Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  Davidson turns to Randolph. “All right, Second Mate, send that message.”

  Randolph pushes the button. A strident alarm sounds as the SAT-C terminal responds to its own distress signal.

  “Wake everybody up!” Davidson yells almost angrily. “Wake ’em up. . . . We’re gonna be good, we’re gonna make it right here.”

  3

  All the mates are now awake, and all or most of the engineering officers as well, but in the unlicensed-personnel quarters three decks below the bridge a good portion of the crew have been asleep, or trying to sleep. They’d be looking for that last shut-eye before their alarms go off, since the day men and the eight-to-twelve watch, assuming they want a regular breakfast, need to be in the mess no later than seven thirty to eat before showing up for work fifteen minutes before shift as tradition dictates. They hunker down in a bunk that has canted more than fifteen degrees to port; a bunk that, even if you narrow it with life jackets, rolls and pitches and bucks around more and more as the night wears on. Davidson earlier twice referred to “getting everybody up,” but it seems he was talking about alerting Tote and the Coast Guard, not his own crew. Perhaps this has something to do with his obsessive optimism; getting all the crew up and ready to abandon ship would be a final admission that everything has gone horribly wrong.III

  To be fair, though, there’s not much the crew could do anyway, save pick up life jacket and survival suit and hump them to their muster station, as they have done before in drills. Most of the muster stations are port and starboard on the “embarkation deck,” otherwise known as the engineers’ quarters, the level to which the lifeboats would be lowered for the crew to board. More important, it’s also where the life rafts are stored. Everyone would have to stand or squat in the corridors at that level since it’s far too rough to wait on the deck outside.

  Coast Guard hearings later will reveal that the lifeboat drill on El Faro might have been skipped, or at least skimped on, several voyages running. Former members of the Polish riding crew will testify that they’ve never attended a drill aboard. It’s another indication of the complacency that El Faro’s normally calm run to and from Puerto Rico has engendered among her crew. In any case, if there’s one thing that’s obvious to anyone with seafaring experience, it’s that El Faro’s antiquated lifeboats will be useless in a storm like this. SOLAS regulations require only that lifeboats be able to launch at angles of fifteen degrees or under, and El Faro at this point—especially given the added component of wave-induced roll—is certainly listing much more than that. And even if the boats could be launched in such waves, even if they managed to get clear of the ship without being smashed like rotten pumpkins against her sides, the massive blows of sea and wind combined would capsize or swamp the open craft within minutes, if not seconds.

  The four twenty-five-man inflatable life rafts strapped next to the boats are the ticket out.

  Jack Jackson will be awake. He’s on watch at eight but more than likely he hasn’t slept at all. Earlier he vowed to get his Gumby suit ready for action, he even talked about personal emergency beacons, and his awareness of where the ship is heading must have made sleep difficult if not impossible. Larry Davis is not on watch till noon, but he, too, was on the bridge when it became clear where the ship was going, and might have lain awake afterward.

  The most obvious place to hang out, for those worrying about the ship’s course or even those who can’t sleep for other reasons, would probably be the crew’s mess, where they could go not just for coffee and a bite but also to talk with others and find some atavistic comfort, some sense of hearth and shelter from the elements, in a place that most of the time is alive with hot drinks, food, and conversation, even if right now you have to hang on to the metal tables to stay upright. At this hour they can always count on talking with Lonnie Jordan, Ted Quammie, or Lashawn Rivera, as the galley crew does its level best to fix some sort of breakfast; in these waves, it’s a little like trying to serve food on horseback. Maybe one of them has the Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” running through his head, in particular the lines “When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin’ / Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya”; though given how that song ends, no one willingly entertains this earworm right now. Jordan has to make sure plenty of coffee is available anyway, and the makings of a DIY meal of cereal, toast, jam. He might just be able to fix scrambled eggs, but a western omelet? Not a chance.

