Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  The landing crumples the transom. As the rest of the ship slams into the bottom, the hull cracks in several places. The biggest crack opens at frame 200, just aft of the engine room, three feet wide at its broadest point, and runs up the hull’s side and right across the Main Deck. In that area a boiler explosion might have had strong effect; or the crack could be due to the stresses of hitting the ocean floor. Channels running through bottom silt outward from the crack indicate a sudden outflow of water such as might be expected from impact.

  But that crack, or the others, might also have existed before hitting bottom; started where the hull began to fail while El Faro was still alive and moving toward Puerto Rico, allowing the first ingress of water that ultimately killed her, a microscopic thread of entropy that extended as the hull pounded and twisted in the clutches of the hurricane.

  A great cloud of silt explodes around the ship as she settles. The stern sinks deeper. The hull’s forward part presses less deeply, fourteen feet into soft bottom. Bits of ship and cargo, sinking at slower rates, continue to patter down onto the surrounding seabed. The wheelhouse and navigating officers’ deck land right side up eleven hundred yards to the north-northeast of the hull. The stack hits nine hundred yards away in the same direction; the mast—including the voyage data recorder, or black box, housed in a heavy-duty fiberglass cartridge fastened to one of the mast’s supporting beams—six hundred and fifty yards off. All but two of the 391 containers have disappeared, most sunk, some floating off to go down later. The two remaining boxes rest askew on the forward half of Main Deck. A single trailer hangs like a broken tooth, three-quarters of the way out of the forward loading ramp on 2nd Deck.

  Bunker seeps from the ship’s ruptured fuel tanks, and gasoline from smashed Chevrolets and Hondas. Lube oil drifts upward from the shattered engine.

  Usually, at almost three miles down, and except for the almost inaudible noise of deep-dwelling shrimp, it is deathly silent. Now there is noise: the last pockets of air in El Faro’s structure seep away with a slight hiss, metal creaks as the ship settles further; but after a few hours, a few days, the wreck of El Faro subsides into the ambient dark, the killing pressure, and all is silent again forever.

  Resting place: The wreck of El Faro lies three miles down, almost intact, facing northeast, her last heading, in this composite image recorded by deep-sea sonar.

  PART VII

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  AFTERMATH

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  You go on anyway, maybe because you know you have to go on, though you might not even remember why.

  —Bernard Moitessier

  1

  Though the search-and-rescue duty officer who correlates El Faro’s position with that of Joaquin, connecting the dots of effect with those of probable cause, has a gut feeling the ship is in serious trouble, he and other Coast Guard officers following what is at that point merely an “incident,” in the words of Coast Guard captain Jason Neubauer (who later will lead the investigation into the loss), have “a lot of denial” to overcome before accepting that a ship as large as El Faro can simply vanish like this.

  Lawrence, the Tote safety officer, has told the Coast Guard that Tote has hired tugs through T&T Salvage to aid the stricken vessel, and at the time this seems a rational response. For a full day, Neubauer remembers, people speculate that the ship is alive but incommunicado, her antennas knocked off in the storm, making it impossible for her to respond to VHF calls, even from Hurricane Hunter aircraft flying high over her last known position.

  There are issues with “last known position” though, among other problems that hinder search-and-rescue operations. The GMDSS message that Danielle Randolph programmed into the Inmarsat unit included the ship’s GPS position. El Faro drifted after the second mate finished the programming, though only for a short while before she capsized. And given the scale of downflooding she probably sank between fifteen and forty-five minutes after that, so this difference cannot be great.

  Coast Guard officers, however, don’t know that. They must assume El Faro continues to drift, without power, blown probably to the southwest by the fury of a hurricane that still seems to have a mind of its own, still stalks the area where El Faro died.

  The Coast Guard 7th District uses advanced models that pull in weather and ocean data and process them to calculate how far a vessel in trouble and lacking power might drift. But the overall search-and-rescue operations program (called, with the usual federal addiction to acronyms, SAROPS), which has just been updated, keeps crashing and proves largely ineffective. Luckily one of the officers on duty has experience figuring drift the traditional way, using tables that tell you how far a given strength of wind and waves will push a ship of a certain size and shape; wielding also, as Danielle Randolph did only hours ago, the charts, dividers, and parallel rulers of the traditional navigator’s trade.

