by Rachel Slade
Take away the mundane things, life’s basics—the stuff we don’t even think about—and civilization ceases to exist. A 2017 story in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos illustrated our dependence on the cheap movement of goods across multiple oceans. Osnos’s piece was about superrich doomsday preppers, tech wizards who spend a lot of time thinking about the end of our world. “Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization,” he wrote.
In Osnos’s story, the thirty-year-old CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, said that he was “increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. ‘Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.’ (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., ‘without rule of law.’)” Huffman believes that contemporary life “rests on a fragile consensus. ‘I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work.’”
Huffman’s point is that global shipping depends on an extensive, yet fragile, global infrastructure: cheap energy, satellite communications, international agreements, regulations, and policing. Doomsday preppers understand that these institutions are at risk. And while you might dismiss their paranoia, the more you know, the more you realize that they could have a point.
Americans have always harbored paranoid tendencies that continue to thrive. Some Americans are convinced that their own federal government poses the biggest threat to their way of life. Along with the taxman, the US Coast Guard can find itself in the middle of this argument. When its inspectors deploy to militia-rich areas like the Great Lakes, Alaska, and parts of the South, they sometimes have to go armed. They’ve come to inspect boats to ensure that the vessels comply with federal regulations—that they’ve met certain safety standards so that they’re less likely to kill their owners or riders—but the antigovernment types consider that kind of maritime regulation a fundamental threat to their freedoms.
Like Huffman, Captain Michael Davidson was a self-proclaimed survivalist, a doomsday prepper, armed and ready to protect his kin. He had an arsenal of weapons in his house, plus a reserve supply of food and water, and maxi pads to soak up blood.
He was preparing for an apocalyptic event but probably didn’t have just one scenario in mind. He trained for something catastrophic, and much of that training involved shooting his way out. Or learning how to survive in the woods after a fill-in-the-blank enemy burns down the local Target. He made sure his wife and daughters knew how to use guns and equipped them with Glocks. One time, he showed an El Faro officer a video of himself dressed in camo, armed with a range of automatic weapons. He charged a target guns ablaze, and when he ran out of bullets, he drew handguns, and when those ran out, he pulled knives.
Preppers anticipate the rise of independent militias hell-bent on taking down the government, and with it, the global economy. In the face of armed insurrection, they’re betting that the government will fold, leaving every man for himself. Various congressional attempts at instituting gun control, especially following inconceivable acts of random violence, stoke those fires, banding preppers with antigovernment types, creating a single, united, paranoid movement. Best to be prepared.
The main problem with being a doomsday prepper is that when you’re fully armed and ready for battle, it’s very unsatisfying when nothing happens. If the threats aren’t real, what good are all those guns? They secretly yearn for an opportunity to test their mettle. Otherwise, they’ve spent an awful lot of time, money, and energy preparing for nothing.
Some preppers invite standoffs with the law, hoping to achieve glory in a blitz of bullets. Militia members in Oregon in 2016, for example, occupied a national wildlife refuge for several weeks, but finally abandoned their post after running out of food and trashing the place. Their leader ultimately stormed a federal roadblock in his truck. To some, his was a martyr’s death.
Traditionally, Maine-based survivalists have been quieter than their western counterparts, which may be because their contra roots run deeper. Much of Maine wasn’t founded by patriots but Tories—British loyalists who fled north when the American colonists went rogue and defied the Crown. As they have since the Revolution, they blend into their suburban or rural surroundings and hunker down, secretly nurturing their paranoia with weekend training shooting sessions, learning to distinguish poisonous berries from edible ones, or building a bunker out of birch saplings.
In America, the prepper movement is rapidly expanding. From Arizona to Michigan to Maine, survivalism has become a serious hobby. And in recent years, the demographics of the movement have shifted from rural crazy to wealthy, sophisticated, and urban techies whose doomsday scenarios—some involving nuclear war with rogue states like North Korea, for example—have become frighteningly real.
Captain Jason Neubauer of the US Coast Guard was stationed in Hawaii in 2011 when he learned firsthand what happens when the ships stop coming—the threat of anarchy. In March of that year, the archipelago was pounded by tsunami waves, the aftershocks of a deadly earthquake off the coast of Japan that killed nearly sixteen thousand people and caused Fukushima nuclear power plant to melt down.
The waves traveled 600 miles per hour across the Pacific, giving the coast guard time to shut down Hawaii’s commercial ports. Within twenty-four hours, islanders began feeling the pain of a world without shipping. “No one realizes that Hawaii is running day to day,” Jason told me. “We were getting calls from other islands saying they were running short on fuel.” Pretty soon, they would feel the pinch of more critical shortages, like food and water. How long would it take before they had anarchy on their hands?
Like Hawaii, Puerto Rico is an island that depends on ships. Stuffed into containers often originating in Asia, clothes, electronics, and appliances are loaded onto the world’s biggest vessels, transported to Los Angeles, unloaded and reloaded onto smaller ships bound for Florida via the Panama Canal. They travel up the coast to Jacksonville where they’re transferred once again, along with bananas, chicken, cheese, and Doritos, onto ships or barges heading to San Juan. From there, goods may travel on to other American islands, like St. Croix, where after all that handling, half a gallon of milk costs $7.
