Or it could be that the hatch was not dogged to begin with; given the frenetic rhythm of loading work, and the amount of maintenance the day crew have to do on this old ship, and the fatigue the ABs working overtime experience, who the hell knows for sure if they remembered to dog down that particular scuttle or just assumed they had?
Which wave doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter what the original conditions were, which added ounce of pressure was needed to edge the bolt that extra millimeter or jet between lid and gasket lip; what molecule was first or last to break the gasket’s synthetic chain. If the hatch was undogged to begin with, it happens more directly. But one last, big comber coming aboard finally does it, this one: crashing upward against the hatch cover’s edge and popping the cover like a church key prying off the cap of a beer bottle—slamming it up, over, and back.
Now water from each wave coming through the ports pours down the open scuttle into the dark booming cave system of 3rd Deck. Cascades of warm salt water, thick with foam and the occasional sea-nettle jellyfish, gush down every time a wave surges into the deck above; thinning to a stream, spray, or fan of drips as the ship rolls away, till the next wave comes aboard and rushes in turn down the open wound in El Faro’s gut.
The water now in 3-hold roils around the trailers there, rocking them hard. Following the basic rules of gravity, it finds the open ramps and companionways from 3-hold to the lowest deck, the Tank Top.
It has no visible effect at first. Seawater sloshes back and forth with the ship’s motion on 3rd and Tank Top Decks, a great, broad puddle of ebony liquid, laced with salty drool, reflecting the lights; becoming, as the sea continues surging down scuttle ramps and hatchways, a deepening and sloshy pond. The waves outside grow taller yet, easily fourteen feet high on average now with occasional twenty-footers. The flow becomes more consistent and eventually a near-steady pour of ocean invades the vessel’s lowest level. And no one is around to see, watch standers are either high up on the bridge or standing at the engine-room console, while everyone else is sleeping or at least resting in his or her cabin or the lounge.
El Faro is barely wounded. A hatch three feet in diameter, above the waterline, in a ship almost eight hundred feet long and ninety broad, is no big deal in normal circumstances. But the water accumulates steadily at the ship’s lowest level, in the depths of 3rd and Tank Top Decks. Now free-surface effect starts to come into play because the liquid, washing in the direction the ship rolls—this was taken into account in calculations for bunker fuel sloshing around the fuel tanks, but not for this—adds weight to the downhill side, making the roll worse by that amount of tonnage. Which is cause enough for concern if the ship is rolling evenly back and forth, but when the ship rolls deeper and more often to one side, then the ship will start to lean more in that direction, and the weight of accumulated water there will make it harder for her to roll back, and water from the next roll will also run to the lower side. On the bridge El Faro’s officers are keeping her heading as close to 116 degrees as possible, with the wind well on her port side, so the hull is rolling ever harder, deeper, to starboard.
It’s impossible to know for sure if the scuttle’s opening will be the chief contributing factor to what is going to happen. The total continuous flow of water through a hatch three feet in diameter is enormous, but there’s no way of ascertaining how often or consistently waves cover the hatch, at least at first.VI The time is 3:45 a.m., and on the bridge Randolph and Davis are getting ready to switch watches with Shultz and Hamm. The slosh of water in the ship’s belly has not affected her movement or balance enough for her crew, whose vestibular systems are fully occupied keeping their bodies upright, to notice; feet splayed on the wheelhouse deck against pitch and roll, hands grasping the engine console’s railing, the crew tend to the usual duties of their station.
7
Shultz and Hamm get to the bridge at a quarter to four to relieve Randolph and Davis. The second mate tells Shultz they’ve adjusted course again to make steering easier through the swells. She cracks a joke about “crawling” to her cabin, and leaves.
The helm alarm rings again, but Davis reassures Shultz, “She’ll come back. She did that a couple of times because, uh, she pitched so bad. When you get, uh, the good slams and the good pitches she might lose it a little bit but overall she’s been holdin’ good, knock on wood.”