  There’s another glitch. Inmarsat distress messages format a ship’s position—her latitude and longitude—in ambiguous fashion; the minutes and seconds of degree can be read as either minutes (sixty of them per degree) or decimals of a degree (one hundred per degree). If Randolph’s position, which she wrote in minutes, is read in decimal format, a serious discrepancy will occur; and that’s exactly what happens, the degrees being read as a digital percentage. As a result, all Coast Guard search-and-rescue operations use a last-known position (LKP, in federalese) that is over twenty nautical miles to the northeast of the actual latitude and longitude of El Faro’s sinking.

  None of it will make any difference in the long run. No helicopters can fly search patterns inside the Category 4 hurricane that Joaquin is on October 2. One of the Jayhawks from Great Inagua does manage to fly in a direction away from the hurricane and, in the course of two genuinely heroic missions, pulls twelve seamen out of the water; it’s the entire crew of Minouche, the 212-foot, Bolivia-registered, Haitian-crewed coaster that capsized and sank off Haiti during the evening of October 1.

  A fishing boat also capsizes off Haiti’s north coast between Petit-Trou-de-Nippes and Grand Boucan, but such boats rarely possess radios, and no one tries to rescue its crew. A Haitian fisherman in his thirties drowns.

  Lack of nerve or effort is not one of the hindering factors in the Coast Guard’s search for El Faro. The C-130 turboprop, tail number 1503, that performs the first close-quarters search into the storm on October 2 is a case in point. The pilot, Lieutenant-Commander Jeffery Hustace, is shocked by how powerful and defined are the different bands of wind and precipitation swirling around Joaquin’s horizontal layer cake and tries to slalom through them from the north, without success. Islands that should show up on radar are masked by the bands of wind and rain. He decides on a different tactic, flying out of the hurricane and then back in from the south at near-barnstorming altitude, around two thousand feet over the LKP. It’s the trickiest flying Hustace has ever performed; the C-130 is a big, slow, four-engine turboprop built for military use in all sorts of rough weather and terrains, but this one is bounced like a Ping-Pong ball, eight hundred feet up and down, by the extreme turbulence Joaquin generates; sometimes the huge plane free-falls to within a thousand feet of the surface. Flying so low, so dangerously, allows her crew to look up close and personal at the churned surface of the ocean. “They were giant rollers . . . fifty feet [high],” Hustace says later, “because of the wind, water was blowing off one wave to the next in solid sheets.” The tortured foam, the somber chasms of waves reach greedily for the bucketing aircraft. Nothing else is visible. After seven and a half hours of white-knuckle flying the plane returns to base in Clearwater, Florida, where technicians find the turbulence has stripped out fasteners in one wing, causing fuel to leak. A second C-130 is dispatched to the area later in the day. It is not damaged but reports conditions so severe that all search operations are suspended for the rest of October 2.

  On October 3 the Great Inagua Jayhawk that rescued the Minouche survivors flies north. The pilots
, Lieutenants Joe Chevalier and Kevin Murphy, are charged with finding an EPIRB, possibly from El Faro, that is transmitting near Rum Cay. As they near the Cay the winds approach one hundred knots, and Chevalier has to tack into the storm, following radar to find gaps between lightning-cracked clouds and convective cells; gaps that the hurricane’s circular rush often shuts down before they get there. Conditions are as bad as these pilots have ever seen. The normally clear-blue ocean, Chevalier says, has turned dark; near the islands the water has churned into a sick cloudy color. The white-scarfed rollers are so huge, the terrain-sensing system that under normal circumstances allows the chopper to hold automatically at a given height can’t find a level, and Chevalier dares not fly lower than five hundred feet in case of downdrafts that could drop his aircraft into the drink like a shot of whiskey into a boilermaker. Homing in on the EPIRB’s signal, they fly directly over its position, two miles southeast of Sandy Point on Rum Cay, looking for a survival suit or raft, but nothing is visible in the wrack below. Finally, low on fuel, they return to Great Inagua.