The fate of El Faro—an elderly ship transporting increasingly greater cargo to Puerto Rico—shows how America’s maritime laws, bent to accommodate corporate interests, can lead to tragic consequences.
Since she’d been built ships were getting bigger and bigger. The world’s population had doubled. There was increasing demand for goods. El Faro had to keep up to be profitable. While her ability to take on trailers was useful, she needed to behave more like a modern container ship. That meant taking containers loaded from above by the port cranes.
It seemed like an easy change to make. In 2002, Sea Star (now TOTE) made a big bet on Puerto Rico. Saltchuk, the Seattle-based transportation and logistics company that owned Sea Star, had gone to great lengths to profit off its trio of elderly US-flagged steamships. It kept its workhorses running an average of twenty-eight years longer than any others docked in America’s ports, sending them to the Persian Gulf during the two wars there, and into the rough Pacific Northwest trade back and forth to Alaska, another Jones Act monopoly. And now it wanted El Faro to carry more cargo to Puerto Rico.
In 2003, the company wanted to remove El Faro’s spar deck—an ancillary deck above the main deck designed to accommodate trailers—and shut off the ramp that led up there. Now trailers and cars could only drive onto the second deck and follow two ramps down to the decks below, instead of going up.
This change made a lot of sense from a commerce perspective. The world had fully embraced containerization since El Faro was built thirty years before. These days, all the container ships crossing the Pacific and the Atlantic are fat and wide to accommodate con
tainers stacked as much as ten high.
But how would El Faro react to this dramatic transformation? Instead of carrying all the weight in her belly, she was being asked to shoulder a huge backpack, one that would get pushed around by the wind on stormy days. El Faro was designed to be a sprinter, sleek and streamlined. Her engineers gave her a sharp bow to slice a narrow path through the seas at 22 knots with the least amount of drag. Her elegant taper from deck to keel was very different from the bulbous modern container ships, which travel around 15 knots, meaning she was naturally tippier, and slower to right.
Could El Faro be both a beast of burden and fast as hell?
Obviously, containers piled high on her main deck shifted her center of gravity upward. The added weight also pushed all her openings—vents and hatches—closer to the water.
El Faro became trickier to model as well. The most stable ship is a loaded tanker. The oil in its holds acts as a low, uniform weight throughout the vessel, so it’s easy to predict how that tanker will react under various sea and wind conditions. It’s simple to model, thankfully, because if a tanker sinks, the environmental consequences are far-reaching.
El Faro’s cargo presented a complex modeling situation. She would be carrying containers, trailers, cars, and liquid-filled tanks in a dynamic environment, the open sea. It’s a nightmare of a physics problem. How that ship would react to changing conditions depended on everything—the shape of her hull, where the weight sat relative to her center of gravity, how much ballast was in her tanks, and the additional sail area (vertical surface), which would cause her to heel over when the wind pushed against it. Calculating all this requires a computer. You could do it by hand, but it would take hours and a small error could produce major miscalculations.
So TOTE’s officers and port engineer relied on CargoMax, standard ship-loading software customized for the ship’s unique variables. Before El Faro was loaded for each voyage, the port engineer would get a manifest and start plugging in numbers. Each container’s weight was provided by TOTE’s customers, which he’d enter into CargoMax. Each trailer had a weight. Each car had a weight. After entering everything in, CargoMax would spit out a loading plan. Box A had to go here. Box B had to go there.
Loading had the aura of an exact science. But it wasn’t. Possibility for error lurked everywhere. Was the customer properly reporting box weights? You had to trust them. And what was the center of gravity of those boxes? No one knew. Did the port engineer enter the weights correctly? It was a lot of work to get it right. Minor numbers got screwed up all the time, sometimes causing major problems. And on her final voyage, a wrong decimal threw off the calculations so much that during loading the ship experienced a serious list. Cargo had to be shifted around to correct it, delaying her departure.
And of course, the computer model itself was just that: a model. It was designed with margins of error. But it wasn’t designed to project what would happen if one of those containers broke loose in a hurricane. That was precisely the kind of dynamic situation that no can precisely model. You’ll just watch in awe as those containers shake loose, break free, and fall over the side, ripping the deck apart while pulling the ship over with their momentum.
The US Coast Guard declared that TOTE’s proposed changes to El Faro were major modifications, and the vessel would have to be brought up to current safety standards. That ruling meant TOTE would have to swap out El Faro’s open lifeboats for the modern, submarine-like enclosed boats required on every ship built after 1986. Open lifeboats had been banned internationally because the small crafts had proven so vulnerable in heavy seas. Much of America’s aging merchant fleet, however, did not follow all IMO laws, and still carried open lifeboats because the shipping industry lobbied against the regulations, which it considered draconian and egregiously antibusiness. (For example, it took decades of lobbying for Samuel Plimsoll to convince shipping companies to mark load lines on their hulls, indicating how much weight they could take before they were officially overloaded. If they could, one coast guard officer told me, shipping companies would grind those marks right off again.)
