by Rachel Slade
The coast guard sometimes sent a plane out to warn small crafts lacking El Faro’s sophisticated communications equipment about approaching hurricanes, but it was rare for the ship’s crew to actually hear the message. They usually sailed too far out to pick up the signal. Besides, the past couple of years had been quiet, hurricane-wise.
“Aircraft he said?” Danielle asked, surprised that planes had come all the way out there to warn vessels in their vicinity. “Oh wow.”
“Wow,” Davidson repeated. “So by 2:00 tonight—on your watch—you should be south of this monster,” he stated confidently.
Davidson assured her that he’d stay up with her, to help her get through. “I will be up the entire night for the most part, once we start getting into the shit,” he said.
They’d try to keep the ship from rolling too much, he told her, but other than that, they’d stick to their course.
Danielle wasn’t so sure. She reminded Davidson that AB Jack Jackson had sailed in Alaska in rough weather on El Faro and had told her that the ride was horrendous. “He had much experience with the weather with this particular ship,” she told him.
But the captain didn’t want to hear petty warnings from his second mate and brushed her off, saying he was going to go “watch a little television, I think.”
When Davidson left them alone again, AB Jackie Jones didn’t conceal his anxiety: “It’s all whitecaps out there now. And the swell’s growing.”
The aircraft broadcast blasted over the radio once again: “The coast guard requests all mariners to use extreme caution.”
A few minutes later, at 3:00, El Yunque appeared on their radar, thirty miles out, steaming northwest at 22 knots. El Faro’s sister ship was racing back to Jacksonville. “They’re trying to get away from the storm too.” Danielle said.
“Nobody in their right mind would be driving into it,” Jackie said.
“We are,” Danielle said, and then she laughed. Because what else could she do? She’d been put on the spot, in charge of steering a loaded, ancient steamship through an erratic hurricane. She was relatively new to the second mate job and was still learning the basics. She didn’t have the experience or knowledge to improvise a course through deafening winds and roiling seas at night. That was someone else’s responsibility. It was the captain’s. Not hers.
As the clouds thickened, the satellite TV went in and out. Without the Weather Channel and the news, they had to rely solely on BVS and the text-only weather reports from the National Hurricane Center.
Danielle yawned. She hadn’t had much sleep. Yesterday, while the ship was loading, she had spent a lot of time on the phone with the oil company in Maine trying to cancel her account. “I’m not paying for someone else’s fuel,” she told Jackie. “The cable company wants to rip me off too.” Closing down her Rockland house so that her mother could sell it had been a headache. She’d need more caffeine to get through this watch and poured herself another cup of coffee.
26.39°N -76.50°W
A little before 4:00, Shultz took over the watch.
“Joaquin’s still coming right for us,” Danielle told him. “Or we’re headed right for it. The swell has been about the same—about six to eight feet. From the east. But the wind has started to pick up more.” She mentioned that the boatswain had tightened up the lashings on the trailers on the second deck in preparation for the storm.
A few minutes later, the chief mate of El Yunque, Kwesi Amoo, radioed to El Faro and bantered with Shultz. Talk was light, yet pointed. Amoo said that his ship had sped up to escape the storm.
“We’re trying to give it an extra thirty to fifty miles from the predicted center as we scoot around here,” Shultz replied.
“Eh, just go through it,” joked El Yunque’s chief mate.
“Roger. Yeah, I’ve been there. No thanks. I just wanted to say hello and thank you very much. And as always, wishing you well. See you on the way back.”
Before signing off, Amoo said, “The captain here is saying you’re going the wrong way.”
Shultz laughed. “No,” he said. “We’re really loving that BVS program right now.” Thanks to BVS, he explained, he and Davidson knew exactly how the story would go. BVS even told Davidson the precise minute he would safely arrive in Puerto Rico, based on his heading and current speed. The BVS interface did not equivocate, suggest uncertainty, or offer a range of possibilities. In the world of BVS, the future was fixed and knowable. They’d be fine.
