Each ship subscribing to BVS can elect to receive a more specialized “tropical weather update” simply by clicking on the option. This comes in thirty minutes after the main package and elaborates on the basic information sent earlier. But according to BVS, El Faro’s officers never click on the option.
Also, for a further fee and for a specific ship, BVS will plan and recommend tailor-made routes to a given destination that avoid bad weather and maximize fuel efficiency. Tote has not forked over the extra $750 per month, per ship, and no routing advice is included in El Faro’s package.
Just as the Weather Service did, BVS’s email package clearly shows the predicted, westward-trending track of Tropical Storm Joaquin running well to the north of El Faro’s course to San Juan: clear graphic images of a spatial buffer protecting the ship from potential peril. Based on this information, a captain keeping to his usual course would expect seas and winds depicted in yellows and maybe orange, stronger than routine but not unusually so, especially compared to what passes for normal wind and sea conditions on the Alaskan route El Faro ran for years.
The flawed weather predictions are certainly one big reason Davidson does not consider taking a safer, more southerly route to Puerto Rico. Alternate routes from Florida to Puerto Rico are few because the Bahamas chain, to mariners, reads the way a high barrier fence thick with razor wire reads to a horseman. It’s a nightmare of shoals, reefs, and stupidly shallow water. El Faro’s usual path keeps her safely north and east of the chain, in the profoundly deep water over the Nares abyssal plain.
But one deepwater path behind the chain exists: the Old Bahama Channel. It lies much farther southwest of El Faro’s usual route, and even farther from Joaquin’s predicted track on September 29: a line of deep blue running between central Florida and the Bahamas, hugging southern Florida and then—via the Old Bahama Channel proper—the coasts of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All the way to Puerto Rico. Though it adds 160 miles to the trip, it’s not an unusual route: Davidson took it on his way north in mid-August to avoid Tropical Storm Erika, and another Tote captain, Bror Erik Axelsson, is known to have done the same to avoid a different storm. The channel, accessible only from its northern and southern ends and through a handful of winding “holes in the wall,” principally the Northeast Providence Channel between Abaco and Eleuthera Islands, and the Crooked Island Passage between San Salvador and Crooked Island farther south, can seem narrow as it threads between Bahamian sandbars and the big islands of Cuba and Hispaniola to the southwest. And its lack of breadth would restrict further evasion if a storm should come that way. But it is so far to the south and west that a captain choosing to take that detour could be reasonably certain he is out of range of a storm raising Cain hundreds of miles offshore, in the Atlantic.
The Old Bahama route—including the holes in the wall—are alternatives that Charles Baird, a former second mate on El Faro, urges Davidson to consider in the last of three text messages sent from his home in South Portland, Maine, to Davidson on the twenty-ninth, in which he counsels caution regarding Joaquin; advice that Davidson acknowledges politely, but rejects on the grounds that he is already aware of the storm and factoring it into his plan, which is to “skirt under” the hurricane.
These are the roads not taken.
8
Davidson’s equanimity at dinner should surprise no one; why worry, when the ship seems okay and is nearly ready for sea? He knows that a tropical disturbance was officially recognized as having turned into a storm yesterday evening—was even given a name, something hard to pronounce for the Anglo palate, Joaquin, apparently pronounced Wa-keen. But the forecasts are reassuring. Though the port engineer remembers Joaquin being mentioned at table, it is without emphasis, as someone discussing the weather in his kitchen might say, “It’s supposed to rain.” No heavy weather is expected.
This is in marked contrast to the previous month, late August, when Tote’s safety manager sent out that email advising masters to prepare for Hurricane Danny by checking weather maps and reviewing cargo procedure with Tote’s shoreside personnel. Updates were also requested on preparations for Erika, which followed close on Danny’s heels. Both cyclones, of course, looked set to become the season’s first bad-ass hurricane and like all firstborns got more attention; by the time the fourth or sixth storm rolls around, what once seemed noteworthy has become run-of-the-mill.
