Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  Everyone in the engine room knows what actions to take if oil pressure suddenly falls. The flow of oil must be brought back to normal levels, and if not enough oil is in the sump to maintain suction, the sole remedy is to add oil from the gravity-fed storage tank inside the boiler casing at Main Deck level. From that height a head of pressure will drive spare oil directly to the sump. The gravity tank holds sufficient oil to maintain lubrication for those two-to-ten minutes of respite. And likely this is what the engineers do now, bleeding enough extra oil into the system for the pump to suck normally again, sufficient to restore regular flow and quiet the alarms.

  These men are used to little crises in the engine room, especially old engine rooms; they happen often enough. They are trained to think in terms of engine systems, all of whose unitary parts depend on smooth functioning of the other parts, and they are aware of what can happen if one part fails. Especially under Pusatere’s regime they have gone through numerous drills; they instinctively follow the engineer’s rule of rushing to “the last thing you touched, the last alarm you heard” in an emergency; they know in their bones how the chain reaction works, moving at scary speed from a small fail to a minor malfunction to a malfunction that slows or stops the plant. In this case, if the oil pumps fail, and they can’t fix the problem, they’ll have those two to ten minutes of grace while the gravity-tank oil bathes turbine, gears, and bearings on its own.VIII But that oil won’t come close to filling up the sump and when it’s gone, as one former chief puts it, “You’re shit out of luck.” The throttle, whose valve itself is held open by oil pressure, will close automatically when the pressure drops. The turbines will slow and stop to save the spinning blades, the precise gears and shafts, from melting down. The engine room will grow quiet. The propeller will slow, and still. And El Faro, eventually, will come to a stop as well.

  Last-chance lubrication: The topmost, “gravity,” tank can cool the engine for a few minutes at most. The lower, “reserve” (or “storage”) tank is useless in an emergency. Without oil, the engine stops, and the ship lies helpless.

  The danger to a ship if the plant fails in a hurricane is something no one who goes to sea for a living needs to analyze or think much about. Their job is to keep the plant working, and they will do everything in their power to achieve that end.

  10

  Davidson decides to head the ship into the wind and tells the helmsman to change course accordingly. Looking forward into the blackness, lacking the visual information he needs, a captain tries to get a feel for where the wind and waves are coming from by sensing how the ship moves beneath his feet. If she’s rolling and being thrown mostly rightward, the wind and waves are coming mostly from the left and that starboard list continues. If they bring the ship around so the wind now comes from the other side—in this case, from starboard, from the right—the list should switch to the port side, which won’t solve the problem either. As far as Davidson knows, the list causing the oil problems is due only to the “sail effect” of wind, which has been screeching from the port side of their regular course, against the hull’s side and the containers stacked on Main Deck. If he can get the ship to head straight into the wind, she would only be pitching, bow up, stern down, and vice-versa; the wind would blow from dead ahead, the list should vanish.

  “Just the list,” he tells the chief mate. “The sumps are actin’ up, to be expected.” Davidson then directs his attention back to Frank Hamm, at the wheel. Keeping the ship on one heading in heavy seas is tricky enough with visual information or an anemometer to tell you where the weather’s coming from; doing so at night entirely by feel requires constant adjustments. “Just steer that heading right there the best you can,” he tells Hamm and Shultz. “That’ll work for us.”

  “Okay, steer zero six five,” the chief mate says. The wind, as far as they can tell on the bridge, has continued veering easterly and is now coming more or less out of the northeast.

  “Zero six five,” Hamm repeats—and a few seconds later, as a big wave hits: “Wo-o-o.”

  “Now swingin’ right pretty fast,” Shultz says.

  Hamm is working hard at the wheel. The position is awkward, he is standing at the bridge console, bending over the wheel while keeping his head lifted to watch the compass or gyroscope. He is probably sweating in the iffy air-conditioning and despite the stream of air coming from the fan.

