Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  Once again, it’s not clear if any of the engineers, who have probably never seen the sump housing opened, are aware either of the ten-inch vertical gap between the sump’s bottom and the mouth of the oil intake pipe, or of the twenty-two-inch horizontal distance by which the flared mouth is offset to starboard of the sump’s center. Oil lines coil back and forth under the deck plates, so it’s hard to figure out just by looking at them where the lubricant is going. It’s not certain, either, if the engine-room crew can immediately consult the pump’s specs and diagrams to troubleshoot the issue. Tote has not provided the ship with a manual to guide engineers through this or similar problems.

  What is pretty certain is that, either by studying general diagrams or through a basic understanding of how intake pipes are always set higher to avoid sucking in dregs collected in the lowest parts of a sump, Pusatere and his crew have a good idea of what must be going on. They understand that, with a strong list, any vertical gap between intake and sump bottom will shallow the pool of available oil; and that a pipe offset to one side means that a list the other way will slosh the oil even farther away from the intake, compounding the problem. Since the intake pipe is set to starboard, they need to turn the ship back in that direction, put waves and wind to port again, to regain a starboard list.

  Offset oil: A cross-section view shows how a list to one side (left, or port) pulls oil away from an intake pipe set twenty-two inches to starboard, and ten inches above, the sump’s center line. If the oil pump sucks air, it will stop the engine. Though the sump could contain 2,020 gallons, it only held 1,225 on October 1, 2015.

  “Bring it back, roll back over to starboard,” Davidson tells the helmsman. “Keep her right twenty.”

  “Rudder right twenty,” says Hamm.

  Shultz comes back from 2nd Deck, confirms the scuttle is secured. He volunteers to return to the cargo holds.

  Davidson agrees. “We need eyes and ears down there.”

  One of the radars has crapped out. Randolph bends over the set, adjusting, rebooting. Soon the screen glows with the image of the islands the ship has left behind. She plots the ship’s position off San Salvador.

  The wind, changing angles as El Faro turns slowly to starboard, rips something else loose.

  “There goes the lawn furniture,” Randolph says.

  “Let’s hope that’s all.” It’s the first time Davidson’s words have betrayed any glumness.

  Randolph quickly offers, “If you don’t need me, you want me to stay with you?”

  “Please,” Davidson replies.

  “It’s just,” he continues, “it’s just the—” But he’s interrupted by the walkie-talkie’s call-up tone. Shultz has gone down to the engine room and is checking in from there, and Davidson asks him to tell the engineers to reverse the ballast procedure, fill the starboard ramp tank now to help with the general aim of bringing the ship’s tilt back to starboard.

  The chief mate confirms, “Port to starboard ramp tank.”

  “I’m not liking this list,” Davidson tells the bridge at large.

  And at that moment the world changes.

  The ongoing pulse of engines deep below, the sempiternal tremble of deck and joinery that is the sign, tactile as much as auditory, that El Faro’s heart is beating, her engines driving her and all her people in the direction they’re supposed to go in, begins to falter.

  Slows in rhythm.

  Fades, at last, to nothing.

  In the alien, deadly silence that follows, the shriek of Joaquin against the windows, against the hull, grows to deafening volume by contrast.

  “I think we just lost the plant,” Davidson says.

  Fatal tilt: El Faro, seen from the stern, lists twenty-five degrees to port in this computer-generated image. At such an angle, individual lashings on a container would start to snap, and loose containers would add strain to their neighbors’ lashings in a perilous domino effect.

  PART VI

  * * *

  * * *

  THE ASSASSIN STORM

  * * *

  * * *

  You turn again, but the storm adjusts. . . . Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you.

  —Haruki Murakami

  1

  Of course Joaquin is not sentient. Of course this storm has not chosen El Faro and her people out of some animistic perversion, some sick need to destroy and kill a worthy vessel and a crew of thirty-three decent, hardworking humans; professionals, family people connected to a wide web of wives, children, parents, friends; all as innocent as people can be who go to sea knowing the dangers they face, the hubris all mariners in some way commit by betting they can always, successfully, pit wits and talent against something so vast.