In the mess, loading updates crackle on UHF frequencies from walkie-talkies. The engineers and mates pop in and out to grab a cup of industrial coffee from the urn, or a sandwich, a plate of food. Coffee shows rings in the cup as the turbines are tested. Last cargo is now aboard and the port engineer, Neeson, has delivered a flash drive containing the latest CargoMax stability calculations;XIV Shultz has taken the drive to his office, where he plugs it into his workstation, downloads the worksheet, and compares it to the finalized cargo manifest. It all checks out, the GM margin stands over the desired 0.5, and Shultz has earned himself a sigh of satisfaction, a stretch, an instant of rest. Even the new third engineer, Dylan Meklin, who was late reporting for duty, has shown up, a fact that seems oddly important to Dany Randolph, now up on the bridge spinning the wheel to test the steering—right ten degrees, twenty degrees, then port ten and twenty—which translates under thirty feet of murky dark green water to a turn of the ship’s massive, twenty-foot-high steel rudder.
Someone who knows Randolph might well detect, beneath the second mate’s professional concentration, an extra two or three degrees of smile; likely no one’s aware that earlier she received a cell phone call from her mother, now living in Denmark, Wisconsin. Laurie had just heard a rumor that a former neighbor’s son, another Maine Maritime grad, might be joining Danielle’s ship; Laurie phoned to ask her daughter if El Faro had just signed up a young third engineer named Dylan.
“Oh my God, how did you know?” Randolph exclaimed.
“Do you remember that kid across the street?”
Silence, then: “Oh my God, it’s the baby!”
Twenty-five years earlier, Dylan Meklin’s parents had moved into their new house in Rockland with a newborn son. “Danielle was eight, nine, just a little shit herself,” her mother recalls. When Danielle was told about the baby, she insisted on going out to buy a toy—a set of building blocks—and presented the gift herself to the infant Dylan.
A quarter century later Randolph, chuckling, told her mom, “I am so going to give that kid a hard time. I am so going to have a field day with him, do you know he had the nerve to get to the ship late?”
Laurie protested; Dylan’s mother had phoned her out of sheer anxiety, this was the boy’s first ship after graduation and she was worried. Dylan’s plane was delayed; it was not his fault that he was late. But Randolph will not forgo the chance at a practical joke and presumably has made good on her threat: knocked on the door of Dylan’s cabin, given him the tongue-lashing she promised, smiling inwardly all the while.
9
As the air inside Joaquin warms and rises, it expands and is shunted outward as well by a local wind pattern that torques it away from the system’s center. But as anyone who has watched the flight-data screen in a commercial airliner knows, the higher you rise, the colder the atmosphere; that’s because less air exists high up to be heated by the sun. Therefore, as a hurricane’s warm air moves into the next layer up, the stratosphere, it cools. Cooling, still moving outward, the system’s vapor begins to condense into clouds, thunderheads, and then into water droplets that fall back to earth as rain. The downward cooling motion adds to what is now a vertically circular pattern: upward rush of warm wet air within, downward flow of cool air and rain without, all braided into more and more powerful winds that are both the result of and contributor to this increasingly rapid cycle.
The effects of the planet’s spin, known as Coriolis force, now come into play. As Earth rotates from west to east, it deflects north winds toward the west, and south winds toward the east (in the northern hemisphere; the
opposite in the antipodes).XV The net effect of these winds is to spin this low-pressure system counterclockwise. Like Apaches circling a wagon train in a fifties western, the entire complex of rising warm vapor at the core and falling cool rain on the outskirts rides an increasingly furious cavalcade of winds that gallop harder and harder counterclockwise. The stronger the wind blows, the more air flows in toward the center; the faster it evaporates on its way up, the more hot, moist air it drags upward, the more rain falls outside the circle, and the faster the winds below.
