XI. According to John McPhee, one skipper working for Maersk, the world’s biggest shipping line, said he dealt with paperwork by ignoring it as long as he could, letting the printouts pile up in a single stack on his desk until it got so high and top-heavy that the ship’s roll caused them to topple over; from this he knew he could not put off paperwork any longer.
XII. A tale is told in the hills west of Bangor of a native Mainer, a man not unacquainted with strong drink, who was in the habit of taking potshots with his .22 at Air Force jets landing and taking off. When he was finally arrested, the neighbors were astonished—not (they said) because he had taken potshots at the jets, which was considered understandable, if not entirely normal—but because he’d managed to hit one at all.
XIII. AWT was bought in 2014 by StormGeo, a Norwegian weather-consulting firm created by forecasters at Norway’s TV2 television channel, but in 2015 the US group and its services were still operating under their previous names.
XIV. The chief mate’s eye seeks out the results of three CargoMax calculations that particularly affect ship safety. One is the bending moment, another term for stress that the cargo will exert on the ship’s hold in different directions as she sags from freight loaded in her midsection; or “hogs,” her bow and stern dipping in relation to her middle from too much weight on each end. Also, the ship should not be loaded in such a way as to lean to one side, as this would obviously make her more vulnerable to rolls in the same direction—and this calculation on El Faro must be tweaked because when she was built, or perhaps when she was lengthened by ninety feet in 1993, her hull ended up with more steel on the port side, which, all other things being equal, would give her a 2.5-degree tilt, or list, to that side. But the CargoMax has been fine-tuned to compensate and the mates, working with the stevedores’ foreman, have tweaked the loading in such a way that enough weight is added to starboard (every 130 tons on one side works out to 1 degree of list) to bring her to an even keel; any persisting tilt can be dealt with by adding water to ballast tanks on one side or the other. Although the four main ballast tanks are permanently filled, two “ramp” tanks aft, one to port and one to starboard, can be pumped out or filled to compensate for list.
XV. A playground analogy makes what happens to the winds because of Coriolis more intuitively accessible. Imagine a playground merry-go-round (recently banished from many kids’ areas by the no-risk-childhood movement). If you stand at the center of the merry-go-round as it spins, you feel much less centrifugal force and cover far less ground than you would standing at the edge. If, while standing at the center as the merry-go-round spins counterclockwise (or west to east, if you imagine the center as north), you take your rubber ball and aim it straight at a given point on the edge, the ball will miss your target and hit the edge at a point slightly to the west (against the direction of movement) of your target, because that target was moving faster than you were at the center. In the same way, winds blowing from the north are deflected slightly westward, while southerly winds are deflected eastward; between them they rub up counterclockwise movement in a developing low-pressure zone.
XVI. Pilots are shiphandlers expert in local conditions and are required by law to maneuver large ships in and out of a given port; as in this case, usually one pilot is in charge of docking and undocking, while another will specialize in maneuvering the ship out of the harbor proper and to sea. In Jacksonville the pilots—who belong to two independent trade groups called, respectively, the Florida Docking Masters Association and the St. Johns Bar Pilot Association, both of which contract out to shipowners—are hired for individual vessel movements.If the ship is not ready within two hours of the appointed time, the company is billed and the pilots leave. This is sometimes another factor adding to the pressure felt by officers to keep to schedule.
XVII. Despite the ship’s apparent “stiffness” (her lack of propensity to tilt) as she turns in the river—which might be because the turn is slow and gentle, given the ship’s length and the river’s narrowness here—it turns out, after El Faro’s accident, that the GM margin has been miscalculated, and the ship has sailed with slightly less of a margin than Shultz and Neeson figured; still within accepted safety limits, however. Yet the GM margin, which is a numerical representation of how willingly or reluctantly a ship will list, might have been flawed to begin with. The Coast Guard, with twenty-twenty hindsight, will later calculate that the standard GM margin El Faro sails with is too low for safe operation of this type of ship. Specifically, with only one compartment of one hold flooded, and assuming wind speeds of over seventy knots, the GM margin shrinks to zero, and the ship’s ability to right herself dwindles with it.
