Davidson’s voice comes loud through Shultz’s walkie-talkie. “All right, Chief Mate—Chief Mate.”
“Go ahead, Captain,” Shultz replies.
“Yeah, yeah”—Davidson is yelling—“get into your rafts! Throw all your rafts in the water.”
“Throw the rafts into the water,” Shultz yells back, “roger.”
“Everybody get off, get off the ship,” the captain calls. “Stay together.”
The rafts are unstrapped. The starboard side of El Faro’s hull is probably not all the way horizontal yet but it’s not far off, which means the decks cant not far off the vertical. Standard operating procedure is to lift the rafts over the rail, holding on to a lanyard that once tugged will both inflate the raft and keep it tied to the ship; which is fine for calm weather, or even rough weather, but this is not rough weather, this is madness. Some waves, towering near fifty feet high, explode foaming over the ship, it feels like you are being eaten by a monster and a raft is just not made for this, two people must work together to manhandle it over the railing and the railing is suddenly much higher and because of the list and surging foam the deck is near-impossible to find footing on.
El Faro is sinking lower in the water. The waves, even the average twenty-, thirty-footers, wash over the ship’s length now; the port side has long gone underwater, and surf washes up toward the bridge on that side and even over the starboard side, where most of the crew now crowds. The waves start to overwhelm the decks, wash among the sailors, great walls of whipped water and death reach for them; maybe one of the rafts, rolled with some difficulty over the rail and having barely had enough time to inflate, is torn away from its tether and disappears behind one of those water mountains. Maybe people jump after it on their own, in Gumbies or not in Gumbies—or crowd around the next raft, this time waiting for the ship to sink lower so they can board directly as she goes down.
Many of the containers are certainly loose by now, crowding into their neighbors, breaking the lashings of other containers, ripping open their corrugated sides as they fall into each other, against the house, against the hull. The wind, blowing over 120 mph, takes these goods intended for Walmart, Walgreens, Juanito’s Hardware Store, the people of Puerto Rico, as they spill into the tempest—cans of paint, pallets of detergent, chairs, toasters, rice, Jet Skis, ballpoints, deodorant sticks, swing sets, alternators—the wind blasts them into the water and, also, from those boxes that tumbled and busted open on the vessel’s side, blasts them back against El Faro in a so-called piñata effect, which turns disposable razors, boxes of screwdrivers, and bottles of Karo syrup into shrapnel that will cut like a shiv into any human standing in the way.
The two rafts on El Faro’s lower, port side are underwater; their hydrostatic release inflates them automatically when submerged. They might get clear of the collapsing superstructure, might survive the piñata effect, but they are too far away for the crew to reach, assuming they can even see the rafts. You can swim in a Gumby suit but not fast, and unoccupied rafts, even with the water-filled baffles underneath that are meant to prevent this, will be snatched up by such a wind and pitched into oblivion.
El Faro is leaning ever farther; the surf on her upper side must be powerful enough to wash what’s left of the crew off embarkation deck, and if that’s the case they would try to simultaneously inflate, hang on to, and board the last raft as the wind tackles them off-balance and the breakers roar and surge now over them, maybe ripping some people away, or grabbing the raft or taking all of them who clutch the raft’s tether and boarding lines. Hanging on to a raft in this hurricane feels like—no, it is like hanging on to a parachute deployed, more than likely the wind just takes this raft, too, and makes it fly—it is ripped from the hands of anyone hanging on as brutally and finally as if they were trying to hang on to a speeding train.
Those without Gumby suits will try to swim, and they will be buried, with merciful speed, as waves now the size of ships topple onto them and they cannot find their way out in the liquid dark, or even know which way is up when the blackness takes them.