For three years, TOTE’s executives and lawyers fought the coast guard for the right to keep El Faro’s fiberglass open lifeboats on board, and they eventually convinced the agency to reverse its ruling, arguing that similar work had been done on sister vessels without triggering a major modification ruling. In its defense, TOTE said, it would cost the company an additional $7 to $9 million or so to do all the required work. “If this is true,” TOTE’s letter to the coast guard said, “and we believe it is, the project may not get funded and that would be injurious to our company and the maritime community in general.”
The US Coast Guard reversed its decision in 2006. And so, El Faro sailed with her outdated lifesaving equipment, along with her ancient boiler, and questionable stability. The coast guard had delegated the stability analysis to the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS). There was no review of the calculations done by ABS’s people that would have determined how the ship would pitch, roll, and react to various sea conditions under her new configuration.
A few more things slipped through the cracks: At some point, El Faro’s load line was raised two feet, allowing the vessel to take much more weight than ever before. And six eighteen-thousand-gallon tanks for transporting fructose syrup, totaling approximately 13,400 pounds, were permanently installed in 2014. All these changes permanently altered the ship’s stability but the Marine Safety Center—the coast guard’s office dedicated to ship design and engineering—found no record of these modifications.
Was El Faro more vulnerable to sinking? In a word, yes.
Desperate to squeeze every dime out of its ships in a client-driven market, TOTE’s upper management also broke federal law. Beginning around 2003, executives from the three companies in the Puerto Rican trade—TOTE, Horizon, and Crowley—clandestinely met to divide up the route’s major customers and set shipping rates, agreeing not to compete with or undercut one another. This price-fixing continued for at least five years until a whistleblower alerted the federal government in 2008.
Following a five-year series of suits, the US Justice Department fined the companies a total of $46.2 million for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and sentenced six midlevel shipping executives to prison terms. In addition, a consortium of shippers filed a class action lawsuit against the three shipping companies and received $52 million.
Just a few years later, TOTE’s competitor, Horizon Shipping (owned by the huge international private equity firm Carlyle Group), was socked with another whistleblower case: the shipping company had fired John Loftus, a captain with nearly four decades of experience, for expressing concern about the seaworthiness of Horizon’s ships. Loftus won his case and was awarded $1 million. In early 2015, Horizon went belly-up.
TOTE’s steamships were now carrying nearly 30 percent more cargo.
After losing its price-fixing lawsuit, TOTE restructured the company to squeeze more money out of its operation. Critical onshore staff were designated redundant and let go, along with some of the company’s most experienced seamen. As office staff was shuffled around and new corporate entities sprouted from the morass, communication unraveled. It was often unclear who was in charge of what as managers and employees were moved, given new titles, or let go. Critical emails concerning safety or staffing aboard the ships went to a dizzying array of people, and sometimes went unanswered because it was unclear who was supposed to respond. What emerged was a pass-the-buck culture.
In 2012, TOTE scrapped El Morro, replaced it with El Faro (which had been laid up since 2006 in the Port of Baltimore), and put in an order for two new LNG-powered vessels to take over the Puerto Rican run. Ashore, staff attention shifted from the two steamships at sea to the new pair coming online and the daunting task of creating an LNG infrastructure to support them.
By the fall of 2015, TOTE Maritime and Crowley held a virtual monopoly on Puerto Rico’s lifeline. How could TOTE con
tinue to distinguish itself when vying for the lucrative Walmart and CVS Puerto Rican shipping contracts? Reliability. On-time delivery. Fast turnaround. El Faro and El Yunque were fast—sailing on average 20 knots. It was an easy sell to customers. Former Horizon captains tell me that TOTE ships always got to San Juan first. For many retailers, speed and on-time arrival were worth premium pricing.
Meanwhile, El Faro and El Yunque served their company, inspected but nonetheless, in disrepair. Though the ships were well built and made of thick steel, decades of use had eaten away at their integrity. Some problems were apparent. Those things got fixed. Some weaknesses—rot and rust from life spent in the brine—lurked out of view in dark recesses. Those things didn’t get fixed.
Keeping ancient machinery operational requires constant vigilance. The crew did its best to keep the old ships running. But it was hard to get in front of the issues. On her final voyage, El Faro was loaded down with cargo, more than she’d ever carried, her rusty decks riding dangerously close to the water.
Chapter 16
Dawn
23.53°N -74.04°W
The tumbling and heaving of a ship in a storm can throw you right out of bed. Back and forth, from one side to the other, your body’s weight goes with the ship. You lose your sense of up; the world becomes a sickening swirl of constant, unpredictable motion. There is no center. The stomach revolts and you begin to retch. Your organs churn as violently as the sea.
As El Faro steamed deeper into Joaquin’s grip, the off-duty seamen braced themselves in the corners of their cabins wearing their life vests while trying to sleep.
That night, as El Faro drew closer to Joaquin, Chief Mate Steve Shultz could not have slept well.
He unsteadily made his way up to the bridge at 3:44 a.m., dodging from grab bar to grab bar, timing his steps with the ship’s roll, and when he finally got up there, he wanted to know what the hell was going on.