Until now no one has paid much attention to this particular low-pressure system. But as its mechanism becomes more defined—a “tropical cyclone”—meteorologists start to peer closer at satellite pictures of the eastern, then the central, Atlantic. The doughnut-shaped swirl of clouds at the system’s top is distinctive, as is the hole of plummeting atmospheric pressure in the middle. From ship reports, radio buoys, instruments parachuted from weather aircraft, data start to flow in that show a growing difference in pressure between the doughnut hole and its outskirts. While the winds stay below thirty-three knots, or thirty-eight miles per hour, the system counts as a “tropical depression” and is merely numbered. Hurricane watchers at the National Hurricane Center, located on the campus of Florida International University in Miami, give this system the number 11, as the eleventh of its type to spin into the Atlantic this year.
But the system keeps developing: the winds of number 11 move up the scale to 40, 50 mph. Beyond 34 knots, or 39 mph, the system is now officially a tropical storm. Eventually, as the tenth system to achieve storm status in 2015, it is given a name, tenth down an alphabetical list compiled at the World Meteorological Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland:
Joaquin.
It might have a name, but to forecasters Joaquin still doesn’t look like much, it remains the troublesome kid next door who nine times out of ten grows out of his rebellion, his acting out, and, leaving for college or a job in the city, drops out of locals’ ken. The predictive models of the NHC as well as those of other forecasters show little likelihood of significant growth. Joaquin will churn along, increasing only slightly in strength and then, confronted by the fronts perpetually rolling eastward off North America, take the usual path, northeast and out to sea; and there it will die, harmless, ignored, alone.
Unfortunately, the models are flawed.
10
On deck a quiet reigns, it feels strange because of the uninterrupted noise of the day so far. The gantry cranes have stilled, the yard tractors are parked and shut off, the ship’s loading ramps winched up and stowed. Most of the longshoremen have by now punched the clock and gone home to families, tuna casseroles, Wheel of Fortune. The wind is still light, north-northeast; the air has given up some of the day’s heat. Behind the overcast the sun went down fifteen minutes ago, and only a vague smear of flamingo cloud shows over El Faro’s bow to the west. Lights glare like a prison on lockdown over Blount Island Marine Terminal. On the trip south, with a full order of goods for Puerto Rico, cargo load is always near capacity and El Faro’s spotlights shine metallic, eye-smarting, across the looming containers stacked four-deep on almost every stretch of her deck except the house and the very bow of the ship.
A mate has switched on the ship’s running lights, a jewel of bright emerald glowing outward on the starboard bridge wing, sharp ruby on the port. White range lights shine forward on the masts, there’s a light astern as well. Warm yellow glows at portholes and windows on the house’s sides; shadows lurk everywhere else, but the third mate, or perhaps the bosun, has already checked for stowaways. The shadows are uninhabited, and the chief mate declares the ship secured for departure.
Two pilots show up and, as a skeleton crew of dockworkers drop the gangway, are escorted by an AB to the wheelhouse.XVI
Jeremie Riehm, the third mate, is in the wheelhouse, along with Jack Jackson, the able seaman on watch, who will be steering. Chief Mate Shultz is now standing by on the bow with the bosun and the two “day” ABs, ready to winch in docking lines and pay out towlines to the tugs when the order comes. Riehm and two seamen stand at the stern. The docking pilot, James Frudaker, has maneuvered this ship in and out of Blount Island on over fifty occasions; for St. Johns Bar pilot Eric Bryson, this will be his fourteenth gig on El Faro. Davidson emerges from his cabin on the deck below, and everyone chats easily for a few minutes. The captain, too, has worked with these men before. He is known routinely to show off snapshots of his two daughters, Ariana and Marina, both athletic, attractive teens, both going to college in Maine. At one point in the conversation Bryson asks Davidson what he’s planning to do to avoid this new tropical storm, Joaquin.
“I’m just going to—we’re just gonna go out and shoot under it,” Davidson says.
No one comments. There is no hurricane plan or checklist on board to refer to. Tote’s advice on the subject is limited to two sentences in the safety guidelines: captains should take all precautions—and consult the maritime classic, Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator. The guidelines take care of all heavy weather routines inside two paragraphs.