  It might also be that, as the one person on El Faro in semidirect contact with the sea’s forces, through the wheel’s turn, even though mediated by hydraulics to the rudder; by feeling through muscles of arm and shoulder and stomach just how hard it is for her to hold course, how tortured her movements are, Frank Hamm more than anyone aboard right now is conscious of the true might of the waves, the power of this wind the ship is fighting. More than anyone else he may understand in his gut the extent of murder Joaquin holds in its heart, how great is the danger they all face.

  The captain does his best to make Hamm’s job easier and relieve the helmsman’s tension. Though Davidson only occasionally puts his hand to the ship’s wheel, he directs Hamm and is thus somewhat conscious of the level of storm and the state of his ship within the storm; and the relationship between the two men will only grow tighter, more intense, as El Faro moves deeper into the hurricane’s embrace.

  “Take your time and relax,” Davidson says now, “don’t worry about it. Stand up straight and relax.” “I’m relaxed, Captain,” Hamm replies, which doesn’t convince the skipper, who repeats, “Relax—steer the direction we’re goin’.”

  Later the officers will fetch Hamm a chair to ease his back, get him a cup of coffee as he wrestles the wheel.

  The barometer is still dropping: it now reads 960 millibars.

  Hamm and Davidson adjust the course toward where the wind seems to be coming from now: fifty degrees, almost due northeast.

  Someone relays a message: a trailer has busted its lashings and is leaning over on 2nd Deck.

  Jeff Mathias shows up on the bridge at 5:10 a.m. “Things are slappin’ around,” he says, “down on Second Deck.”

  “There’s not much to see,” Davidson says. “You know that’s our biggest enemy. We have no visibility, ya know. Generally try to steer in the direction we need to go.”

  “Yeah,” Mathias agrees. “I’ve never seen it list like this—you gotta be takin’ more than a container stack. I’ve never seen it hang like this.”

  The Coast Guard will later conclude that El Faro must by now have been filling with water for some time, and possibly in more than one hold. The extra purchase afforded the wind by high container stacks also plays into how officers perceive the problem, since the ship didn’t carry containers in Alaska, and thus they might in their minds exaggerate what percentage of list can be ascribed to wind, versus what could be the result of other factors.

  Davidson’s rough weather experience, the NTSB will later note, has been largely confined to deep-riding tankers or Ro-Ro freighters, which are less affected by wind heel than container ships. Otherwise he might be aware that, even on a container ship, a sixty- to eighty-knot wind blowing against the ship’s side will only lean the vessel over by eight degrees or so—and El Faro does not have the wind on her beam, which means that the sail effect should be a lot less, implying in turn that something else is affecting stability. This possible overemphasis on wind effect informs the captain’s next comment.

  “Yeah, you got a lot of sail area,” he says.

  “It’s like whiteout out there,” Mathias remarks, looking at the windows.

  “Yeah, just all this spray and rain, you get lightning,” Davidson says, and a few minutes later to Hamm: “Put your rudder left ten, we’re gonna steer up into it a little bit more.” Right now they are still steering fifty degrees.

  The ship’s barometer now reads 950 millibars. Pressure at Joaquin’s center at that hour stands at 948, only two millibars lower. This indicates the ship is now close to the eye of the storm.

  “We’re on the bac
k side of it . . . only gonna get better from here,” Davidson says to Mathias, still clinging to his notion that the hurricane is doing what the forecasts predicted, sliding out of range northwest of El Faro. The extent to which the captain repeats himself on this subject and others: on the similarity between these storm waves and normal conditions in Alaska, on getting permission from Tote to take the Old Bahama Channel north; must in part be a function of the responsibility he feels to keep the crew informed of his decisions and reassured as to their good sense.

  But it also seems like the behavior of someone torn between what he hopes will happen and what he fears will occur—trying to believe that Joaquin is indeed moving away, that the vessel is fine even in these conditions; that his preparations will suffice to avert the End of Days.

  Shultz is watching the inclinometer, a simple device, similar to a curved carpenter’s level, that hangs above the bridge windows. “Yeah, eighteen-degree list on,” he remarks.

