this system, the driving force of heat at its core, evaporation at the bottom, condensation on top, the circular plunge of everything the Atlantic—the whole northern hemisphere, it feels like—can gather together into this vast swirling system, this climatic engine gone berserk, continues to intensify: still sucking ever more fuel into itself from beneath by its bulimic consumption of fuel on top, Joaquin’s tearing dearth of pressure generates yet more vacuum from the superheated water it rides.
It is worth remembering that the Central American deity Hurakan, who gave his name to this type of weather, used flood and storm to utterly clear the world of human beings.
An average hurricane, through the energy generated by its changes of state, from water through heat to vapor and back again; by the kinetic force of the resulting winds, over the course of its life unleashes power equivalent to that released by ten thousand to five hundred thousand nuclear bombs. Gauged another way, every day it puts out energy equal to over two hundred times the total electrical power the planet can generate in twenty-four hours. But those numbers are impossible to imagine fully, the gap in understanding is like that between the bad shock you’d get from grounding a car battery, versus being fried to overcooked bacon by the world’s entire voltage. You’re extrapolating Hiroshima from a kitchen fire. “Duck and cover” is a joke, “Kiss your ass good-bye” is all anyone can say trying to imagine such power, shrugging in defeat. The reality is something else—it even looks evil from afar, a towering country of wraithlike clouds reaching well in advance of the storm, a superheated humidity that enfolds you like a sweaty sumo wrestler; then a darkness that takes over the world and rain comes down, hiding the monstrous thunderheads now taking over the sky; a few drops, sheets of it, finally a vertical flood. Lightning sears every which way from the tumbling vapor. And the wind starts up, low rush at first, the 1–10 scale of volume ratcheting up to 11, to a keen, a howl, a million screaming ghouls busting through your ears, your skin, into your very nerves; strong enough to make you fly or slice you in half with the junk it blows around.
Joaquin is all of that, and within its eyewall—the vertical circle of clouds surrounding the storm’s center—as if dissatisfied with this single engine of impossible power, minihurricanes form. The process here is similar to the collision of Coriolis winds that spin a hurricane at its inception; the difference in speed between winds around the outer and inner cores spins smaller vortices that, in a process akin to the larger storm’s, pull warm air upward even faster than through the eye—hot towers they’re called, or heat elevators, zooming a thousand floors up the express bank to condensation—and what this looks like to a person in the middle, at sea, is waves higher than houses, and combined waves twice that size, each tall and wide enough to smash and destroy a village; wind that carves off their tops and hurls the water in what fee
ls like white sheets of salty razor a hundred yards long, at speeds that will turn a truck into an airplane.
But no one is near Joaquin’s center yet. No one in his or her right mind wants to be anywhere close.
5
Not much communication is happening between engine room and bridge, now or at most other times. It’s not clear if some personal tension between captain and chief engineer has a role in this, or if the relative silence is just a function of the usual semi-joking professional rivalry between deck and engine departments. Davidson is not on the bridge when the engine slows at 2:15 a.m. for no discernible reason, but the mate in charge, Randolph, doesn’t call down to ask what’s up, even though reliable operation of the engine, as she and Davis note, is crucial to the ship’s safety in a storm. It can be assumed, and the bridge officers clearly so assume, that the engineer on watch will call the bridge if anything unusual occurs. The senior third engineer, Mike Holland, and the oiler on duty, Joe Hargrove, came on watch at midnight, and one of the first things they’d have done once the changeover was finished, and once they had checked the control console and noted everything in the log, would have been to swap out the fuel strainers again to make sure any sediment stirred up in the tanks by rough waves would not be sucked into the burners. The burner throats are bad enough, they don’t need any clogged fuel lines on the fire side to complicate things further. And God knows what plaques of rust or clouds of sediment from bunker barge or pipelines lurk in the various fuel tanks and are being knocked off by the sloshing of fuel; all would clog the engine’s arteries absent those strainers. Now with filters swapped the bunker flows golden and sweet through the pumps, past the glass bull’s-eye inspection port. The lubricating oil, too, is clean. That system is closed, so there is no need to swap oil filters frequently; the gauges measuring the oil’s flow around different parts of the system, inflow and outflow, show no difference in pressure readings that might indicate a problem.
As for the readings in the minds of the third engineer and the oiler, these must be pegged to the “so far, so good” level. The same is likely true of Chief Pusatere, who has certainly been present, making sure everything works right for the coming watch, which is bound to be rough. So most likely has the other licensed chief, Mathias, who, while charged only with oversight of the riding gang and the retrofit of El Faro for Alaska, is far too experienced and committed an engineer to not leave his cabin and come below to help when the going gets a little hairy. Hell, most of the engine-room gang has probably been down, possibly because sleep is getting harder and harder to come by, even if wedged into your bunk with life jackets. Mitch Kuflik, the third in charge of showing the ropes to the greenhorn, Meklin, would be on duty by choice; and Meklin no doubt feels some excitement, if not heightened concern, radiating like a mild fever from the older men as they walk up and down and around the deep confines of their workplace, holding on to rails and support stanchions for balance, keeping an eye on the wonky hangers across which some steam pipes run; listening harder through the noise. The quality of noise itself is always a tool for diagnosis, and there’s more of it than usual now. Although the engine room is insulated from outside, both by the sound of its own machinery, which takes up auditory wavelengths the storm uses also, as well as by its location, which is largely under the waterline, the ship’s more violent movement as she moves into ever-higher waves boosts the overall sound level as stressed joints and pipes increasingly complain and squeak.