  Some of the older, more experienced crew—Carey Hatch, the oiler; Lightfoot, the bosun; Mariette Wright, the AB—might have been woken up early by what felt to them like an event against nature, the stilling of El Faro’s plant. Silent engines are for quiet harbors. A steamship without engines has switched from agency, direction, and power to helplessness and passivity. She will lie parallel to the swells, in a position of maximum vulnerability to their roll and crash, and that roll and crash, combined with the silent engines, stir unease. The crew might not phrase it that way, but they’re aware in their gut of how unnatural, and perilous, such a state must be in a storm; it may be that they’re waiting, at best for someone to tell them what’s going on, at worst for the first call to muster.

  Instead, those who are up likely sit around a table together, holding on to coffee and Pop-Tarts so they don’t slide to the deck, just feeling the ship move and shudder as she drifts sideways now, side-slammed by the wind; listening hard for the slowly strengthening, trembling beat that would mean the engines have started up again; feeling for the change in motion as El Faro pulls out of her sideways drift and faces the storm again as a fighting ship. Maybe one or three of them have followed Jackson’s example and staggered back to their cabins to fetch life vests and Gumby suits. Waiting for the rest of the day crew, the electrician, the Polish riding gang, to straggle in—or not, since it’s more than likely the ship’s increasingly violent and passive motion has caused seasickness, especially among the Poles, who are not professional seamen. Seasickness is usually good for a few not-unsympathetic cracks, anything to break the tension of waiting.

  4

  Seawater spritzing from the ventilation ducts makes footing more hazardous than usual in the engine room, but so far does not affect the ship’s electronics; ample power is still being supplied by the two generators, which, though powered by steam, like the main engine, are independently lubricated. Presumably Shawn Thomas keeps an eye on the control console while the engineering officers gather around the three pressure points at which the situation could be rectified: first, the bilge pump, which is valiantly chugging but not making headway against water in the holds. Mathias, true to his can-do, cranberry-farmer background, is trying to figure out a way to rig a separate, air-powered pump that will suck out more water through a different access hatch.

  The second pressure point would be the valves controlling flow from the lube-oil gravity tank. Under Chief Pusatere the engine room has gone through multiple troubleshooting drills, but it’s highly unlikely anyone posited a background condition of fifteen degrees of list—a list that is now getting much worse. The low-frequency boom of storm waves resonates throughout the light-dark space between machines. Tension digs deep lines in the faces and eyes of the engineers, and more shadow collects there now.

  Later, tests conducted by the Coast Guard will show that El Faro’s sump-oil level at departure—24.6 inches—when paired with an eighteen-degree list would cause the mouth of the oil-pump intake pipe to break entirely free of the oil’s surface and suck dry. If the oil was at the lower operating range of seventeen inches, the pump would suck air when the ship listed fifteen degrees. What has probably been happening is that hard rolls inevitably worsened the list to over fifteen degrees, causing air sporadically to enter the system and choke off oil flow. Now as the list deepens, the oil intake pipe is continuously dry.

  If the sump held the recommended level of oil, twenty-seven inches, the oil would most likely keep flowing, even at a list of eighteen degrees.

 
The third pressure point is the ten-ton reserve oil tank, whose outflow pipe is too narrow to refill the sump, but which can be used to prime the oil pumps and get rid of any air trapped inside prior to starting them again.

  Pusatere calls the bridge, looking for a status update, and Davidson tells him, talk to the chief mate, who has been in the holds and seen the water rising firsthand. Pusatere tells Shultz the bilge alarm in 2A-hold, the next forward from 3-hold, has just gone off, indicating this hold is also filling with water. No one has time to speculate about it on the bridge, but logically there could only be two reasons for this: either the gates between the different holds are allowing water through, probably because of faulty seals or because they weren’t closed properly; or else there’s another leak somewhere else. One source, Pusatere thinks, might be the firefighting system, whose main intake pipe allows water into the hull for use in fire hoses.

  “The cars that are floating in three-hold?” Davidson asks Shultz once he has hung up, on the bridge.

  “There are cars,” Shultz agrees. “They’re subs.”

  Davidson laughs, then asks if any of them were near the main fire pipe.

  “I saw cars bobbing around.”

  “Think they coulda come through there?”

  “Yeah, there’s a fire main in the aft end, water could have . . .”