Shultz stares out the bridge windows at the invisible storm. One of the windows has a clear-view screen, a rotating disc of glass that keeps rain off by centrifugal force, but it is useless against the night, the volume of water. “It’s hard to tell which way the wind’s blowin’, huh?” he comments. “I assume we’re heeling to starboard because the wind must be blowing port to starboard.”
Davis wishes his relief “a good one,” and disappears down the companionway.
“Don’t like this,” Shultz says, almost to himself.
“What’s the gusts out there?” Hamm asks. “I don’t have any idea,” Shultz says, “we don’t have any instrument that can measure it.”
One deck below, sitting at the public computer terminal in the ship’s office, Danielle Randolph taps out an email to her mother, Laurie Bobillot: “Not sure if you’ve been following the weather at all, but there is a hurricane out here and we are heading straight into it. Winds are super bad and seas are not great.” Then the normally undemonstrative second mate types the sign-off that will strike panic in her mother’s heart: “Love to everyone.”
Captain Davidson must be awake in his stateroom, sitting at his own computer; emails from the ship’s other workstations collect in a file on that computer and don’t get shunted to the Inmarsat satellite transmitter until he clicks on the “send” icon. While they sit in his terminal, the captain could theoretically read or delete crew emails at will, and some family members will later voice suspicion that the captain read and censored messages voicing doubts about his decisions; their relatives or spouses say the crew usually send several a day, but not on this trip. No evidence exists to prove this one way or another. Davidson clicks the send icon now. Still at the workstation he downloads the BVS forecast package that came in at 11:00 p.m. the previous evening. It’s an enhancement of the same forecast, on the SAT-C terminal, that Riehm told Davidson about, but given Davidson’s reliance on the BVS version it’s surprising that he has waited so long to download it.
Then Davidson climbs to the bridge. It is 4:09 a.m.
“There’s nothing bad about this ride,” he tells Shultz and Hamm cheerfully, and adds that he’s been “sleepin’ like a baby.”
Others aren’t sleeping that well, Shultz remarks.
“Well, this is every day in Alaska, this is what it’s like . . . a typical winter day in Alaska.”
Silence for a while on the bridge. Everyone is leaning, compensating now for the ship’s tilt to starboard. The windows are utterly blank with night and rain and spray. The mate states the obvious, which is that the wind’s on the port side, and Davidson says, “The only way to do a counter on this heel is to fill the portside ramp tank up. Heel is not so bad.” He adds, “Oh, it’s howlin’ out there,” and the chief mate says the wind should come around to hit the starboard side later, which is what the forecast implies could occur once the storm has passed as its lower arc of counterclockwise wind swipes from north and west of El Faro. Davidson agrees.
A 4:15 the engine revolutions slow. Davidson calls down to the engine room. Second Engineer Schoenly, who has just come on watch, picks up. “How you guys doin’ down there?” Davidson asks, and Schoenly explains that he’s doing the usual on his watch, blowing tubes, which accounts for the drop in speed.VII
The barometer stands at 970 millibars at 4:24. At Joaquin’s center, according to weather reports, the pressure is around 950. “It’s gonna go down before it goes up,” Shultz says. But Davidson is still convinced they are already on the back side of the storm. “We won’t be going through the eye,” he comments at one point, and a few minutes later, “From he
re it’s all downhill as far as the low.”
Now Davidson says to the mate, “Sounds a lot worse up here than in the cabin,” but it sounds more as if he’s musing to himself. “Right now we’re poundin’ a little bit because we’re goin’ more easterly . . . gotta let her get up to speed, get a little more toward our course . . . need the rpms.”
He decides to check on the galley and disappears down the companionway. Two minutes later the bridge telephone rings. Shultz answers. It’s one of the engineers, probably Schoenly, with news that a container on 2nd Deck has come loose from its lashings and is leaning over. “I’ll pass it on to the captain,” the chief mate says, adding that Davidson is in the galley.
Two minutes later the telephone rings again.
“Bridge, Chief Mate.”
It’s the chief engineer. He wants to talk to the captain.
