With the single exception of the lost body in the survival suit, no physical traces of the crew are located at the wreck site or anywhere else, then or ever.
On two subsequent expeditions, in April and August of 2016, Apache locates the VDR, a cylinder painted bright yellow and half-buried in silt, still attached to a supporting beam of the bridge-top mast. CURVE’s mechanical arms, working through clouds of silt, tug at the specially designed metal loops fastening the device and detach, lift, and place the cylinder inside the ROV’s sample basket for the three-mile ride back to the surface.
4
The Coast Guard/NTSB hearings last a total of six weeks in 2016 and 2017. They are mind-bogglingly thorough, delving into aspects of El Faro’s “accident voyage” as arcane as the relative battery life of different data recorders, the design of Roloc boxes, and the academic backgrounds of boiler engineers. During those six weeks many dozens of expert witnesses are called. “Parties of interest” in the hearings include Tote, ABS, and Michael Davidson’s widow, Theresa. Mrs. Davidson settles early with the company; her lawyer, William Bennett, while emphasizing Michael Davidson’s competence in questions to witnesses during the Coast Guard/NTSB hearings, confers frequently with Tote’s legal team and generally avoids asking hard questions of the company. During testimony, according to family members who attended all the hearings, Bennett seems to take Tote’s side by casting doubt on a former captain’s statement suggesting he was fired by Tote for reporting safety issues.
Coast Guard traveling inspectors attending a standard ABS audit of El Yunque in February 2016 find such severe corrosion in the Main Deck vents that they can poke holes in the metal with a hammer; continuing evidence, the inspectors believe, that such conditions were prevalent on her sister ship. The traveling inspectors are informed that they must report to the sector’s commander, Captain Jeffrey L. Dixon, after the first day of the audit. The chief inspector accordingly fires up his cell phone and calls Dixon, who orders him to cease the inspection on grounds that he is exceeding the parameters of the ABS audit. In April 2017, Captain Dixon voluntarily retires from his command and from the Coast Guard. Two weeks later he joins Tote Services Inc. as vice president for marine operations.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation analyzes the recordings and evidence from the hearings and releases its findings on October 13, 2017. Principal blame for the tragedy is ascribed to the captain’s faulty decision making, followed by Tote’s poor maintenance of and support for a superannuated and badly flawed ship. Crew fatigue, weather-forecasting problems, and failures in inspection practices and the Alternate Compliance Program are also cited.
Although six of the first twelve conclusions drawn in the Coast Guard’s final report directly implicate Tote in the most significant circumstances of the sinking, the Coast Guard—because of a lack of statutory authority, according to one officer—only files four enforcement findings, two of which have to do with relatively picayune reporting issues. The other two concern crew-fatigue violations and failure to include the Polish riding gang in lifeboat drills.
Following the hearings, Tote takes a number of remedial actions, which include changing emergency call centers, fitting its ships with a second EPIRB, and training officers in best use of the CargoMax program.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s report, issued December 12, 2017, mostly replicates the Coast Guard’s, except that it identifies the breach of firefighting pipes as a major contributing factor, which the Coast Guard does not. It also emphasizes the impact of poor bridge-resource management. Specifically, in the final hearing in Washington, DC, on December 12, 2017, NTSB’s chairman—against the strong objections of the board’s sole female member—amends the report to criticize El Faro’s junior officers for not doing more to convince their captain to alter course. Deficiencies in ABS inspectors’ training and Tote’s safety management plan are noted. The board also suggests that all US-flag vessels be required to carry fully enclosed lifeboats.
NTSB does not have the power to pass judgment, write rules, or mete out punishment.
Total penalties assessed on Tote and all affiliate companies, according to the Coast Guard’s chief investigator, Captain Jason Neubauer, cannot exceed $80,000.
5
Glen Jackson, a retired fisheries and wildlife officer for the state of Louisiana, still lives in New Orleans, although the sights and sounds of the city where he and Jack once roamed on a Norton motorbike seem bittersweet to him now. He spends most of his waking hours diligently researching every aspect of El Faro’s loss—speaking to investigators, other family members, various maritime experts—in order fully to understand what happened to his brother. While careful not to jump to conclusions, he notes that the Coast Guard’s report following El Faro’s loss includes many of the same recommendations made, but not implemented, after the loss of the Marine Electric in 1983, in particular, an overhaul of the marine inspection program. The shipping industry, he believes, killed the impetus for reform. “Money talks,” he comments wryly, “what can I say?”
Kurt Bruer still ships out, though not on Tote vessels. He is doing relief work—one-off jobs on different ships, the requirements of which show up at the modern, heavily air-conditioned SIU hall in Jacksonville, on the electronic job board hung a few dozen yards from one of the three El Faro life rings recovered after the ship went down. Working relief allows him to spend extra time with his wife and son, and if he had the choice, Bruer says firmly, he’d stay ashore and never again go to sea, where the memories of Larry Davis and the rest of what he calls his El Faro family inevitably await him. “But I couldn’t make this kind of money if I worked shoreside,” he says. “I couldn’t make the mortgage on my house. Money is the only thing keeping me going to sea.”