  The EPIRB is never located.I

  Later that same day, a Jayhawk finds an El Faro life ring. Early on October 4, with conditions improving in the area, choppers out of Clearwater and Great Inagua locate fields of debris and oil not far from El Faro’s last reported position.

  On the morning of October 4, El Faro’s sister ship El Yunque is heading south from Jacksonville on her regularly scheduled route. If things had gone differently, if El Faro had taken the Old Bahama Channel, traded cargoes in San Juan, and headed north again, El Yunque would be looking to contact El Faro on VHF today as they crossed paths. Somewhat ironically, given what Davidson did not do, El Yunque has hugged the Florida coast to avoid the trailing edges of Joaquin, then jinked east through the Northwest Providence Channel. She’s now closing in on a position that the ship’s captain, Earl Loftfield, has figured out from wind and current data should be the most likely site of El Faro’s wreck. The sea is calmer now. “Normal working overtime for the deck gang [during the transit] will be as lookouts,” her captain tells Tote headquarters. “NO PLANS for search pattern. However motor-lifeboat is ready for good fortune.”

  At ten thirty that day, not far from the LKP, El Yunque’s lookouts spot an “apparent point of origin for plume of oil rising and creating a slick. . . . At this position,” Loftfield’s transmission reads, “oil was black on the water and air smelled strongly of same. We found the slick after traveling through a debris field for 25 miles, at times having as many as 50 simultaneous sightings.”

  At 4:35 p.m. on October 4, the crew of the Coast Guard Jayhawk that spotted a floating Gumby suit twenty-two nautical miles east of the ship’s last position lowers a rescue swimmer into the swells; thrashing his way over, he finds the suit holds a lifeless body. After three nights and four days exposed to warm seawater and powerful winds, the corpse is so decomposed that the swimmer cannot even tell if it’s a man or a woman. While he’s checking the suit, the on-scene search coordinator, operating from the cutter Northland, relays a message from a Navy P-8 sub-hunting jet that has spotted another immersion suit, twenty minutes of chopper-flying time from this one. He asks the Jayhawk to investigate. The swimmer attaches a miniature transponder to the body and is wound up into the helicopter. The Jayhawk cannot locate another Gumby, only a piece of floating orange plastic, flopping back and forth in the swells in such a manner as to resemble a waving arm. The chopper goes back to retrieve the first Gumby, but cannot find it; the transponder, meanwhile, has gone silent.

  The dead mariner in the survival suit, the only one of El Faro’s crew to be found, sinks to rejoin his, or her, shipmates.

  On Tuesday the sixth, in San Juan, El Yunque’s crew assembles in the ship’s mess. The captain summarizes what is said at the meeting: “Significance of what we have witnessed is acknowledged. The Pain. The Rage. The Knowing. The Work. Our safety through situational awareness and the stifling of afflictive emotions.”II

  A Coast Guard statement reads, “From October 4 to October 7 another 42 sorties were conducted. Debris confirmed to be from El Faro confirmed that the ship had sunk. No survivors or additional bodies were discovered.”

  At 0715 EST on October 7, 2015, after covering almost two hundred thousand square miles of ocean, the search for El Faro and her crew officially ends.

  On the same day El Yunque, now heading back north to Florida, spots and recovers a second life ring marked EL FARO. In Jacksonville she unloads, and reloads, as her sister ship did only nine days before and, still dutifully hewing to schedule, heads for Puerto Rico again, this time bearing a bouquet of roses that the wives of the Polish riding gang have requested be dropped over El Faro’s grave. As El Yunque crosses the site she transmits this message back to Tote: “Crew gathered on the bow. Moonless night. Sea was flat. Eternity over the rail. With each of 33 strikes of the ship’s bell a flower was dropped in the water. Our ritual is complete. The mark on our souls will endure—is supposed to endure—forever.

  “Lightning began far in the distance two points [twenty-two degrees] to port and continued throughout the watch. A meteor burned bright, arcing towards the lightning. . . . We sailors see what we see and have our judgments about what’s indicated.”III

  2

  By the time the search for El Faro ends on October 7, Joaquin, having moved eastward under the influence of the continental high-pressure ridge, has skirted Bermuda, become embedded in a mid-latitude westerly airflow, and traveled northeast into colder waters off Newfoundland. These suck away its power, degrade it into a tropical storm.