Those who managed to pull a survival suit on will assume they’ll float off and maybe survive, because in water this warm they can live for days. And if the suit has been fastened correctly, it should keep them on the surface. The trouble is, “surface” is the term for a clear interface between water and air, and no such interface exists here with combers between twenty and fifty feet rolling and collapsing on top of you. And even on the waves’ summits, or in a brief calm between them, the mix of water and air whipped off by such winds is not something you can breathe; every time you draw breath you are taking in not oxygen but an emulsion of surf and wind, something that’s half-Atlantic and half–Force 11 and all Joaquin; it will fill your lungs and drown you almost as quickly as if you sank five fathoms under.
Drowning slowly is no fun, at least at first. Saltwater drowning is different from dying in fresh water because the sea’s water is hypertonic, meaning that for a given volume it contains more particulates and less water than the fluid inside lung cells, which means that water will be sucked out of the cells, through osmosis, to reestablish balance. This makes the blood thicker; thickened blood, being much harder to pump, overloads the circulatory system and causes cardiac arrest within eight minutes.
Drowning fast, when the person drowning cannot hold his or her breath any longer, means going from voluntary breath-holding, or apnea, to involuntary, otherwise known as lack of oxygen due to inhaling water. In most people the process takes less than two minutes and is marked at first by panic and agony. The blood is so full of carbon dioxide that the brain doesn’t work right and figures breathing water is no worse than holding your breath, whereupon the mouth gulps down water against the swimmer’s will. In some people a phenomenon known as laryngospasm shuts down the windpipe, and the person passes out without ingesting any more water. In most, water floods the lungs. Blackness closes in, and the swimmer loses consciousness.
But the cliché of seeing one’s life pass before one’s eyes, apparently, is not so far-fetched. As the brain shuts down, it releases endorphins, allowing the illusion of a serene, out-of-body state. The survivor of a ship sunk in the late nineteenth century in a hurricane off Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) wrote this of the experience: “Gradually the pain seemed to ease up. I appeared to be in a pleasant dream. . . . Before losing consciousness, the pain had completely disappeared and the sensation was actually pleasant.” VI The writer, a Scottish doctor, floated to the surface while unconscious and lived to tell the tale.
7
El Faro is capsizing now.VII Michael Davidson is still on the bridge, and so is the able seaman on duty, Frank Hamm. The deck is approaching vertical. The voyage data recorder is still running. It is time to let these men speak entirely for themselves:
HAMM: “Cap.”
DAVIDSON: “What? . . . Come on, Frank. Gotta move. We gotta move. You gotta get up. You gotta snap out of it—and we gotta get out.”
HAMM: “Okay.”
DAVIDSON: “Come up.”
HAMM: “Okay. . . . Help me.”
DAVIDSON (yelling): “You gotta get to safety, ya gotta get to safety, Frank!”
HAMM: “Cap. Captain!”
DAVIDSON: “. . . Ya all right?”
The sound of a loud electronic pulsing alarm starts up, repeating about two pulses per second. The pulsing alarm, along with the previous ringing, continues to the end of the recording.
HAMM: “Captain! . . . Help me.”
DAVIDSON: “Frank? . . . Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Work your way up here.”
HAMM: “I can’t.”
DAVIDSON: “Frank.”
HAMM: “Help me!”
DAVIDSON: “You’re okay. Come on. . . . Don’t freeze up, Frank! Come on.”
HAMM: “Cap! Are you—?”
DAVIDSON: “Where are the life preservers on the bridge? . . . Yeah! Go ahead and grab one . . . follow me.”
HAMM: “I can’
t.”
DAVIDSON: “Yes, you can.”
HAMM: “My feet are slipping. . . . Goin’ down!”
DAVIDSON: “You’re not goin’ down. Come on.”
HAMM: “I need a ladder.”
DAVIDSON: “We don’t have a ladder, Frank.”
HAMM: “A line!”
DAVIDSON: “I don’t have a line, Frank.”
HAMM: “You gonna leave me.”
DAVIDSON: “I’m not leavin’ you, let’s go!”