Part III
I. All courses are listed as “true,” which means cardinal points based on the actual geographical position of Earth’s north-south poles, as opposed to “magnetic,” based on the planet’s magnetic pole, which not only is hundreds of miles distant from the geographical pole but varies yearly. Old-fashioned ships, reliant on magnetic compasses, primarily used bearings based on magnetic north, sometimes converted to true. Modern ships mostly use gyroscopes or flux-state compasses that show true north.
II. The gravity-fed tank, which is looped into the lubricating system, is topped up automatically by the oil pump as the engine runs. It is there to provide temporary lubrication should the pumps fail.
III. The turbine blades work as all propellers work, steam pushing against the leading edge and exhausting toward the trailing edge, creating a pressure differential between the two that translates into lift; here, too, they replicate in microcosm a process that will affect, on a larger scale, El Faro’s fate. The pressure and speeds in this system are extremely high—although the plant, due to age-related wear, cannot produce the power it did forty years ago, the superheated steam still roars from boilers to turbines at 850 pounds per square inch, at 900°F, and it is one of the top nightmares of a marine engineer to be standing anywhere near a steam pipe when it ruptures, since the vapor would within seconds both scald and flay the flesh from his or her bones, which by any standards ranks low on the list of desirable ways to die. Ship’s electricity is a stepchild of the steam cycle, a one-way conversion of kinetic energy to electromagnetic tension, as the twin two-thousand-kilowatt Terry/GE turbo-generators are turned by steam hived off the main system. The cargo’s multiple refrigeration units work off these, plus, in case of emergency, a circuit powered by a Detroit Diesel engine on Main Deck.
IV. Jackson was proud that he steered a ship up the Congo River, into Conrad’s “heart of darkness.” And once, hiking deep into Thailand’s Chiang Mai Province, he wounded his foot, contracted blood poisoning, and, far from the nearest medical facility, might have died had not a group of Buddhist priests showed up and over the course of several days nursed him back to health. The experience presumably lies near the heart of an enormous chicken-wire-and-concrete Buddha figure he is building in the backyard of his home in Jacksonville.
V. AIS is an identification beacon that transmits a ship’s name, course, and speed to the radar screens of all nearby vessels and port authorities. It’s required on most ships over three hundred tons sailing internationally.
VI. It is no coincidence that Puerto Rico in 2015 holds the distinction of containing the greatest number of Walmart stores (including its subsidiaries) per square mile and per inhabitant in the United States. It’s the biggest employer on the island, with over fourteen thousand people working in its stores, warehouses, and offices. In 2014 Walmart and its subsidiaries owned 65 stores in Puerto Rico; by way of contrast, Massachusetts, with double the population, had 50. Walgreens ran 127 outlets on the island. In 2015 Walmart is in the process of suing the commonwealth’s government to oppose a coming sales tax increase from 2 to 6.5 percent. The company has threatened to leave the island if the increase, known as Act 72, is passed. Walmart will later win the suit, based on evidence that diverting some of the Walmart stores’ profits to public projects was a specific ai
m of the proposal and thus discriminatory. Overall, Puerto Rico’s economy in 2015 suffers from a failed policy of tax breaks, called Section 936, that brought in a slew of big manufacturers, many of them pharmaceutical, which mostly spent their money off-island. Section 936 was phased out in 2006, and the manufacturing sector has steadily declined since; the commonwealth will file for bankruptcy relief in May 2017, the first time a US state or territory has ever done so. In September 2017, Hurricane Maria will compound the island’s problems, causing multiple fatalities and largely wrecking Puerto Rico’s infrastructure.
VII. Neither Walmart nor Tote replied to the author’s requests for information on that score. Jim Fisker-Andersen, Tote’s ship-management director, when asked during hearings whether he was aware of penalties for delays incurred by Tote, will respond that he didn’t know.