  “Waitin’ for that wind to shift,” Davidson says. If the wind shifts to the west, it will indicate that El Faro has finally punched her way south of the hurricane—

  At 5:43 the bridge telephone rings.

  “Bridge, Captain.” Davidson listens for a few minutes: “We got a pro-o-o-blem . . . . Three-hold? . . . Okay. I’ll send the mate down.

  “Watch your step,” he tells Shultz. “Go down to three-hold. Probably just water . . .”

  “Suspected leak?” Shultz says.

  “I would tend to concur.”

  “. . . ’specially the scuttle.”

  It’s the first acknowledgment by anyone on the bridge that El Faro’s list is not due only to wind pushing against the containers, tilting the ship; that the sea is somehow getting into her hull and sapping her stability. When the bridge telephone rings again, Shultz picks it up; the engineers are getting the bilge pumps running to pull water out of 3-hold.

  The captain takes the phone and suggests transferring water from the starboard ballast tank to the port, to help compensate for the list.

  Then Shultz picks up a walkie-talkie and goes below to check.

  11

  The ballast and bilge-pump system is nowhere near the oil pumps. It’s located on the engine room’s lowest level, all the way forward, against the bulkhead separating machinery from 3-hold. Apart from the pumps themselves—man-size metal insects with suckers poking in different directions—it’s a bewildering puzzle of manifolds, junctions, and valves, painted in different colors; when some valves are closed off and others opened, the pumps will move water from port ramp tank to starboard ramp tank (or the other way around) or will suck it from the ship’s bilges and shoot it out of an outlet in the hull’s side. The oiler, Shawn Thomas, knows the system well and most of the time does this kind of work alone; given the urgency now, one of the officers, maybe the senior third engineer, Holland, whose standard responsibilities include tanks and ballast, comes along to help.

  Though the VDR gives no indication, it’s near certain someone took a gander through one of the two watertight doors between the engine room and the aft section of 3-hold that are normally hooked open to allow cooler air in; this is why one of the engineers would be first to discover the water in the hold. He would have shut and dogged the door immediately. The temperature in the engine room would have started creeping upward at once.

  The bilge pump’s job is straightforward: pull water from the lowest part of El Faro, between the bottom plates and the ballast, fuel, and fructose tanks, and through the rose boxes—big steel colanders, located at the bottom of metal wells, that filter out the kind of junk that accumulates in bilges. The water then flows through the pump and out the discharge pipe to the ocean. In this ship, as in others of her age, the rose boxes tend to clog with rust from all the steel decaying around, but this time apparently the bilge pump draws fine and hundreds of gallons a minute are pulled from 3-hold and dumped back into the Atlantic. Now the engineers, sweating, open the valve on the suction pipe leading from the starboard ramp tank; they crack the discharge valve on the pipe leading to the port tank, and the pump whines, sucking water from starboard to port, right to left, transferring weight from downhill to uphill, which must help correct the list.

  At the control console a lube-oil pressure alarm sounds again. The chief engineer picks up the telephone and calls the bridge. He and the captain both know that, even if the pumps can gain on the water in 3-hold, and even if shifting weight to the port ramp tank helps in the long run, they have no “long run” right now, both processes will take time, and the way the oil pumps are acting they don’t have time to wait; something must be done now to get rid of the list that causes the pump to suck air.

  Pusatere listens intently as Davidson says, “Okay—what I’m gonna do—I’m gonna turn the ship and get the wind . . . on the starboard side, give us a port list, and, um, see if we’ll have a better look at it.” “It” means the scuttle, but both men also realize that during the time the ship changes direction and heads into the wind; during the time the water in the hold takes to change sides, the ship will straighten up and the lack of tilt will give the lubricating system a breather.

  The captain asks for more speed: “More rpm available?” The ship, laboring into the growing swells, is still going half her normal speed, because of the energy it takes to fight the storm.