  Finally, on October 9, it subsides into a weak, “post-tropical” low. Now a mere swirl of rain and gale, it ambles past the Azores, swipes at Lisbon, then heads back out to sea. And there, finally, Joaquin dies—like a mortally wounded animal seeking shelter in its home den—in the Atlantic waters off the Canary Islands where it first became a storm.

  3

  Tote’s officers are conscientious and attentive to the families of El Faro’s crew. They release a statement: “We have no doubt these are the darkest days of Tote’s years as an organization and indeed the darkest days in the memory of most seafarers. A legacy of this painful event must be an understanding that serves all who go to sea.”

  The company flies family members to Jacksonville, arranges tribute ceremonies, helps sponsor a memorial under the Dames Point Bridge, within sight of the Blount Island dock: it’s a stylized lighthouse of reddish metal engraved with the crew’s names, flanked on one side by a series of thirty-three bollards (short metal stumps over which mooring lines are looped), each dedicated to a crew member. The company also funds monetary settlements for family members. But some of the families, dissatisfied with the sums, sue the corporation in court, claiming that the poor physical condition of El Faro proved negligence on Tote’s part.

  Tote files for protection under an 1851 maritime law limiting liability for shipowners; a federal judge, agreeing Tote is covered by the law, sets a $15 million cap on total liabilities. Tote eventually settles with all the crew members’ families, for sums reportedly averaging $500,000.

  In late October of 2015 the US Navy’s oceangoing tug Apache, carrying a team of Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board experts, arrives at the area where El Faro disappeared. The experts drop hydrophones into the swells, listening for the locating beacon the voyage data recorder is supposed to transmit for a month after sinking, but the depths are silent. Then they lower into the sea and start to tow a yellow kite-shaped rig called Orion, housing a side-scan sonar—a mechanism that, “flying” at depth, sends out serial pings on both sides of its path that bounce off undersea targets back to receptors, which then plot a picture of the topography based on how long the pings took to return. At 1:36 p.m., during the fifth of a planned series of thirteen passes, Orion picks up an object of El Faro’s size and shape sitting upright on the ocean floor three miles down. It is two miles from the position the SSAS system automatica
lly plugged into its distress message—the message Danielle Randolph sent out twenty-seven minutes before the voyage data recorder went dead.

  The team drops a subsea robot, or ROV (for “remotely operated vehicle”)—this one bearing the awkward name of CURVE 21—in the wreck’s vicinity. CURVE is an unmanned submersible that resembles a yellow generator the size of a compact car. It carries lights, video cameras, and mechanical arms. In Apache’s control room, a pilot stares at the video picture transmitted up a cable from the ROV and carefully tweaks a joystick to steer the sub’s propellers. Hazed by silt and deep-sea organisms, the picture shows a great blue hull, and on the shattered transom the words EL FARO SAN JUAN PR.

  CURVE 21 moves down the vessel’s side, floats easily over the deck of what was once the engineers’ cabins, for the two upper decks have disappeared. Deep-sea plankton snow across camera lenses. Virtually every square yard of El Faro has been cracked, broken, twisted, abraded by Joaquin’s fury and the violence visited on the ship as she sank. Lines, lanyards, a pilot ladder, hang forlornly off the outer decks, presumably where the crew tried to keep the inflating rafts close enough to a surging hull that they could slide down the ropes with some hope of making it into a raft.

  When the bridge and the navigating officers’ deck are located to the northeast, surrounded by torn bulkheads from various cabins, CURVE’s cameras peer into the windows, the open door of the navigating area; but the openings are black, light does not seem to penetrate—if you stare hard enough at the footage, though, you begin to suspect movement in that blackness, the mind plays tricks when you’re aware that they are in there, not alive but people all the same, ghosts of the imagination who only a few weeks ago were moving, laughing, drinking coffee: Frank and Danielle, Larry and Captain Mike, Jack and Jeff, Jeremie and Joe, Lashawn and Jackie, Mitch and Dylan, Rich and Carey, all the rest . . .