HAMM (shouting): . . . “I need someone to . . . help me. You gonna help me?”
DAVIDSON: “I’m the only one here, Frank.”
HAMM: “I can’t. I can’t! I’m gone.”
DAVIDSON: “No, you’re not.”
HAMM: “Just help me.”
DAVIDSON: “Frank! Let’s go.”
A low-frequency rumble builds until the end of the recording.
DAVIDSON: “Frank . . . it’s time to come this way.”
A yelling starts, and is cut off by the termination of the recording.
8
And so El Faro capsizes. She’s lying almost entirely submerged on her port side. Her wheelhouse is underwater, though the starboard bridge wing probably pokes out of a trough now and again. The starboard running light, well insulated against the elements, still bravely shines its green into inferno. Most of her crew have been washed away, lacerated, crushed into the sea, drowned. Given the difficulty of climbing out of a ship that’s on her side, or close, one or two people, particularly among the engineering staff, might not have made it to the embarkation deck doors in time and will either have drowned inside the house or are trapped in air pockets.
Water pours through all twenty-two vents, filling the engine room and cargo spaces at the rate of tens of thousands of gallons, hundreds of tons a minute. The waves have been pounding the containers, over and over, like hill-sized sledgehammers, and these blows, combined with the pull of gravity dragging the boxes sideways, and the pile-on effect from containers that busted loose before, have caused the ship’s deck load to break free entirely. Now the boxes, cracked open or whole, are rolling in and out of troughs in the hull’s lee like ice cubes in a cocktail shaker, crushing between their steel sides and macerated contents anything or anybody still floating on that side of the ship.
Paradoxically, with the weight of containers gone, the water that has filled most of El Faro’s holds, together with the weight of cars and trailers in her nether compartments, lowers the ship’s center of gravity once more. The waves are bigger than ever, regularly rolling over forty feet; the ship, though, rides with her starboard side at surface level, barely afloat, if you can call a temporary presence among this range of moving, wind-savaged mountains “afloat.” The waves and wind have little to push against, and slowly, painfully, the great weight in her gut levers the ship upright, raising the right side of the house out of the sea. The water streaming off decks and companionways is immediately torn away by wind, though wind pressure, in a ghostly replay of the sailing effect that started the ship’s earlier list, also works against the side, slows this righting.
Or it could be that the weight of water in the ship’s holds, moving in the opposite direction on the buoyancy scale, reaches the sinking threshold while the vessel is still canted over so that she starts to drop sideways at first, slowly righting herself as she goes down until, ironically, she is riding the way she was designed to, bottom down, wheelhouse on top, but underwater now. The tumult of storm loosens its grip on the last man-made protuberances: a davit, a broken raft lanyard, a still-tethered lifeboat. Or, if the ship rights herself first, the mast on the wheelhouse roof and whatever else survives there stands against the wind for a few seconds, until the deep quiet and pressure of underwater envelops the entire ship, leaving nothing but the flotsam of El Faro’s broken world to be chewed and raged upon and gloated over by her assassin.
Calculations of sinking rates based on other shipwrecks, most notably that of RMS Titanic, indicate that a ship El Faro’s size going down on a relatively even keel would reach speeds, more perpendicular than vertical, of between 35 and 50 mph. She probably starts her long dive in reverse, down by the stern, since her deck cargo has gone and the weight of engines and ballast aft is pulling her that way: backing out of the living world, turning now in the opposite direction of her last, northwest heading, sinking three vertical feet for every horizontal foot, plunging southwestward into the caverns of the sea.
The exact depth underneath El Faro at her final surface position, forty-six nautical miles southeast of San Salvador, is 15,400 feet: 2.92 miles.
What little light Joaquin’s thunderheads let through, filtered by ocean water, quickly dims to nothing as the ship goes down. At fifteen feet reds disappear; yellows are gone at forty-five feet, and greens at seventy-five. Although somewhere high above Joaquin’s thunderheads the sun is rising, almost no light shines at the surface, and by the time the ship reaches two hundred feet she is in total darkness.