  12

  As El Faro, rolling badly to starboard, starts to wrestle her way to port—pitching harder now as her bow starts to smash more directly into the dragon wind and the maelstrom of waves themselves—Shultz makes his way down to 3rd Deck, enters the engine-room main level, makes his way around the boilers, through a storeroom, and opens the heavy steel door to 3-hold. Water runs against the coaming in front of him, around the Rolocs and chains of the ranked trailers. The mate steps into the water. Closing the door behind him he inches forward and to the right, holding on to lashings, trailer to trailer, and, when he gets to the outermost starboard trailer looks forward and sees water gushing from overhead, out of the starboard scuttle leading to 2nd Deck, a pulsing Niagara down the steel side-shell that makes it impossible to climb the ladder and shut the hatch from below. His pant legs must be soaked to the knees, seawater is pooling deeply on that side of the ship.

  He climbs back up to 2nd Deck, to a watertight door in the after bulkhead of the house, and finds seawater rampaging also on the deck in front of him. Dogging the door, he leaves the shelter of the companionway and boiler casing and sloshes out onto 2nd Deck, around the house, all the way starboard. The water’s up to his knees here, too; he hangs on to something, another trailer, lashings, on the starboard edge of 3-hold. In the long space between trailers and the side shell he sees waves flooding through the side-shell ports, washing over the scuttle, which yawns open when the waves clear it for an instant, its hatch thrown back. He retraces his steps to the breezeway door and keys the transmit button on his walkie-talkie.

  “Ya got water against the side . . . just enough to pour over the edge of the scuttle . . . about knee-deep water, rolls right over.”

  The captain tells him they’re turning the ship to port to pull water away from the scuttle. He asks the mate if he’s alone, if he needs help. “I’m by myself,” Shultz replies.

  “Don’t move,” Davidson says, “stay right there, don’t move.”

  “Standing by.”

  The ship, pitching harder now, is turning slowly against the wind. Water starts to swirl and rush from the starboard side to port, making surf against the trailers, the chained automobiles. For a couple of minutes, maybe more, as the water shifts in El Faro’s holds, the ship is roughly on an even keel, and oil must be pumping normally. Jeff Mathias shows up on 2nd Deck and finds Shultz staring forward as seawater in 3-hold starts to eddy toward his left.

  “I got Jeff Mathias with me here,” Shultz radios the bridge, his words partially drowned in wind. “We’re ready to go . . . starboard scuttle.” Shultz and Mathias confer, yelling over the noise. Mathias volunteers
to venture out onto the deck and shut the scuttle.

  “The worst area’s already dried out,” Shultz yells into the walkie-talkie.

  “All right, Chief Mate. You got a lifeline on him or anything? Is there any chance of him going over?”

  “I think it’s okay.”

  El Faro has completed her turn to port, chopping and pitching, water on 2nd Deck now cascading massively toward that side. Her heading is almost due north, 350 degrees. Slowly, soggily, she is leaning more and more heavily to port. After a few minutes she is listing in that direction at just as deep an angle as she did before to starboard.

  Mathias, one arm crooked around trailers, lashings, anything he can find as the sea plucks at his legs, starts making his way along the starboard side of the house to the starboard scuttle. By the time he gets there, that side of the deck is almost free of water, as Davidson anticipated. The cover on the scuttle is still thrown back; the opening gapes, black and dripping. Mathias moves quickly, heaves the cover up and over, closing the hatch. He turns the locking wheel clockwise as hard and fast as it will go, then hurries back to the house.

  “Okay, Captain, it’s done,” Shultz yells into the walkie-talkie.

  “It’s done.”

  It is one minute before six in the morning of October 1.

  13

  Just before 6:00 a.m. Danielle Randolph appears at the bridge companionway.

  “Hi, how are you, Captain?” she says brightly.

  “How are you?” Davidson replies. He sounds happy to see her, but his question, like hers, is ritual. Both officers know how they are, and it’s not so hot. Davidson, as always, puts a bright face on the situation: “A scuttle popped open and there’s a little bit of water in three-hold. They’re pumping it out now.”

  The bridge telephone rings. The chief engineer now asks the captain to reverse his earlier move and turn the ship back to starboard, bringing the wind on the port side again to resume the starboard list. Apparently the list to port causes worse problems than a tilt the other way.