  Melville writes in Moby-Dick, a book that’s all about man’s hubris on great waters, “For ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder [man], and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless . . . man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.”

  Yet to anyone tracking Joaquin and El Faro together over the last two days, a sense of awfulness must come; for the storm’s aura of ill intent seems only to deepen. By six in the morning of October 1 the hurricane—still drunk on overheated ocean, still trashing wind shear, still following the upper-level airflow—has been zeroing in on El Faro’s track for forty-eight hours straight. When the ship’s engine shuts down, Joaquin’s center is a mere twenty-five miles to the southeast; the opposite direction from that which Davidson expects, as if the storm were deliberately trying to lunge under his guard. El Faro, disabled and helpless, lies almost within the eye, inside its circle of strongest winds.

  Joaquin is now approaching Category 4 status, winds averaging 115 knots, gusting to 130—close to 150 mph. Most humans in such winds would be blown off anything they clung to, and what they clung to would be ripped off sea or ship or earth and hurled after them. The waves routinely reach heights of twenty, sometimes thirty feet; occasionally, a wave will reach close to fifty feet, the height of a five-story building, a dark mass of water streaked like a rib-eye steak, only instead of fat veining the liquid flanks, these are white tendons of watery fury stretched by the massive energy of wind; and the wave tops are impossible to see, for that same wind is shearing off the waves’ summits and using them to rocket some matter that is neither sea nor air but an abrasive mix of spume and salt water, a slurried ganache of surf that will rip clothes from the body and drown the very breath in your throat. On El Faro, even as what momentum she has left keeps her heading, temporarily, close to the wind, spume abrades every unsheltered surface, and waves must now consistently blast over Main Deck, crashing against the container stacks, the breezeway, and bottom of the house.

  Second Deck has become part of the sea, a surging tumult of black water and phosphorescent eddies.

  And Joaquin is not done. A mid- to upper-level trough over the eastern United States is starting to deepen, interfering with the southwest-tending airflow from the mid-Atlantic ridge that has dominated the hurricane’s motion till now; so that Joaquin, having found the ship, having pulled her into its tightest, most violent band of winds, now starts to slow, for all the world like an assassin who, having tricked its victim into a blind alley, now moves around him, readying for the kill.

  Pinched between trough and guiding winds, the eye of Joaquin circles the stricken ship.

  2

  “So . . . is there any chance of gettin’ [the engine] back online?”

  Davidson is on the phone again, talking to the engine room. He is in full emergency-management mode, a short, bristle-haired bundle of talk and energy, fielding telephone calls from the engineers, walkie-talkie transmissions from the chief mate, dealing with the helmsman, conferring with Randolph. El Faro still coasts along—a thirty-thousand-ton ship doesn’t stop simply because her propeller quits turning, the momentum on her will sustain movemen
t for several minutes more. But momentum is not enough for the rudder to bite, for the ship to go where pointed, she will not turn right to an easterly course, allowing the wind to blast her port side and reestablish a starboard list. Apparently it would require the full force of El Faro’s plant to push the ship against the wind and waves toward the right; the list to port creates extra drag on that side and makes a rightward turn yet harder.

  She falls off the wind to port, and the wind pushes harder and harder against her starboard side. From now on her list leftward will continue, and deepen, making it that much more difficult to reestablish suction in the oil pump.

  Even now the ship is leaning to port more than ever, probably somewhere around fifteen degrees.

  Earlier Shultz mentioned an eighteen-degree list, which was probably a combined list and roll, but even fifteen degrees is a lot, it doesn’t sound like much but imagine the floor of your house that much off true, to the extent that one foot set against the slope is four inches higher than the other; Earth’s very gravity feels different, everything rolls or tumbles in that direction, you have to compensate with each movement, walk uphill against the incline, you can’t set your coffee mug down without its sliding off the table. Bear in mind also that your house isn’t rolling, pitching, or hitting swells about as subtly as a Mack truck driving into a wall.