The master of El Yunque, Captain Kevin Stith, got on the radio. He and Shultz exchanged pleasantries. Then Stith brought up the other elephant in the room: lack of job security at TOTE.
“I never know where I’m going next,” Stith said. “So we’ll see what the company has in store for me.” Another TOTE captain worrying about his job.
“Are you actually without a plan?” asked Shultz, a little surprised.
“Anything and everything could happen. They haven’t told me anything, you know. Kinda like the way they left me down there in San Juan for three days. They just said, Go to that ship. Next thing I know, I’m hanging out at the beach all day. So anyway, the short answer is, no. I have no idea.”
Shultz hung up the receiver and looked out at the ocean. Maybe he should start worrying about his job instead of the weather.
He scanned the latest printed NHC forecast. “It’s pretty much what we knew this morning,” he told his helmsman, Frank Hamm. “We’re predicting 40-knot winds on our starboard beam tonight. The latest and greatest forecast. But that’s not hurricane force.”
According to Buys Ballot’s Law, the only way they would get winds on their starboard beam while sailing south is if they got below the storm. Shultz was confident they would.
Frank Hamm had kept to himself when he was steering the ship during his early morning shift. Now he was wide awake, and worried. He was a big man, forty-nine years old, and diabetic. His thoughts wandered back to Jacksonville where his wife, Rochelle, and three children lived. He’d met his wife twenty-seven years before while working at a Red Lobster in DC. Her father worked in shipping and when he got transferred to Jacksonville, the young couple followed him down. One day Frank’s next-door neighbor encouraged him to join him in the merchant marine. The life was good—just fill out the paperwork, pay the fee, take a test. Frank got his certification at the union’s school in Piney Point, Maryland, and started shipping out in 1999.
Frank was gone for long stretches of time, but he and Rochelle made it work. For a while, he had a job in Charleston, South Carolina, and Rochelle would drive their car right onto the ship when Frank was docked for a romantic evening.
Between gigs, Frank would hang out at the Jacksonville union hall where a wall of monitors posted open jobs. Every company, every ship. As he worked his way up the ranks, he could take his pick of jobs—around the world or just a week. “He’d be at the hall all day,” Rochelle remembers. Sometimes he’d grab a ship leaving port that day. The shipping company would send a car for him. He kept one bag packed full of warm weather gear, and one packed for cold climates. One time, a ship he was on changed course and sailed far north, catching him unprepared. He was so big, Rochelle says, “They had to sew together two jackets for him. I had to FedEx his meds.”
Shipping took Frank places, and he always brought home gifts, though sometimes they were a little weird. From New Orleans, he brought Rochelle a voodoo doll. Oh, Frank. She shook her head and smiled when he gave it to her. Why can’t you bring me a damn T-shirt or a keychain? “I’m a Christian and the devil is real,” she said a laugh.
At 4:30 in the afternoon, El Faro was passing just east of the Northeast Providence Channel—the only deep, wide trench that provided clear passage between Little Bahamas Bank and Great Bahamas Bank. If they wanted to escape to the Straits of Florida on the lee side of the islands, they’d have to practically turn the ship around to squeeze in there, but that would get them to the safe side via the Northwest Providence Channel. Their next escape
route west would be the Crooked Island Passage, more than nine hours southeast of them. There’d been some discussion of the Providence Channel between the chief mate and Davidson early that morning, but it’d been dismissed, deemed too far out of their way.
“So this storm is gonna start around ’bout when we get off watch?” Frank asked Shultz.
“Yep,” Shultz said, looking at Joaquin’s projected track. He surmised that winds would swing around as the ship moved southeast of the storm. “And then 5:00 in the morning we should be settling down with about 35 knots of wind on the starboard side. If we’d stayed on our original track, we would have hit dead center.”