Shultz listens for a while, then says, “I understand you.” He hangs up and calls down to the galley. “Captain—Chief Mate. The chief engineer just called, and they called back again, something about the list and oil levels.”
Davidson comes straight up to the bridge, calls the engine room; he listens, then hangs up.
“The chief wants to take the list off,” he tells Shultz, “so let’s put it in hand steering.”
“Mr. Hamm,” Shultz says, and maybe he’s making a joking alliteration, and maybe he’s taking refuge from worry, as is not uncommon, in the formality of address he’s been taught in the academy, “go into hand.”
And Frank Hamm, whose height is on a par with his girth, flicks the switch that turns off the Iron Mike, hunches over the small metal wheel set low on the forward console of El Faro’s bridge, takes a solid grip on the wheel with his large fists—maybe looks automatically at the windows in front of him, the clear-view spinning, wipers swiping uselessly back and forth as the wind drives rain at them in a smush of twisting drafts and vortices and water—and finally looks lower, in front of the wheel, at the glowing compass and gyroscope dials that tell him in which direction to steer.
8
Even if someone was aware of the busted scuttle and looking at it on 2nd Deck, in the swirl and froth of waves coming in, washing out, it would be hard to tell how much is pouring into the lower decks. But it’s sure that by now tons of water must have come in, and thanks to free-surface motion, the ensuing list is bad enough that it’s having an effect in the engine room.
Conceivably, the scuttle is not the only culprit in the flooding. Trouble continues to occur in the way chain reactions and accidents happen, through a complicated system in which every part, to some extent, is reliant for its efficient functioning on every other, so that one initial fault puts extra strain on the next, which because of the strain fails in turn, starting a chain of breakdowns that exponentially increases in speed and scope—and so it might be that the list itself is the final stressor that causes the crack in hull plates to creep that extra nanometer, that almost infinitely small subunit of analogue change. For a ship is built to ride, on average, on an even keel; if listing to one side, the bow’s curve will capture more waves under that side, which will push the front part of the ship sideways, exerting uneven force down the hull’s length. This is never a problem when the stress is regularly relieved as a ship rolls the other way. But if she doesn’t, and if the waves are big, the strain can damage an already wounded hull. It might be that two corners of plate between 2A- and 3-holds, right at the turn of bilge, the curve where the ship’s vertical side meets her horizontal bottom, were incompletely welded in a Mobile, Alabama, shipyard in 1993. Since then fatigue would have weakened them to the extent that they are held together at this point by a scant nanometer of steel. When that nanometer lets go, the plates start to separate, only a millimeter or two at first; but through that void the sea streams in.
Another actor in this theater of dysfunction is the cargo. Already, according to one engineer, who likely saw it happening through a porthole in his stateroom, a container has busted partly free of its lashings, whether twist-locks or rod-and-chain tie-downs or both.
Some of the trailers on 2nd and 3rd Decks are off-button, and the lashing manual specifies that, if stored off-button, they be secured by six rod-chain lashings to whatever’s available; however, the kind of pounding El Faro is starting to experience, plus the constant and egregious stress on port lashings as the list to starboard pulls trailers the other way, inevitably loosens the tie-downs. With more play and bigger waves the heavier off-button trailers start to slide. They are brought up short by their lashings, but forty thousand pounds of trailer busting on a chain rated only to twenty-six thousand will create intolerable “shock load,” and a link inevitably will snap, and this will increase stress on other chains till the trailer breaks entirely free on one end or both and slams into the trailer it’s moored beside, initiating a similar sequence there.
The same is true of the cars, mostly loaded on the Tank Top Deck, many of which are not individually secured but are instead fastened to those long chains running across the ship, port and starboard; in this case there might be more play for cars to work against, especially as the waves reduce the tires’ grip on the wet deck. And if a central chain should break, a number of cars would be set free at the same time, skidding around together in a nightmare version of crack the whip.