The boom of water slamming against the side shell fills holds forward of the engine room, and those sounds echo in the palace of cargo areas and come through the watertight doors between 3-hold and the engine room, which are pegged open, even in rough weather, to keep a draft going, to help cool the machinery spaces. Should Dylan Meklin, for example, peer forward through those doors he would get a loud dose of echo from the bang of waves as well as the creak of trailers and cars rocking on their springs to the pitch. He’ll also find it a little spooky—the minimal lighting conjures memories of every clichéd movie murder committed in a half-lit underground parking garage; and the massive, serried ribs and girders of the ship’s structure, visible down the narrow corridor between trailers and side shell, twist ever so slightly as El Faro rides over a swell, the vertical beams forward all leaning one degree to port in relation to the ones aft, then reversing that movement, as the ship rides the swell; like a snake sliding over a stick, as Conrad once described it.
Of course no one in the engine room can physically see the waves, but because it’s night and the air is filled with wind-driven spray, nobody on the bridge can either, except when the ship plows bodily into the side of a wave and black-green ocean bleeds briefly under the port light and raises spume against the containers, or when foam smashes in a million gallons of phosphorescence against the ship’s side. The bridge is high, totally enclosed, and fairly quiet despite the wind; the officers’ cabins are well insulated, and even if the navigating officers could see, this is no yacht small enough that everything is perceptible to everyone, rhythm of engine, sea state, wave sound, and wind-feel all up close and personal. The bridge staff are attuned to the ship’s motion, but lacking visuals they cannot describe the sea to the engineering crew, and no one is correlating the relative size of waves to the shimmy of the ship as she moves.
If they were, they might be wondering why El Faro moves as energetically as she does; rolling, as Randolph remarked, even when she is between two islands that should be sheltering her from rougher seas.
6
El Faro now holds close to her course of 116 degrees. She’s heading for an ocean waypoint from which she can resume her track to San Juan—except that the swells are suddenly high enough to make steering by autopilot clumsy, and Randolph and Davis have adjusted course somewhat, from 116 to 114 degrees; and, when a particularly large wave bangs in, to 110. As is typical at this stage of and proximity to a hurricane, the wind, still out of the northeast, is starting to whine, mutter, shriek at times on the lower registers of the banshee opera. The ship’s movement is suddently harsher, the twist of her hull tangible to everyone, to the men in the engine room’s deepest level; to Lashawn Rivera and Jackie Jones, now wedged into their bunks on the unlicensed-personnel deck, four flights up from Main Deck, three down from the bridge.
If some divine observer, some Poseidon with a nightscope, could see El Faro now, he would observe a shape massively long and dark, the edges of which are defined by the ghost-pale crash of waves smashing at her bow and from behind and to the side, faint spray blasting off the rows of containers, the white, green, and red shine of her navigation lights arcing slowly but considerably up and down, left and right; blurred pinpoints of yellow from the lounge windows on mess deck, from a cabin on the deck above where one of the crew lies sleepless; pinkish glow of bridge windows high up; occasional shine of lightning on metal enameled by rain and blasting wind and more spume from the ranks of rearing waves.
Her speed has come down further. From 3:45 a.m. on, this ship that can move at twenty-two knots, that desperately needs power to escape the storm, will never go faster than eleven or twelve. As she moves she wobbles a bit, causing the helm alarm to ring again on the bridge; lifting to one swell, aft first with port side surging higher, starboard thus lower as well, and water washing solid through the starboard side-shell openings on 2nd Deck, bathing the trailers lashed there. The wind blasts from the north and east and, with the ship running a little south of east, heaps more water against her port side. Then the stern dips down and the swell now lifts her bow and she leans to port, but not as much due to the ongoing shove of wind from that direction. Because of the wind, when she rolls back to starboard, she sags perceptibly deeper on that side. At reduced speed she’s still slugging it out, gamely crushing into the backs of storm waves, and overall this Poseidon-type, assuming he’s a mariner, would not find much amiss, except perhaps her heading: a big ship moving strong, confidently steered into darkness.
But disaster, and we hav
e seen signs of this already, starts as small as it gets, and as El Faro edges back into the Atlantic, what starts to kill her most likely begins on 2nd Deck, at those big openings through which the avid ocean slurps. The ports are fifteen-odd feet above the waterline, two feet closer to the sea than they were before the ship’s “minor” conversion. The waves still average between ten and fifteen but the foaming commotion they make when hitting the ship drives them higher; those higher than average reach eighteen, even twenty feet, tall enough to reach the ports when the ship is level. When she rolls, bringing ports on the lower side close to the waves, even average swells can smash in bodily, pouring and white-watering on 2nd Deck to a depth of four or five feet.
Given the pressure of the strengthening northeast wind, the roll to starboard must now be consistently deeper, and the slices of solid North Atlantic water wash that much fatter through the starboard ports. Black and monstrous in the sparse neon, glinting evil, the waves crash against the chained trailers, make surf against the steel baffles and half bulkheads built on 2nd Deck to shelter the many vents against seas that normally wash in, then wash out again via the same ports they came in through; the waves don’t care, they come back, outflank the bulkheads and throw themselves bodily against more trailers and curl against the scuttles leading down to 3rd Deck; roar hard and strong as if shot through a fire hose, swirl in grins of froth around the lashings, slop into the angle between the hull’s starboard side and a vent housing where the scuttle leading to 3-hold is located, deepening and churning there against the scuttle’s coaming, deflecting upward: the jetting water will hit any void where rubber rotted, peeling away the rest of the gasket with power strong enough to move a car, which the waves most likely are starting to do as well—and now that gap, that chink between gasket and lip, is wide enough that hundreds of foot-pounds of pressure are pushing through it against the scuttle’s lid.
Run the Storm Page 18