  Davidson calls the engine room again. “Can you isolate the fire main from down in the, uh, engine room? . . . ’Cause that may be the root cause of the water comin’ in. . . . Isolate it from your side, so there’s no free communication from the sea.”

  5

  On the bridge nothing much has changed except that the storm now lashes the starboard windows harder and the deck is tilting even more the other way, to port, as El Faro drifts on, her great length now lined up with the vast and deepening troughs of Joaquin’s rollers. Hamm, at the wheel, is trying to tweak the ship’s heading. More spray must be getting into the wheelhouse: white noise from frying electronics fills the area. Davidson tells the chief mate to shut down some of the electricity panels so water won’t short them out.

  Shultz mentions possible difficulties with pumping more than one hold—if the ballast pump sucks air, he suggests, it, too, could wind up shutting down.

  Suddenly Davidson’s reserves of optimism are sucking as dry as the lube-oil pump. “Don’t think it’s gettin’ any better,” he says, of the list most likely; maybe of everything else that has gone so badly wrong.

  Randolph has been doing the second mate’s job: navigating, staring at the working radar screen, the GPS repeater. “We’re drifting southwest,” she tells the captain now.

  Mathias calls from the engine room with a general question about how things are going (“It’s lookin’ pretty nasty,” Davidson says); and a more specific query about the down-flooding angle, the angle of heel at which ventilation intakes on 2nd Deck, normally well above any conceivable wave action, will be underwater, at which point the engine room will start to flood. It’s not just a technical question: if the engine room starts to flood, the ship will sink. It’s more like Mathias is asking how long El Faro has to live.

  “Um, that I don’t have an answer for ya,” the captain says.IV

  Mathias suggests digging out information in the chief engineer’s office, which nobody has time to do right now; and even if they tried they would be unsuccessful, since Tote’s sparse stability guidelines include no information about downflooding angles, or even where flooding might occur.V

  Clearly the list is going from bad to worse, and the rate at which it’s getting worse is speeding up. Although Davidson tells Mathias, “We still got reserve buoyancy and stability,” the next thing he says is “All right, we’re gonna ring the general alarm here and get everybody up. . . . We’re definitely not in good shape here.

  “Just make a round on two-deck and see what you can see,” he tells Shultz. “This isn’t gettin’ any better.” Then, ever solicitous of his crew: “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Shultz says. “I’m not sure I wanna go on second deck. I’ll open a door down there and look out . . . chest-deep water.”

  The chief mate fights his way down the stairs, which must now be tilting like a fun-house corridor. Davidson calls him up almost immediately on the walkie-talkie.

  “Hey, chief mate. This is just a heads-up. I’m gonna ring the general alarm. Get ya muster while you’re down there. Muster all, mate.” Then Davidson rings the engine room with the same message: “We’re not gonna abandon ship or anything just yet, all right? We’re gonna stay with it.

  “Yeah, all is fine,” Davidson continues, with a flash of his old optimism, “. . . but let everybody know I’m gonna ring the general alarm.” Then he turns to the second mate and shouts, “Ring it!”

  A high-frequency ringing erupts throughout the bridge—throughout the ship. A familiar sound at noon, when it’s always tested; the sound of danger, fear, a damn serious situation at any other time, and especially when the ship is tilting in this way, so obviously sick, jerking like someone hurt, while what can be seen and heard through portholes and windows speaks of something insane outside, crazy dangerous, wind and sea gone into a whole other state, sick with senseless fury. Adrenaline surges, pulse spikes. The stomach, if not already upset by the ship’s rolling, cramps with tension. Anyone still asleep will be jackknifing out of his or her bunk at this point, halfway ejected to port if his bunk is to starboard, ears numb from the alarm, stumbling against the list and foul movement, groping for the light switch, throwing on pants and T-shirt, fumbling out the life jacket, survival suit. In the corridors people are yelling. The first reflex of most mariners, after grabbing life vest and Gumby, is to pound on their buddies’ doors, make sure they’re up. The second is to get to the muster station: embarkation deck, which is the engineers’ level, two flights up from the mess, one from the crew’s quarters. Moving as fast as possible on a deck that feels like it’s lusting to become vertical bulkhead, a wall; hanging on to railings with one hand, Gumby with the other, trying not to be knocked on your ass when the ship rolls hard—it takes time to put on a survival suit, you have to lay it flat on the deck and drag it on one leg at a time, like pulling on farmer johns made of thick rubber, no easy task; might as well get to muster station first and await orders?