Davidson and the pilots go over departure conditions. There is almost no traffic. The Kingfish, a 965-foot, Bahamas-flagged container ship owned by the French shipping conglomerate CMA CGM, is entering the river from the east. They can see her on radar, a yellow icon; her name, call sign, speed, and course are signaled by transponder and show up in a tiny text box next to the icon. The wind, still light and northerly, won’t be a factor tonight. Nevertheless, as the ship will be heading east when she drops her pilots, they’ll rig the Jacob’s ladder, down which the pilots will climb upon leaving, on the sheltered, starboard side. Saint Johns River is tidal, and the tide is coming in, so it will be a little harder to turn the ship’s bow 180 degrees against the upriver current, but that is what the two Moran tugs standing by across the inlet are for.
Then captain and pilots sign the “docking card,” a form that lists the vessel’s draft and affirms also that all required equipment is running: radars, radios, engine, steering. If any essential gear is broken, it should be listed here, and the pilots cannot take the ship out until the gear is fixed or the Jacksonville port captain signs an exemption. Everything works, with the exception of the ship’s anemometer, a device for measuring wind speed and direction.
The anemometer is not on the list.
With departure plan discussed and pilot form signed, Davidson telephones the engine room; his usual style is to loudly call, “Put some heat on ’er,” to which the chief replies they have sufficient steam on the boilers and the engine is ready to go. Davidson then gives the okay to the docking pilot, now standing on the port bridge wing, who radios the tug masters on his portable VHF. The pilot orders let go forward lines, let go aft, let go spring lines. There are splashes as the mooring lines and wire hawsers drop into the harbor; El Faro is free of land. The tugs take up slack on the towing lines, and the three-inch-diameter ropes straighten into nylon bars, hard as iron, water spraying from their compressed fibers. Roils of churned white water appear under the tugboats’ back ends as, with painful slowness, they start to pull the huge ship sideways.
Someone on the bridge pulls the foghorn lanyard, and the wail, both earsplitting and mournful, of a great ship departing echoes through the depots and gantries, the Spanish moss and saw grass. At Paulie’s the drinkers at the counter turn to watch, and for a few seconds their chatter wanes.
On the fo’c’sle and in the covered section aft on 2nd Deck, where mooring lines are handled, the ABs finish winching in the ropes and wires. They lash their ends with lighter cordage to the bits, the twin vertical steel posts around which lines are looped to hold the ship in harbor; in rough seas, if a four-hundred-foot, three-inch line of nylon or wire goes overboard, it can wind itself around the prop and slow or stop the ship. For big storms the lines are fed off their winch reels into storage boxes below. But no such storms are expected and the lines are not stowed.
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nbsp; When El Faro is several hundred feet off the dock, Frudaker tells the tugs to stop pulling. He orders slow ahead and left full rudder, and Jack Jackson, at the helm, repeats the order, spins the wheel all the way left, counterclockwise—not an easy task, as the wheel is set low on the console and even for a man of average height requires bending the knees to operate; but the joystick that would turn the rudder mechanically, through the ship’s autopilot, is too slow and clumsy for practical use. The deck begins to tremble as the turbine rolls. Seventy feet beneath the bridge a delta of crushed water emerges from El Faro’s stern. The ship, though carried upriver by the current, slowly turns leftward. The captain who knew her best, the one fired after the Lauderdale incident, claims that because the ship was not built for containers, a full deckload of freight will cause her to tilt centrifugally, which would mean to starboard now, when turning; but if that’s the case, the pilot doesn’t notice.XVII
In less than five minutes El Faro’s bow is pointing downriver. The tugs drop their lines. The river pilot now has control, and Riehm escorts Frudaker to the Main Deck, the ship’s topmost exposed level. One of the tugs has crept up and rides next to the ship, keeping pace, her port side to El Faro’s starboard; the dock pilot climbs carefully down to step aboard the tug, which now, with a roar of engines and a farewell peep of her whistle, peels off, back to quayside.
Run the Storm Page 5