by Rachel Slade
Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all: shipping companies would have to convince the longshoremen’s unions to accept their sad fate. No doubt, containerization would destroy thousands of dockworkers’ jobs.
For these reasons—the considerable outlay of cash coupled with insurmountable labor resistance—containerization took a while to catch on.
But you couldn’t fight progress for long. In the mid-’50s, North Carolina–based trucking tycoon Malcom McLean developed a complete containerization system, which he launched with a single experimental ship in 1957. A year later, his company inaugurated containerized service between the US and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over the next decade, all eyes were on McLean’s SeaLand, the revolutionary shipping company that had bet on containerization. A few ports adopted McLean’s system, but others watched and waited.
Meanwhile, Sun Ship made a different kind of bet.
In 1965, a groundbreaking ship order landed on Sun Ship hull designer Eugene Schorsch’s desk. Unlike the “deadly detailed specifications heretofore commonplace,” he says, this order was just one and a half pages.
Schorsch had worked at Sun since 1952. He’d taken a job there straight after graduating from the premier naval architecture school in the country—New York’s Webb Institute, which, to this day, offers free tuition to all students. Taking a walk around the yard in 1952, Schorsch observed, “It was rugged. It was busy. Perhaps six thousand people working on a dozen ships. Some streets were paved with old riveted shell plates to make them less muddy. Philadelphia still had horse-drawn wagons and the horses had not long left the shipyard.”
Like Glanfield, Schorsch knew he’d found his calling. “It looked like the kind of place where you could learn to be a shipbuilder,” he wrote in a trade journal many years later, “where the ghosts of thirty-six thousand people and twenty-eight shipways offered a young person a place to hone his book learning and get to know practical, real skills.”
In the thirteen years since he started working for Sun Ship, Schorsch had designed all kinds of things, but this would be the first time his team got to design a revolutionary ship from scratch.
Sun Ship was itching to get into the lucrative cargo shipping business and this new vessel was slated to be the first of a fleet of trailer ships for the Transamerican Trailer Transport, set up to compete with SeaLand. Maybe containerization would take off. Maybe not. This was a hedge.
Similar to McLean’s container ships, Schorsch’s merchant vessel would be built for the age of the interstate. Replacing the laborious loading and unloading methods of the past, all cargo would be driven or towed aboard the ship over ramps and discharged the same way in less than twelve hours. That meant that the ship’s interior had to be free of interior obstructions so that the 260 trucks loaded with goods could drive straight from the dock via a ramp onto the weather deck where their trailers were unhitched from their cabs and secured to the ship. Another three hundred cars and light trucks would be driven from the dock and down into its cargo holds via internal ramps. Roll on.
The ship had to have lock boxes on deck where the trailers could be quickly clamped in place and plenty of D-rings for lashing down other vehicles. Once at their destination, the trailers and cars had to be unlocked just as fast so that a stevedore could drive them right out again and onto the highway. Roll off.
The ship Schorsch was designing also had to be fast. In the increasingly competitive market that was global shipping, speed was everything. The vessel was slated to do a weekly turnaround between New York and San Juan, Puerto Rico, requiring normal operating speeds in excess of 23 knots. “Maintaining a regular schedule was an important selling point to shippers,” a report of the day announced, “since the plan was for New York cargo to be loaded on Fridays with a Friday evening departure for San Juan, putting the ship in San Juan before 8:00 a.m. each Monday morning.” So she was built narrow and powerful, with a thirty-three-thousand-horsepower steam turbine engine that spun a single giant propeller.
The roll-on/roll-off trailer ship (ro/ro) presented other unique engineering challenges for Schorsch’s team as well. While the ship was being loaded, the weight of the tractor trailers driving over that huge steel ramp onto the second deck would pull her over, so Schorsch developed a counterweight system of ballast tanks and pumps that could keep the boat stable under dynamic loads. He also had to design the ship’s framing robust enough to support a wide open interior; from fore to aft, the ship lacked any vertical structure along its centerline. If a hold flooded, water would slosh from port to starboard as if it were a giant swimming pool, throwing off the vessel’s roll.