VIII. Perhaps to help Davidson improve his management style, Tote sent him to the STAR Center in Dania Beach, Florida, a professional training school run by the officers’ trade union (AMO, or American Maritime Officers). There he attended a “leadership and management” course that included subjects such as “personnel management and administration,” “effective communications,” and “safety and environmental leadership in the maritime industry.” He also completed a radar refresher course. Davidson took no classes in heavy-weather tactics, emergency shiphandling, stability, or cargo management, although such courses were also on offer.
IX. This is known as Buys Ballot’s law.
X. El Faro carried a black box, a digital voyage data recorder or VDR that was programmed to store the latest twelve hours of conversation on the bridge, and in fact recorded twenty-six hours’ worth. Subsequent to El Faro’s loss, the VDR was successfully recovered and, following eleven hundred hours of painstaking work by National Transportation Safety Board audio engineers, its contents retrieved. From this point in the text relevant portions of conversation on the bridge are transcribed directly from the record. (See the Author’s Note for further details of this process.) Occasional brackets mark phrases NTSB’s audio engineers had to tease out of the surrounding noise.
XI. A swell is a wave of relatively long wavelength, which can sometimes run in a different direction to shallower waves, and reflect more distant or long-lasting weather events. In the case of Joaquin, based on bridge conversation, waves and swells rarely appeared to differ markedly in direction or quality, and except where specifically described as one or the other, the terms are used interchangeably.
XII. Presumably, taking the Old Bahama Channel.
XIII. Ironically, since El Faro’s accommodations were laid out before she was refitted to carry containers, some of the senior crew’s staterooms lie in the forward part of the house, which on a Ro-Ro ship would afford a clear view of the sea in front; their windows are now partially blocked by steel containers, whereas the smaller cabins of the junior sailors (“general utility” deckhands, wipers, and third engineers) tend to line up on the port and starboard sides, with unobstructed views.
XIV. Racial profiling in Jacksonville will be spotlighted in 2017 by a Florida-Times Union/ProPublica investigation focused on “walking while black,” which finds that for the previous five years African-Americans were three times more likely to be stopped for minor, sometimes arbitrary, pedestrian offenses than were whites.
XV. It should be said that Tote Services’ safety record, for on-the-job injuries anyway, is good; the subdivision has won several awards from the industry group CSA (Chamber of Shipping of America) for keeping injury time at low levels.
XVI. The number of US-owned foreign-flagged ships is still high, but this is irrelevant to the American mariner.
XVII. As well as the federal academy at Kings Point, New York, there are six state maritime academies (Massachusetts, Maine, State University of New York, Great Lakes, Texas A&M, and California), all of which enjoy federal funding through the US Maritime Administration. According to MARAD, “The education of merchant marine officers is an essential Maritime Administration responsibility to meet national security needs and to maintain . . . defense readiness. The maritime academies meet that need by educating young men and women for service in the American merchant marine, in the US Armed Forces, and in the Nation’s inter-modal transportation system. The Maritime Administration also provides training vessels to all six state maritime academies for use in at-sea training and as shore-side laboratories.” (These training vessels are full-size cargo ships that carry cadets for extended tours, often abroad, at least once a year.)
XVIII. One reason the Euro model proves more accurate for Joaquin, and why it was also more accurate for “superstorm” Sandy in 2012, might be that the ECMWF has increased its program’s “resolution,” in effect tripling the number of collection points for meteorological data to a level far surpassing that of other models. Another reason might have to do with NHC’s brief and the marketing ethic underlying it. Hurricane Center experts are trained to think of their forecasts as “products” they must furnish to “clients,” and the overwhelming preponderance of clients are land-based, people living in coastal regions of states most likely to be affected by a tropical cyclone. NHC’s focus and therefore its watches and warnings are tailored to specific terrestrial regions such as North Carolina, as opposed to areas of ocean. Moreover, because the principal result forecasters wish to achieve is timely preparation on the part of civilians on terra firma, who have no concept of a storm’s complexities, NHC bends over backward to avoid what they call the “windshield-wiper effect”: what happens when one shifts forecasts quickly to reflect the newest data. This built-in conservatism means that outlier forecasts, such as the Euro model’s in the case of Joaquin, are given less weight day to day than experts examining the data might otherwise assign to them.