Piotr Krause’s wife, Anna, found it too hard emotionally to stay in the Gdynia apartment she and her husband bought together when they first married. She now lives just outside the seaport, which she says she still loves. The gray horizon of the Baltic Sea is visible from her bedroom window. Sometimes, when she has a hard decision to make, she goes for a walk on the nearby beach and tries to imagine what Piotr would advise her to do. At night as their son Viktor, now three years old, sleeps peacefully in the next room, she writes, “Behind the windows is a strong wind, which will always give me anxiety. The wind always brings me back to that place in the dark, empty ocean, to my husband.”
But outside her bedroom window ships continue to unload and load, even as the wind howls louder. Their green, red, white navigation lights pass slowly between the city’s residential towers and disappear into the night, into the darkness of the Baltic, the Atlantic to the west. Almost all these ships are newer than El Faro, and tonight no major storm is forecast. Many of the ships will be tracked by state-of-the-art systems and routed by home office via the safest course to destination. Some of them, perhaps, will have better equipment and hew to more stringent operating regulations thanks to lessons learned from El Faro’s loss. But their crews know that, inevitably and despite all the technology, one day conditions will worsen, trouble will come that they cannot be routed out of, parts of their equipment, no matter how modern and “foolproof,” will fail, and then some other equipment will go and they will be confronted by the terrifying power of the sea to sweep man’s strongest and finest works to oblivion. And when that day comes they will have to draw on their reserves of skill and courage, as the men and women of El Faro did, as everyone who goes to sea someday must, and hope it will be enough to see them through.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was immeasurably helped in the preparation of this book by El Faro’s extended family, both immediate relatives and close friends and shipmates. Except for those who requested anonymity, their many names are cited in these pages; but I would particularly like to mention Laurie Randolph Bobillot, Glen Jackson, Eddie Pittman, Pastor Robert Green, Jenn Mathias, Frank and Lillian Pusatere, Evan Bradley, and Kurt Bruer. The generous and courageous help of
El Faro’s family made it possible to put together an accurate picture of the last voyage of the ship and her crew, and in doing so provide a testimonial to the skills, bravery, and integrity of the men and women who sailed on El Faro. I would also like to thank Dr. James Delgado, Farley Chase, Chief Robert Young, Alana Miller, Joel Lorquet of the US embassy in Haiti, Professor Rob O’Leary, Rodney Dickson, Virginia Warner, Sarah Goldberg, Dan Cuddy, and Kyle Kabel. I have used the assistance and information these people so generously provided to draw as exact and balanced a portrait of El Faro’s loss as possible; any mistakes that slipped through are mine and mine alone.
Deep rescue: The CURVE 21 submersible managed to retrieve the ship’s voyage data recorder from the wreckage field, fifteen thousand feet under the surface of the Atlantic, in August 2016. NTSB engineers spent eleven hundred hours retrieving the audio.
NOTE ON SOURCES
Many months’ worth of hearings, separate interviews, and working-group investigations took place during 2016 and 2017, conducted by the Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board; these resulted in thousands of pages of evidence, testimony from scores of expert witnesses, graphs, photos, and charts, together with more than five hundred pages of transcribed VDR recordings, all of which can be consulted online. Together they provide the most complete factual background possible of the El Faro tragedy.
I also interviewed dozens of former El Faro mariners and family members of those who died aboard, some of whose names are mentioned in the book’s pages, or the acknowledgments. Many others helped anonymously.
In addition, research in meteorology was greatly assisted by Dr. Jeff Masters, of Weather Underground; in engineering by Captain Brad Lima, of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy; in navigation and ship-handling by Captain John Nicoll; in the background of Coast Guard investigations by Captain Jason Neubauer; in details of the Jacksonville hearings by Tricia Booker, Bob Snell, Anne Schindler of FirstCoast News, and Sebastian Kitchen of the Florida Times-Union. Other, less personable sources include the various volumes of Nathaniel Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator; the official Navy Watch Officer’s Guide, by Admiral James Stavridis and Captain Robert Girrier; Introduction to Marine Engineering, by D. A. Taylor; Cargo Work for Maritime Operations, by D. J. House; and Business Notes for Shipmasters, by John F. Kemp and Peter Young.
Wreckage field: Probably blown off by the explosion of El Faro’s boilers, the two upper decks of the house lie eleven hundred yards from the hull, while the mast and VDR lie six hundred and fifty yards away, both along the line of the ship’s final descent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© LOUIS FOY
George Michelsen Foy is the author of Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human and Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, and several critically acclaimed novels. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and his articles, reviews, and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Men’s Journal, among others. A former commercial fisherman, and a watch-keeping officer on British tramp coasters, he holds a coastal captain’s license from the US Coast Guard. Foy teaches creative writing at New York University, and with his family divides his time between coastal Massachusetts and New York.