The weather deck, complete with its huge doorway cut into the hull, was a key feature of the ro/ro class. It allowed the dock-to-ship ramp to remain nearly level during loading. But that, combined with its massive, undivided cargo spaces, would prove the ro/ro class’s greatest vulnerability.
In the ensuing years, the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO) has revisited this class many times, questioning the inherent instability of ro/ro design and exploring ways to make it safer. While ro/ros statistically incur as many accidents as other ships on the high seas, they have caused a disproportionate number of fatalities. In part, that’s because passenger/car ferries are considered a part of the ro/ro class. The most horrifying accident involving one of these ships occurred in 1994 when the passenger ship Estonia suddenly sank in a terrific storm in the north Baltic Sea, taking nine hundred people with it. Authorities soon determined that the ship’s outer bow door had been torn off during the storm allowing water to rush into the expansive car deck which caused the vessel to list, roll over, and sink very quickly. Cargo ro/ros had the same weaknesses—their huge vehicle decks made them susceptible to rapid, catastrophic flooding.
Another nagging problem for this class of ships was its lack of stability caused by cargo movement. In the cavernous holds, one loose trailer could inflict havoc. The third point of vulnerability was the ro/ro’s low freeboard—doors and other openings in the hull deliberately built close to the waterline for easy on, easy off. In good weather, these weren’t a problem. But in a storm, or if shifting cargo caused a sudden list, a lot of water could rush onto the deck; if any watertight hatches were left open, that water would pour into the hold and quickly swamp the vessel.
By the mid-’70s, all these issues were known by organizations set up to monitor shipping, but demand for ro/ro cargo ships and ferries far outpaced safety concerns. It seems the message didn’t get down to those hired to man these ships. None of the experienced mariners I spoke to had any awareness that the ro/ro was considered more vulnerable than any other.
Schorsch’s first roll-on/roll-off ship was seven-hundred-foot-long Ponce de Leon, launched from Sun Ship in November 1967. Ponce de Leon is an important part of this story. She was the older sister of El Faro. The two vessels shared the same DNA and were built in the same yard by the same shipbuilders, one of whom was John Glanfield.
Both ships were designed to compete with SeaLand for the Puerto Rican trade. In fact, El Faro’s first name was Puerto Rico.
When she was built, Ponce de Leon’s design was so groundbreaking that Schorsch and his colleagues presented a paper at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ 2nd Advanced Vehicles and Propulsion Meeting in Seattle, Washington, in May 1969, describing the ship’s features. The paper emphasized the fact that creating Ponce de Leon involved designing an entire system, foreshadowing containerization:
“The modern concept of a ship is to view it as part of an ocean spanning total transportation system. The PONCE DE LEON, more than most ships, can be thought of as part of such a system. In fact the story of the design and construction of the PONCE DE LEON is the story of the creation of the system of which it is a part. The PONCE DE LEON introduced Roll-On/Roll-Off shipping to the New York/San Juan trade, and in fact to the world, on a larger scale than has heretofore been known, in the sense that it is the largest Roll-On/Roll-Off shi
p in operation.
“Although the ship to be used in the system was the largest single item of capital expenditure involved, shore based loading ramps had to be designed, built and shipped to the two ports. A fleet of special loading and unloading tractors had to be provided at each port. Trailers had to be constructed and an operating organization established. Establishing working arrangements with the appropriate labor organizations and training tractor drivers for the driving conditions on the ship was no small part of the task.”
John Glanfield and his fellow shipbuilders admired the all-white Ponce de Leon’s sharp, narrow prow and long, elegant sheer—the term that describes the way the main deck line peaked at the bow, dipped low amidships, and rose again at the stern. She had that classic look of a ’67 Stingray—sharp, edgy, built for speed. Inside, her two boilers powered a steam-propelled turbine that spun her single screw through the water at impressive speeds. The Ponce-class ships, all ten of them built between 1967 and 1977, served their crews well, and lasted an average of thirty-six years before being scrapped. As of this writing, two are still being used. And so began the life of an American-flagged, American-built ro/ro vessel, constructed and maintained so well that she ran decades longer than many of her foreign-flagged counterparts.