The pressure of water increases by one atmosphere, 14.7 pounds, every thirty-three feet. Air pockets inside the house, squeezed by rapidly increasing pressure, find chinks in accommodation spaces and companionways, and a thousand globules burble madly upward from every corner of the ship through the encroaching depths. Eventually, in fealty to the laws of physics, the pressurized gas jimmies open whatever panels or bulkheads kept it contained, and if someone is still alive in there he might be knocked unconscious by the blowout. If the bulkheads hold, he could breathe and survive for some time since the trapped air would be pressurized, as in a scuba tank, to the same number of atmospheres as the surrounding water. The deepest a human has ever dived without protection is just over a thousand feet, and so he might continue to breathe as his ship sank deeper and deeper, until the monstrous pressure, acting on the different densities of liquid and air inside his organs, tore them apart; but it won’t happen that way.
It won’t happen that way because El Faro’s engine room contains two four-story-high boilers holding fireboxes of commensurate size that until a few minutes ago were generating steam at a pressure of 850 psi each, heated to 900°F, holding that steam hermetically sealed inside a jungle gym of pipes, valves, and machinery. Pusatere and his officers, once the “abandon ship” was sounded, killed the fires and probably tried to release the steam, but they’d only have had seconds to do so before the list got so bad that they couldn’t operate anymore down there, and anyway they had to look to their own survival and get out, so the process could not have been completed.
The Atlantic water is warm. At almost 90°F its warmth is what allowed Joaquin to become the monster it has turned into; but in a process that’s the opposite of its atmospheric equivalent, the deeper you go, the less sun can warm it, so the water chills down fast with depth. Anyway, even at ninety degrees it would be killingly cold by contrast with nine-hundred-degree steam pipes. Once water gets inside the insulation and feels up the metal of the boilers’ shells, thermal stress created between the rapidly moving molecules in hot areas, versus the slower molecules in spaces touched by seawater, causes the steel to crack. It’s as if some of the various forces that have both powered and affected El Faro so far—heated vapor, cooled water, imbalances in stress and temperature—have finally burst through the structures that, by separating them, allowed them usefully to turn, unifying and fusing their elements in one final, cataclysmic event. One boiler probably explodes first, as powerfully as a bomb, setting off the boiler beside it.
The exploding steam and blown water and chunks of boiler debris blast their way into the path of least resistance, the casing through which the engine’s exhaust system vertically extends. The shock wave blows the smokestack clean off, along with everything else left on the wheelhouse roof, mast and radar scanner and GPS antennas. But it doesn’t stop there, the blast is too big and needs more room; it explodes in the joins between structural members and deck plates and lifts the entire top two decks, the navigating officers’ qua
rters and ship’s office, as well as the wheelhouse and bridge wings; peels them all off as if they were a pop-top in the paws of Godzilla, tosses them aside, setting them on their own downward wobble to the bottom.
Any last pockets of air left in the accommodation are blown out like burst balloons, and if any crew members have survived in there, the shock wave would kill them at once.
The explosion is strong enough to send waves of sound bouncing through the Atlantic, echoing along thermal planes of water defining the SOFAR channel (for “sound fixing and ranging”) between 1,200 and 3,900 feet deep, to be recorded as a series of thuds and screeches by hydrophone arrays the US Navy set up to listen for enemy subs.
At 40 mph, even if her vector is diagonal, it would take El Faro less than eight minutes to reach the ocean floor.
She hits bottom stern first, roughly a mile to the southwest of where she started to sink. Her rudder and prop assembly, the heel of her flat transom, drive deep into dozens of feet of silt composed of dead fish and amoebas, plankton and minerals, jellyfish and whale bone, seaweed and jetsam, broken ships, dead pirates; all accumulated there over centuries, over millennia.
Run the Storm Page 23