  Davidson hangs up. “They’ll bring everything back up online,” he announces.

  It’s 6:16 in the morning. The sun won’t rise for almost an hour but even if it were day, what manner of light could pierce this apocalypse of rain and surf now blasting the bridge windows? Despite the eerie, unaccustomed absence of engine sounds everyone must speak loudly against the berserk howl of wind outside. The smash of driven water seems even more mind-numbing than before.

  Water, probably from thrown spray, has been coming through the engine-room vents. Davidson gets back on the phone to the engineers. He wants to know if the starboard ramp tank has been filled back up to seek rightward tilt. The senior third engineer, Holland, confirms the ballast and bilge pumps are all running. Shultz is in the engine room, on walkie-talkie, and Davidson asks him for another update on the ballast; the captain seems more concerned with ballast than with water in the holds, perhaps he’s unaware of the relatively insignificant effect filling a ramp tank will have. (Here, too, the ship’s conversions, which took out several ballast tanks that the crew could have juggled to more effectively rebalance the ship, might have had an effect not only in reducing ballasting options, but in engendering faulty assumptions in the skipper’s mind.) The captain asks Randolph to go below and wake Riehm up, and she asks for permission to detour to her cabin and change into work clothes.

  Hamm points out water starting to drip into the bridge.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the captain says.

  When Randolph gets back, he asks her to start programming the two automated distress systems. The covert SSAS function will send an automated distress signal with GPS position attached. GMDSS is a SAT-C distress text message to which Randolph manually appends the ship’s position; it has yes/no options for the type of emergency and where to send “Help!” emails. The second mate is unsure which to choose: “All I got is ‘flooding,’ or we can do, um, ‘disabled and adrift.’ ”

  “I would do a bunch of them,” Davidson advises.

  The engine room calls again. “That’s good news,” Davidson tells whomever he’s talking to below, and, turning to Randolph: “They’re gonna get that boiler back up online any second. . . . They’re gettin’ lube-oil pressure up.”I

  The radar goes out again but it’s not important; rpms are showing on the indicator, the engine’s running again, and Davidson tells Hamm, “All right Frank, you got some turns right now,” meaning the prop is starting to spin. A slight tremble must arise as the turbine works again. But it’s all too brief. The engine stops almost immediately.

  “That’s a small victory right there,” Davidson remarks hopefully.

  Hamm grunts, still holding the wheel to starboard. He has been hunched at the steering station now for more than an hour. “You okay, Frank?” the captain asks him.

  “You’re gettin’ a leg workout,” Randolph teases the AB. “Feelin’ those thi-i-ighs burn?”

  Waves smash in rapid succession against the house.

  “That’s why I don’t go out there,” Davidson comments.

  And Randolph makes coffee.

  “Cream and sugar?” she asks Hamm. “Do your thing,” he says.

  The second mate laughs. “Sugar is fine with the captain, right?”

  “Give me Splenda,” Hamm says, “not the regular sugar.”

  “Might be a little bumpy,” Randolph says, “but coffee . . . yep.”

  At 6:55 Davidson picks up the satellite phone and punches in a set of digits posted over the bridge controls: it’s the cell phone number of John Lawrence, the safety manager at Tote. Lawrence is in Atlanta, attending the safety convention. The call goes to voice mail.

  “All the wind on the starboard side here,” Davidson tells the recording. His voice is calm, though underneath his words an underlying tension is audible. “Now a scuttle was left open or popped open or whatever so we got some flooding down in 3-hold—a significant amount. Getting a pretty good list. Umm . . . everybody’s safe now, we’re not gonna abandon ship . . . we are in dire straits right now.”

  “How long we s’posed to be in this storm?” Hamm asks after the captain hangs up.