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INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Numbers in italics refer to pages with images.
Abrashoff, Michael, 102
Advanced Weather Technologies, 9, 115
Alaska, Tote’s Tacoma–Anchorage run to, 11, 56, 98, 99–100, 134, 149
Alternate Compliance Program (ACP), 154–55, 156, 232, 233
American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), 26n, 100, 155, 156, 231–32
American Maritime Officers (AMO) union, 70n, 82
American Practical Navigator (Bowditch), 47
Anchorage, Tote’s Tacoma run to, 11, 56, 99–100, 134, 149
Anderson, Philip, 30n
anemometers, 48, 66–67, 71, 123, 136, 182
Apache (tug), 229, 230, 231
Applied Weather Technology (AWT), 40
autopilot (“Iron Mike”), 57, 176
Axelsson, Bror Erik, 41, 69
Baci, Peter, 110, 111
Bahamas Defence Force, 11
Baird, Charles, 42
ballast system, 25–26, 26n, 43n, 185–86, 197–98
Barer, Stanley, 108
Bermuda Triangle, 9–10
bilge pump system, 178, 185–86, 204
bilges, 133, 134, 135
black box. See voyage data recorder (VDR, or black box)
Bobillot, Laurie Randolph, 11, 28–29, 43–44, 174
boilers, 131, 155
evacuation and, 210, 217–18
explosion of, 218, 219, 238
hurricane’s impact on, 198
inspection of, 122–23
maintenance of, 120, 121, 122–23
steam system using, 14, 59–60, 61–62
Bon Voyage System (BVS), 40–41, 72, 73, 104, 114–15, 118, 125, 127, 143, 165, 174
Borisade, Olabode “Odd Rod,” 27
Bowditch (Nathaniel), American Practical Navigator, 47
bridge of El Faro
broken anemometer on, 48, 66–67, 123, 136
description of, 52, 57–58
familiar routine during sailing in, 57
watch change routine on, 68
Bruer, Kurt, 5–6, 10, 31, 70, 76, 233
Bryson, Eric, 47, 50
Buys Ballot’s law, 71n
BVS (Bon Voyage System), 40–41, 72, 73, 104, 114–15, 118, 125, 127, 143, 165, 174
captains
authority of, 103–4, 160–61
safety responsibility of, 102
CargoMax program, 26, 43n, 50, 67, 98, 207n, 232
Carl Bradley (ore carrier), 13n
Cash, Chris, 92
center of buoyancy, 25, 216
center of gravity, and stability, 25–26, 75, 121, 150, 215–16
Champa, Louis M. (electrician), xvi, 24, 65, 92, 116
Chancery, Matthew, 7, 8
chaos theory, 135, 153–54
Chiarello, Anthony, 110, 111
Clark, Melissa, 80, 106, 111
Clark, Roosevelt L. “Bootsy” (deckhand), xv
classification societies, 26n, 96, 133, 155, 156
Coast Guard
distress signal received by, 7
drug testing by, 79
Edmund Fitzgerald sinking and, 134n
El Faro debris field and oil sheen spotted by, 12–13, 226–27
El Faro drifting incident and, 62–63
El Faro safety inspections by, 9
El Faro safety issues reported to, 108
El Faro’s sinking determination by, 13
GM margin calculation and, 49n
inspections by, 63, 155–56
lifeboat conversion and, 9
6
risk matrix and target list of, 63
rules and regulations on equipment and personnel from, 78, 79
search-and-rescue operations of, 10, 11–13, 223–26, 227
Tote’s notification about El Faro’s distress to, 6, 7
Columbus, Christopher, 10
Conrad, Joseph, 64, 104, 169
containers
daily checks of, 93
hold cargo spaces for, 116
lashing guidelines for, 30, 93
loading of, 22–27, 29, 30
sail effect of wind on, 67, 182, 184
contracts, delay clauses in, 66, 103
Coriolis force and winds, 44–45, 166
Crawford, Sylvester C. Jr. (wiper), xvi
crew of El Faro See also specific members
cabins and accommodations for, 75–76
captain’s relationship with, 68–70
caste system on El Faro and, 79–80
Coast Guard rules and regulations on, 78, 79
commonality of interests of, 56
doubts about trip expressed by members of, 29, 64–65
El Faro as a Southern ship and, 77–78
familiar routine during sailing and, 56–57
fatigue of, as factor in sinking, 29, 159, 161, 171, 232
feelings about El Faro held by, 55–56
free time activities of, 77–79
list of, xv–xvii
maintenance work with rust by, 92
memorials for, 228, 229
mess for, 35–36, 42–43, 77, 136, 151
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