As planned, the SS Puerto Rico faithfully delivered goods to and from Puerto Rico for fifteen years, first for TTT, and then, when the commonwealth nationalized its shipping, for Navieras de Puerto Rico Steamship company, which had purchased three of her sister ro/ro ships as well as part of the deal. In the meantime, the Sun Company introduced its own shipping service called TOTEm Ocean Trailer Express (TOTE), running cargo with its fine ro/ro ships between Tacoma, Washington, and Anchorage, Alaska. Sun’s ownership of TOTE didn’t last long. A consortium of businessmen based in Seattle, now known as Saltchuk, bought TOTE in 1982.
In 1993, TOTE bought back Puerto Rico from Navieras and had her lengthened ninety feet at an Alabama shipyard. Many of the other Ponce-class ships had been lengthened too. In fact, even while it was building its ro/ro vessels, Sun Ship noted that they could be lengthened and did some of that work on other hulls at the Chester shipyard before it closed.
Because the coast guard considered lengthening a major conversion, the new ninety-foot section of Puerto Rico had to meet current codes. The rest of the ship remained intact, including Puerto Rico’s two gravity-launched “open” lifeboats. International codes required all ships built after 1986 to have enclosed lifeboats; the watertight vessels look like small, bulbous submarines. But American shippers balked at the cost of purchasing and installing these pricey add-ons and the US Coast Guard was generally sympathetic to industry. And so, without much resistance from regulators, Puerto Rico’s lifeboats, banned everywhere else, were grandfathered in and remained on the ship until the day she went down.
Saltchuk, through TOTE, continued to expand its holdings, acquiring Sea Star lines in 1998, digging deeper into the Puerto Rican trade route. By now, there was a lot of competition in that market. Someone was going to lose his shirt.
When Puerto Rico was lengthened, she was renamed Northern Lights and sent into the Pacific Northwest trade. During the second Persian Gulf War, she was chartered by the US government to carry military cargo to Iraq.
Of course, by 2003, McLean’s containerization had conquered the world. Yes, the ro/ro ships still had their uses, but importers and exporters demanded container capabilities of their shippers as well. Speedy old Northern Lights would need to be reconfigured once more, this time to take dozens of containers on her main deck. And again the coast guard gave in, allowing her to sail with her white fiberglass open lifeboats rather than the bright red submarine-like enclosed ones found on most other modern ships. In a wild storm, one could quickly sink or capsize while the other would get knocked around, but stay afloat.
Sun Ship discontinued new shipbuilding on January 9, 1981, the victim of appalling mismanagement in the preceding years and a shady sale to an entity Schorsch is convinced had some connection to the CIA. Enter the go-go ’80s, trickle-down economics, and the golden age of management consulting and offshoring. After the ownership change, executives determined that the land Sun Ship occupied was more valuable than the ability to build and repair ships. The whole factory shut down, and a year later, its parts were sold for cash.
Sun Ship’s sixty-year story speaks to America’s great maritime boom and bust. Its hulking sheds and dry docks decaying along the banks of the Delaware River echoed the postindustrial landscape that began dominating America’s heartland—Gary, Indiana; Detroit; Pittsburgh; Cleveland—as early as the 1970s. By the time Reagan assumed power, the country’s shipbuilding days were over, timed perfectly to coincide with a new imports-welcome administration.
America is now number one, in trade imbalance. Since 1975 the US has maintained the largest trade deficit in the world, nearly four times the total of number two, the UK. Both were once maritime superpowers. China has the greatest trade surplus. It also dominates the global shipping industry.