  Shultz is on the embarkation deck yelling at everybody to muster on the starboard side. Muster station for half the crew is normally to port, but that side is close to the water and the deck there is regularly being cleared by waves.

  Davidson’s voice crackles from the chief mate’s walkie-talkie. “Yeah, what I’d like to make sure, everybody has their immersion suits and, uh—get a good head count.”

  On the bridge a mid-frequency beeping sounds insistently; it will never quit. Randolph is looking out a window; from somewhere there’s enough light to see the deck through the storm waves now washing the containers or looming mountainous against the canted windows. “All right, I got containers in the water!” she yells.

  “All right,” Davidson yells back. “All right, let’s go ahead and ring it—ring the ‘abandon ship.’ ”

  For the first time in her life the second mate does what no mariner ever wants to do: she smacks the brightly colored button that signifies the ship is lost. A shrill bell, different from the general alarm, starts to clang, seven times in a row, then another seven—and keeps on clanging.

  “Tell ’em we’re goin’ in!” Davidson calls.

  “Can I get my vest?” Randolph asks the captain.

  “Yup,” Davidson says. “Bring mine up, too, and one for Frank.”

  “I need two,” Hamm says—is the big AB actually joking in this?

  “Bow is down,” the captain remarks; and El Faro begins to die.

  6

  Spare life jackets are usually stored in the bridge lockers. It’s not clear if they are missing for some reason or if Davidson and Randolph, in the great tension of the moment, simply forget. What is clear is this: Second Mat
e Randolph, Captain Davidson, and Able Seaman Hamm, while the ship is being evacuated, don’t waste a second doubting that their job is to stay on El Faro’s bridge till the rest of the crew has been taken care of.

  Randolph edges fast down the companionway, pushing herself off the port wall of the staircase to stay somewhat level, to her cabin on the next deck. One deck below that, Shultz is likely counting off crew members as they wrestle their way out the door on the house’s starboard side; a door the sailors have probably struggled to hook open against the brute shove of 120 mph wind and rashers of seawater slashing in, climbing their way now up an ever-more slanted and soaked deck, breath rasping in their throats, ears ringing with the storm’s noise, which is mind-blowing, stunning in and of itself; it sounds like women screaming at the volume of a jet engine, howling high from the pain of torture, and maybe above that the high-pitched shrieking of the sadistic, ululating Furies who stretch the women on a wrack of storm.

  Some of the crew, Jack Jackson for example, might already have their suits on, but for those who haven’t had time to don them, dragging themselves up while carrying the heavy suits is increasingly difficult.

  For the engine-room crew the task is that much harder. Before evacuating, the chief will push the “trip” button on the console that shuts off boiler fires, it’s part of the discipline in an emergency. If an engineer can get that far, he’ll try to turn a safety valve that dumps steam from the boilers as well, but the valve is not as easy to reach as the trip button and, as one ex-engineer on El Faro puts it, “Once you go to ‘abandon ship’ you’re just trying to get out.” Getting out involves negotiating metal decks that are canted and slick; water now is most likely starting to pour from vent outlets into the machinery spaces, making steam where it touches hot surfaces. With luck none of the steam pipes hanging from old and rusted brackets have been dislodged and burst by the ship’s increasingly violent rolls; it’s hard enough navigating catwalks that are halfway to horizontal, then two flights of steel steps to Main Deck (or up the escape stairway aft to 2nd Deck) and another three to the embarkation deck—up, and up, with your heart in your mouth, you do not want to be trapped below when this happens—and finally climbing out of the engineering spaces through the starboard door of the embarkation deck to the wacked-out howling of Joaquin. Mitch Kuflik, at least, can be glad of his youth and fitness as he negotiates what must feel more like an obstacle course than a ship.