Davidson came up to the bridge to tell Shultz that he’d requested the Old Bahama Channel route on the way back. From the captain’s perspective, the hurricane looked like it would intensify in a couple of days. Joaquin was just warming up. He wanted to be far away when it did.
Frank Hamm overheard the two officers. “Is there a chance that we could turn around?” he asked. He knew he was at the bottom of the hierarchy, but at this point, he was getting tired of the officers’ silence. He didn’t like what he was seeing and had to speak up.
“Huh?” said Davidson, perturbed that the helmsman was getting involved. Officers and unlicensed seamen rarely discussed routing decisions aboard the ships.
“I’m just bein’ nosy,” Frank demurred.
“Oh,” said Davidson, relaxing. “No, no,” he stated definitively. “We’re not gonna turn around.” Then again, more emphatically: “We’re not gonna turn around.”
He went back to looking at the charts and spoke his thoughts out loud to reassure the men on the bridge that he’d thought everything through. “The storm is very unpredictable. Very unpredictable. It went high, it went left, it went right, it went back again. This one in particular is very erratic. So we’ll get away from all that when we leave San Juan. I want to come home up Old Bahama Channel and not get tangled up with this thing.”
Word spread around the ship that they were taking the Old Bahama Channel back, which lifted everyone’s spirits, including Danielle’s. She came up to the bridge a bit before five o’clock so that Davidson and Shultz could get dinner in the officers’ mess.
“I love taking the Old Bahama Channel,” Danielle told Frank before he went down to supper. “It’s really pretty when we get close to the islands. You can see them out there, especially the Dominican Republic. It’s a beautiful run.”
Once the captain was gone, Danielle returned to the chart room to plot out the newest forecast from the NHC while talking it through with helmsman Jackie Jones. What she saw alarmed her.
“See where we are? Right here. Eleuthera Island.” It was a long, narrow sandbar of an island west of Nassau. Then she read the latest alert: “Government of the Bahamas has issued a hurricane warning. Northwestern Bahamas, including the Abacos, Berry Islands, Eleuthera, and Grand Bahama Island.”
“That’s awesome,” she joked, trying to ease her fear with humor. “But all of this area is a hurricane warning. All of this area here: ‘The government of the Bahamas has issued a tropical storm warning for the southeastern Bahamas including the Acklins, Crooked Island.’” She let out a big sigh. What the hell were they doing out there? “So at 2:00 in the morning, it should be right here,” she said, referring to the forecasted point on her map. “Let’s see where we will be.”
She followed her line then she couldn’t help it. She laughed like hell. “We’re gonna be right there with it. Looks like this storm’s comin’ right for us. You gotta be kidding me.”
She plotted her points again, just to make sure. She preferred to plot the weather from the NHC rather than rely on BVS. No way she could be right, she thought to herself.
Joaquin was a compact, soon-to-be powerful storm with an indeterminate eye. Danielle couldn’t have known, but even the NHC’s positions of Joaquin were seriously off. For the next thirty-six hours, official reports put the eye as much as forty miles too far to the north. Lack of reliable data had hindered NHC’s reporting accuracy. The storm system had developed much faster than anyone expected, defying all the odds, intensifying at an astonishing rate. The NHC’s Hurricane Hunters usually ran through a storm system collecting data every twelve hours; keeping track of this rapidly developing hurricane would have required much more frequent flies. The NHC’s forecasts were also handicapped by the fact that there weren’t any ships in the area sending voluntary weather reports. Without quality data, the meteorologists could only get a fuzzy picture of the storm from satellite imagery. There simply wasn’t enough information to accurately predict Joaquin’s intensity and path.
The BVS forecasts were even less accurate because they lagged several hours behind the NHC’s forecasts. By the time the captain downloaded them, they were based on data more than twelve hours old. Here’s why: NHC meteorologists use dropsondes, ship-reporting, and satellite data to collect raw data from land and sea. They run this mountain of data through dozens of computer models that then produce a range of possible hurricane paths and intensities. The meteorologists analyze these models, toss out anomalies, and generate a forecast. This whole process takes four hours.