The Philadelphia-built Ponce-class ships traveled through the Panama Canal, sailed in the rough waters off Alaska, and delivered military goods to the Middle East during the two Gulf Wars. They survived long past their shelf life. Few questioned their seaworthiness because no one wanted to pay to replace them.
Like all things under the sun, the vessels had vulnerabilities. Only one of them was pushed to the breaking point.
Chapter 9
Afternoon
27.04°N -77.12°W
Jackie Jones stood at the ship’s wheel, keenly scanning the ocean for signs of Joaquin. “Looks like the wind’s starting to pick up a little bit.”
“Yeah, a few more whitecaps out there,” Danielle said distractedly.
She was mentally exhausted.
She’d watched the hardworking mariners she respected get screwed by TOTE. She saw captains and chief mates get fired. She saw officers getting promoted, seemingly at random, to the new ships while she languished on an old vessel, bound to get scrapped. She saw the ship itself deteriorating. Davidson was a newcomer, a neophyte, a poor substitute for the profoundly experienced men fifteen years his senior who’d protected her, looked out for her, trained her.
Danielle’s mother says that her daughter had a strong sense of order that was shaped by her ex-navy parents who, after serving for years in the military, instilled in their children respect for discipline and authority. Add to that years of watching Fox News, and Danielle was confident that she knew right from wrong. She was a die-hard conservative who could tell you exactly where she stood on nearly every issue—politics, abortion, welfare, regulation. Following strict conservative tenets, all answers were as clear as day. She never shied away from a political debate.
Danielle’s politics didn’t square well with the fact that her job depended on a complex network of protectionist laws, strong unions, heavy regulation, and corporate tax breaks. It was the “small government, pro-business” crowd that had systematically undermined the coast guard’s ability to properly regulate America’s commercial fleet. (Notably, El Faro was scheduled to go on the coast guard’s “watch list”—a file of troubled ships that needed extra oversight because they’d been in incidents, or because they were exceedingly old—on October 1.)
But these were complex issues, and Danielle preferred clear, concise commands. In that way, she made a good deck officer.
Because she shipped out so much, dating wasn’t easy, but she’d recently begun spending more time with Chief Engineer Jim Robinson who was off-duty at his Maine home during this voyage. Robinson had been assigned to oversee El Faro when she went into dry dock that November. (Following US Coast Guard regulations, El Faro had to get a major overhaul every five years.) The Bahamas shipyard assigned to the task had been given a lengthy list of things that needed to get fixed before the vessel went to Alaska.
“Jimmy hates going to the shipyard,” Danielle told Jackie. She thought that the company h
ad taken advantage of Robinson during the last dry dock session, and she was encouraging him to ditch TOTE. “I keep telling him, ‘Why the hell do you do that to yourself? Obviously all that work’s gotten you nowhere with this company.’ They don’t appreciate it. He was putting in twenty-four-hour days—literally twenty-four-hour days at the last shipyard. And he got nothing for it except for a Fuck you—you burnout—we don’t want you for the new ships. He’s an engineer so he won’t have any trouble finding a new job at a company that actually appreciates hard work.”
Her thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Jeremie who had come back to the bridge with Davidson for the change of watch. Danielle took the third mate over to the chart room to update him on the storm. “Here’s what it’s looking like now. At about 23:00 we should be full force slamming into it.” Then she added with a nervous giggle: “It’s a good thing I’m the swell whisperer,” implying that she was skilled at steering the ship in rough seas to get a smooth ride.
Just as they were wrapping up, an emergency message broadcast over the VHF radio from a US Coast Guard C-130 plane flying overhead:
“Sécurité. Sécurité. Sécurité. The National Hurricane Center has issued a hurricane warning for the central Bahamas, including Cat Island–Exuma–Long Island–Rum Cay–San Salvador. The National Hurricane Center has issued a hurricane watch for northwestern Bahamas including the Abaco–the (Canary) Islands–Bimini–(Elliotbrook)–Grand Bahama Island and New Providence. The coast guard requests all mariners use extreme caution. The United States Coast Guard aircraft standing by on channel 16.”