Part IV
I. Except for 1-hold, the cargo space farthest forward, which is smaller and requires only a single scuttle.
II. One ex–El Faro deckhand has stated at least one of the scuttles doesn’t close all the way, but this is not corroborated by other mariners. One ex-bosun claims the scuttle on the fo’c’sle—the top, raised part of the bow—which leads down to storage areas and a locker where anchor chain is held, is damaged and would easily be popped open by waves breaking aboard.
III. Tote’s argument was that other ships had undergone similar conversions, and these were not described as “major.” The Coast Guard will later criticize its own flip-flop because while the precedent cited in Tote’s argument did exist, inspectors nonetheless were obligated to treat each conversion on a case-by-case basis, according to which El Faro’s conversion should have been deemed “major.”
IV. The rafts, which are inspected annually, carry water and food, lights, and baffles underneath that, once the raft is inflated and launched, are supposed to fill with water to prevent the rafts’ being blown over. Manufactured by Denmark’s Viking Group, each weighs over three hundred pounds and requires at least two strong people to throw over the side. The manufacturer’s instruction video shows the rafts being launched and inflated in a perfectly calm, flat sea. Launching methods under stormy conditions are not addressed in the video.
V. The insurers’ cooperative known as Lloyd’s of London was created in the seventeenth century to alleviate the risks associated with the delay or loss of seagoing freight.
VI. MacWhirr’s eventual decision was to avoid risking the owners’ displeasure: to stick to his planned course, and run the storm.
VII. For example, Jack Hearn, El Faro’s former captain, says the master is supposed to consult with the company on route changes, but doesn’t need permission to make them.
VIII. The subcommittees are the House Coast Guard and Maritime Transport Subcommittee, and the Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, & Security. Saltchuk also, quite logically, funds a good percentage of Alaskan, Floridian, and Washington State politicians, whether or not they belong to committees immediately relevant to their mari
time activities.
IX. Roth-Roffy, shortly after making this statement, which by some standards implies prejudging of fault in the investigation, will quit the investigating panel, and the NTSB, for a job at SUNY Maritime.
X. Category 1 on the so-called Saffir-Simpson scale packs winds of 64 to 82 knots (74–95 mph); 2 is 83–95 knots, or 96–110 mph; 3 (qualified as a “major” hurricane from this point on), 96–112 knots (111–129 mph); 4 blows 113–136 knots (130–156 mph); 5, 137 knots or 157 mph, and higher.
XI. Five ships respond to the aircraft’s call with requests for further info on the hurricane. El Faro is not one of them.
XII. Generally speaking, US ships over sixteen hundred gross tons are required to carry paper charts as backup to their ECDIS systems.
XIII. The ten tons of extra oil in the reserve tank behind the turbines are also available, in theory at least, in case of lubrication problems, but the supply line from that tank is only one inch in diameter. According to Chief Engineer Brad Lima, of Massachusetts Maritime Academy, even a one-and-a-half-inch pipe would restrict flow to 10 percent of what would be required to significantly increase oil levels in a sump the size of El Faro’s. A one-inch pipe would allow less than that, making it useless in an emergency: for example, if it suddenly became necessary to increase the volume of oil in the system overall.
XIV. The twenty-nine-thousand-ton ore carrier sank in a severe storm on eastern Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, at the same time as El Faro was being built; her loss exhibited several characteristics similar to what is going on with El Faro. The Coast Guard determined the Fitzgerald probably sank because she started taking in water through deficient or unsecured hatches, then capsized; other experts raised the possibility that hull failure might have contributed to the disaster. The Fitzgerald, too, sent no Mayday signal.
Run the Storm Page 28