The BVS programmers spend an additional five hours plugging the NHC forecast into their own system before issuing their report. As a result, BVS’s forecasts are based on raw data recorded more than nine hours prior, often longer. The company that produces BVS doesn’t want to advertise that fact. Buried on page 101 of the BVS-7 manual, it says: “The forecast model run and data preparation time is approximately 9 hours.” That’s the only tip-off to users that BVS’s models weren’t fresh.
For a quickly evolving storm like Joaquin, those hours were critical. The most serious consequence of the lag time was that earlier NHC forecasts, the source of Davidson’s BVS reports, had positioned the storm as much as one hundred miles too far north, unlikely to intensify. Due to its unusual southwestwardly heading, the Atlantic’s high temperature, and weak shear winds, Joaquin proved one of the most difficult storms to predict in recent history.
From September 30 to October 1, each NHC forecast incrementally shifted the hurricane’s eye farther south and shifted its path from northwest to southwest. The changes were deliberately subtle because as a rule, the NHC prefers to avoid making major adjustments. Huge shifts would be unnecessarily confusing to the millions of people relying on these forecasts.
BVS duplicated that inaccuracy in each of its reports. On dawn of October 1, BVS was still showing the hurricane’s eye eighty miles north of its actual location.
Davidson didn’t know that the BVS information he relied on was always stale. He probably never received formal training on the system, and he may not have read the manual.
In between NHC reports, however, the Miami meteorologist on watch crafted a Marine Weather Discussion to explain his reasoning. Through the language of this discussion, people who live and die by weather—the world’s pilots and sailors—could glean a much better sense of how reliable the forecasts are.
One of these interim reports was issued at 3:17 a.m. on September 30: “Joaquin is forecast to continue slowly west-southwest through the next 48 hours then turn north and accelerate,” the forecaster wrote. “There is considerable uncertainty among major models with the details of track . . . intensity and timing not only of Joaquin but also the surrounding environment.”
Between the morning of September 30 and the evening of October 2, the NHC also provided a set of “key messages” via its Tropical Cyclone Discussions for Joaquin on its various social media accounts. These announcements detailed NHC’s lack of confidence in its track and intensity forecasts for Joaquin and focused attention on the expected direct, and indirect, effects of the hurricane on the Bahamas and the eastern United States. South Carolina was certain to see major flooding.
Unfortunately, all of these more nuanced forecasting products were only available to those with internet access. The officers aboard El Faro had no way to br
owse the web.
A few mariners I spoke with said that they used the National Weather Service’s FTP site to download this information at sea. To do this, they had to email a coded request to the NWS, which would then automatically email them reports. It was an exceptionally clunky system.
We know from El Faro’s download records that Davidson didn’t receive these supplemental reports. Davidson also may not have known that BVS offered up-to-date cyclone locations to its users, if they specifically request them by checking a box within the program. At the very least, we know that he didn’t use this service on El Faro’s final voyage.
Instead, Davidson relied on weather information so outdated it was practically useless. Although the NHC shifted its forecasts over time, Davidson refused to shake his belief that Joaquin would turn north. The BVS reports only hardened his conviction.
Davidson thought he knew where the storm was and where it was going. Like a race car driver, he cornered tight along Joaquin’s presumed course in order to shave off seconds from his time.
The other officers aboard weren’t sure why the BVS and NHC forecasts were so different, and they didn’t seem to be aware of the delay in the BVS reports—but at some point, it didn’t matter. In situations like these, it made sense to respect the worst-case scenario for what it was: a possibility. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.
“That’s where we should be and that’s where the hurricane’s gonna be,” Danielle said, laughing, always laughing, at the absurdity of their predicament.
“Gotta be a better way to go,” Jackie said.
“Max winds 85, gusts to 105 knots,” she read out loud.
“We’re gonna get our ass ripped.”
“We are going to go right through the fucking eye.”