  “Should get better all the time,” the captain says brightly, and repeats what is sounding more and more like a mantra, or a wish that might come true by virtue of repetition: “Right now we’re on the back side of it.”

  A series of metallic objects crashes into the house outside. After the noise subsides, Davidson picks up the sat-phone again to call Tote offices. At first he apparently gets a recording, and recites pretty much the same message he left earlier, except that he calls what happened a “navigational incident.” Then, it appears, the call is automatically transferred to a call center the company has contracted with to handle off-schedule messages; a call center Davidson had problems with a year earlier.II It takes a while for someone to answer and when the call goes through, the woman on the other end sounds like a typical call-center operator, clueless and programmatic.

  “Okay, sir.”

  “Are you connecting me through to a QI?” (QI is office-speak for “qualified individual.”) Davidson sounds less calm, even aggressive: Is it possible he recognizes the voice on the other end from his call last year?

  “That’s what I’m getting right now,” the operator replies politely, “is, seeing who is, uh, on call, I’m gonna get you right to them gimme one second sir, I’m gonna put you on a quick hold so one moment please.

  “Okay sir,” the operator continues shortly afterward, “I just need your name please.” Davidson supplies it. The operator asks for his rank, and the captain supplies that. She then asks for the ship’s name.

  “El Faro,” Davidson says impatiently.

  “Spell that? E, l, . . .”

  “O-o-o-h man, the clo—the clock is ticking, can I please speak with a QI!” The tension in the captain’s voice is out in the open. But he must give in to the ritual, using the NATO phonetic alphabet: “El Faro! Echo, Lima, space, Foxtrot, Alpha, Romeo, Oscar! El Faro!”

  The operator asks for, and Davidson supplies, his phone numbers. She then continues, “Got it sir, again I’m gonna get you reached right now, one moment please—” and puts him on hold once more. While he’s on hold, Davidson addresses Shultz on the walkie-talkie, calling, “And mate, what do you see down there? What do you see?”

  A different voice comes on the sat phone. “Hi, good morning, my name is Sharita, just give me a moment I’m gonna try to connect you now okay? Mister Davidson?”

  “Okay.”

  “One moment please. Hi—”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Thank you for waiting—”

&
nbsp; “Oh God!”

  “Just really briefly, what is the problem you’re having?”

  It takes several agonizing minutes for the operator to connect him to Lawrence’s voice mail, and the safety manager is still unavailable so Davidson has to leave another message: but this time around Lawrence spots the voice mail and calls back almost immediately.

  Davidson sketches out what has happened, mentioning a ten- to fifteen-degree list that he ascribes in good part to wind, waves that are “ten to twelve feet over [something inaudible],” adding that because of the lack of lube-oil pressure the engine is down; they are pumping out water but not gaining ground so far. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up before I push that [automated distress call] button,” he explains. “We are gonna stay with the ship—no one’s panicking. . . . Our safest bet is to stay with the ship during this particular time. The weather is ferocious out there. . . .

  “I wanna push that SSAS button,” he finishes. “. . . Just wanted to give you that courtesy so you wouldn’t be blindsided by it—everybody’s safe right now, we’re in survival mode now.”

  The storm waves at El Faro’s position have grown well beyond twelve feet, according to weather data assembled later. They are probably closer to twenty on average, sometimes thirty; unless Davidson means twelve feet over 2nd Deck or Main, he underestimates their size. The list, too, most likely exceeds “ten to fifteen degrees”; the mate’s estimate was eighteen degrees an hour ago. The captain’s habit of resolutely looking on the bright side—despite the occasional, clashing mention of “survival” and “dire straits”—not to mention his drive to extend every courtesy to his employer, is so strong and evident that Lawrence, hanging up, doesn’t get the sense El Faro is in immediate danger. Then again, like everyone else at Tote, he has not been tracking Joaquin and doesn’t realize El Faro now rides near the very center of the storm.