The density of trailers parked on a fully loaded ship means that they cannot move far individually, cannot pile on weight to one side of the ship the way the free-surface effect works with a liquid. The same is true of cars. Automobiles might have a different effect, however, in the lowest part of the ship, starboard and aft on Tank Top Deck, where the main inlet pipe for the firefighting system rises out of the seabox; the latter being the manifold through which El Faro lets in seawater from outside the hull to quench flames or draw ballast. The inlet pipe is partially shielded by a protective bracket made of six-inch-diameter piping, but the possibility exists that a loose car, weighing a ton and a half, will gain enough momentum to break through the protective steel and bust the pipe; and if that happens, pressurized seawater will pour into El Faro’s hold at a volume sufficient to explain by itself how the ship takes on so much water so fast.
If this is what happens, the flow rate of seawater from the firefighting pipe will be greater than the bilge pumps’ ability to gush it back into the ocean.
9
Schoenly and his oiler, Thomas, have been checking the lubrication system as a matter of routine, and, to begin with, the oil pressures were okay with no loss of lubricant or anything else to report.
Then the alarm sounded at the control console, piercingly loud to catch everyone’s attention amid the machinery noise. Most likely it keeps sounding, sporadically, and a light flashes also next to the lubricating-oil-pump pressure gauges. Low-suction pressure on the inlet side, low-discharge pressure at the outlet, trouble by any other name would look and sound this way.
It’s not consistent, and for now the interval between the low-pressure events triggering the alarms must be long enough that the primary pump can regain suction and bring the pressure back up quickly, thus avoiding the automatic trip that brings the second pump into operation, let alone more dramatic emergency moves to cope with the problem.
Probably a small crowd is in the engine room by this time. Griffin, the first engineer, told his wife in an earlier email that he would be up all night because of heavy weather. Schoenly and Shawn Thomas are on watch; the chief, Richard Pusatere, is not the sort of officer to let his subordinates take care of problems when they’re apt to occur, as in a storm; the same is true of Jeff Mathias, the other licensed chief aboard.
Thomas and Schoenly might be assigned to keep an eye on the rest of the plant, but Pusatere, Mathias, and Griffin will be taking inventory of all the gauges to make sure they’ve pinned down the problem. The oil-temperature alarms at turbine and bearings have not been set off. One of the officers certainly moves fast to the lower level to look at the screw pump itself, but it, too, appe
ars to be working well, at least when there’s enough oil. Nothing sweats from the seal, no discernible leaks plague the system, so the most likely culprit, the engineers agree, is the one they blamed initially: this list to starboard.
That’s when Pusatere gets on the phone to the bridge to tell the captain the list is affecting his oil levels.
The pumps have not been opened up in a long time, and even the engineers probably don’t know by heart the exact specs of this lubricating system—how the intake, an eight-inch steel pipe with a flared mouth, hangs ten inches above, and twenty-two inches to starboard of, the V-shaped bottom of the reduction-gear sump. They wouldn’t know by rote but could look up the amount of lube oil currently in the system: 1,225 gallons, which corresponds to a depth of oil in the sump of 24.6 inches. This theoretically means the pipe’s suction end plunges 14.6 inches below the surface of the oil, more than sufficient depth for normal uptake.
But a serious, chronic list will reduce that depth by spreading oil to the port or starboard sides of the sump, shallowing its depth near the center. Possibly, if the list is severe enough, consistent enough, especially when combined with a lot of roll and pitch, the oil level will shallow sufficiently for the pipe no longer to touch the liquid. The pipe’s end will pull out of the oil and the pump will suck dry, if only for a while, creating air bubbles that reduce or even gag off the flow of oil to turbine and gears.
A former chief on El Faro will testify that he normally keeps the oil level between twenty-nine and thirty-two inches, and higher for rough weather. The sump can hold 2,020 gallons, which works out to a thirty-three-inch level, enough to ensure suction at any conceivable degree of tilt. Because El Faro carries only 1,225 gallons this trip, the oil level in the sump lies well below that mark.
Run the Storm Page 19
