by Rachel Slade
He saw the form of Second Mate Danielle, her face illuminated only by the dim lights on the console. He saw the shadowy form of helmsman Jackie Jones standing by the ship’s wheel. And he felt a succession of riotous waves knocking them off course with every hit. The autopilot alarm sounded regularly—it couldn’t maintain its programmed bearing. Shultz wanted to steer the ship by hand, but it was difficult to turn into the waves when you couldn’t see them.
Shultz was the first deck officer to notice that the ship was listing. An inclinometer on the bridge —a curved clear tube filled with liquid, like a carpenter’s level—told him that as she rolled, the ship was dipping farther over to starboard than port. She wasn’t properly righting herself. He attributed the vessel’s list to the strong port winds. But without the anemometer, he couldn’t be sure.
It was certainly roaring out there, though. How much wind did it take to send them that far over to one side? He didn’t know. He’d only been on El Faro a few weeks. Must be wind heel, he concluded, and made incremental heading changes to try to maintain their 116-degree course.
AB Frank Hamm lumbered up to the bridge for his watch. Leaning as the floor rose and dipped beneath him, gripping the grab bar on the console, he surveyed the scene. “Captain ain’t been up yet?” The question hung in the air like a black cloud.
A few minutes later, Davidson came through the bridge door. He didn’t like his crew’s sullen mood. “There’s nothing bad about this ride,” he told them. “I’ve been sleeping like a baby.”
Shultz was done with heroics. “Not me.”
“What? Who’s not sleepin’ good? How come?” Davidson demanded.
“I could tell from 1:00 a.m. that the storm was comin’ in,” Frank told the master. “Those seas are for real.”
“Well, this is every day in Alaska. This is what it’s like,” Davidson declared.
Shultz immediately stepped up to support his commanding officer. “That’s what I said when I walked up here. This is every day in Alaska.”
“A typical winter day in Alaska. We’re not pounding.”
“Exactly my words,” said Shultz. “This is every day.” But that wasn’t exactly true. While storms in the Pacific Northwest could be savage, they didn’t compare to the highly organized cyclonic Atlantic hurricanes.
Davidson went on, “I mean, we’re not even rolling. We’re not even pitching. We’re not pounding.”
Shultz wasn’t so sure. “We’re heading up into the gusts and coming back down, riding through a lot of rain here.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Davidson. “Steer it up. Just steer in this direction right now.”
“Yes, sir,” Shultz said.
Like Shultz, Davidson considered the effects of wind heel—a list to starboard caused by strong winds blowing against the broad port side of El Faro. The crew could counter the list by shifting water from the starboard ballast tank to the portside ramp tank. It wouldn’t make a huge difference, but it was something. He called down to the second assistant engineer to find out how they were doing down in the engine room. His engineer confirmed that all was well.
But lack of experience was beginning to show. Former officers of El Faro who rode the ship in heavy seas told me that when she rolled over for an extended period of time, the engineers would always call up to the bridge to complain, and with good reason. Solids stirred up by the ship’s motion would enter the fuel lines and clog them up. Either someone in the engine room was furiously monitoring the fuel strainers, or no one was paying attention. If an engineer was struggling down there to keep the lines open, the bridge should have been alerted.
El Faro was equipped with bilge alarms in each hold that rang an alarm and lit up a light on the console in the engine room, not the on the bridge. It would have taken about eighteen hundred gallons of water to activate a high-level bilge alarm in a level condition. We know that the alarms had been recently tested. Is it possible that they malfunctioned? Or that they were on the port side—the high side—of the ship? Or worse, that an inexperienced engineer had turned on the bilge pumps (which may or may not have instantly clogged) and never gave them another thought?
The third assistant engineer was twenty-six-year-old Mitch Kuflik. Another third assistant engineer, Michael Holland, was only twenty-five years old. He’d been shipping for three years and spent only half of that time on a ship; he had a lot to learn about the complex steam engine. The last third assistant, Dylan Meklin, was a fresh graduate of Maine Maritime. He’d just stepped on El Faro on September 29 at age twenty-three. This was his first voyage, his first real job, and likely his first tour on a steam ship.
In the engine room, two huge boilers—fire chambers where water is turned into steam—sat opposite a ten-foot-long console, built in the 1970s, along with the rest of the ship. To young guys like Holland, Kuflik, and Meklin, raised in a digital world, this console must have seemed like a nightmarish vision of an analogue past: buttons, lights, gauges, and levers. Alarms were always going off. Things were always going wrong. Some were critical, some could be ignored. Less experienced engineers depended on the chief engineer’s knowledge for guidance.
The second engineer, Keith Griffin, came on watch at four o’clock in the morning. Following protocol, he diverted a portion of the engine’s steam from the propulsion system to clear accumulated soot off the boiler tubes. This is called “blowing tubes.”
Engineers I spoke to after the sinking find this troubling. The ship was very close to the eye of Joaquin. Containers were already shaking loose from their lashings. Inside, it must have felt like a carnival ride with all that rolling. This wasn’t the time to perform routine maintenance, especially when it compromised the ship’s power and speed. GPS records show that blowing tubes that morning slowed the ship down three knots for about thirty minutes.
In an interview, Chief Engineer Rich Pusatere’s wife said that the daily demands of El Faro’s ancient systems had left him exhausted. Someone needed to wake him up, if he wasn’t in the engine room already.
On the bridge, Davidson continued to ignore or even deliberately avoid evidence that might contradict his stance. “It’s probably better off that we can’t see anything, Chief Mate,” he told Shultz.
Davidson went downstairs to see how the galley was faring in the storm, maybe get some breakfast. As soon as he was gone, Shultz took charge. He used the ship’s internal phone to check in with the second assistant engineer again. Something didn’t feel right.
“It should go without saying the weather decks are secured,” he told the young engineer, “but I want to just make sure you wrote it down because the third engineer came up from the second deck when he got off watch and we don’t want anyone else doing that.” There was an interior route from the engine room to the ship’s house, but some people preferred to walk up the loading ramp, through the watertight door at the top, and onto second deck, which by this point was awash in waves.
For the third time, Shultz assumed that the scuttles had been properly closed without checking on them himself. The barometric pressure on the ship was down to 960 millibars; Joaquin’s eye measured 950 millibars with maximum sustained winds of 121 miles per hour. El Faro was steaming straight in.
At 4:45 Davidson downloaded the BVS report that had been waiting for him since eleven o’clock the night before. At that point, the forecast was more than fifteen hours older than the most recent NHC report; it was completely obsolete. The BVS forecast continued positioning Joaquin’s eye much further north, giving Davidson false reassurance that he’d successfully steamed below it.
When Davidson connected to the internet to get his BVS report, he also uploaded any of the crew’s emails that were waiting in a queue for the satellite connection. That’s when Danielle’s final three messages went to her mother and two friends. The one to Laurie read: “Not sure if you have been following the weather at all but there is a hurricane out here and we are heading straight into it. Category 3 last we checked. Winds are
super bad and seas are not great. Love to everyone. -D.”
Several hours later when her mother woke up and saw that message, she knew all was lost. In the decade that Danielle been shipping as a deck officer, Danielle never told her mom about the dicey situations she’d occasionally find herself in until after she’d been through them. And she never wrote “love.”
On the bridge, bad news began flooding in from around the ship. Containers and trailers were coming loose and falling off the deck, crew reported from below. One shipping box equipped with a GPS locator dropped over the side and drifted south between the islands, following the very course Danielle had charted for El Faro.
A few minutes later, the bridge phone rang again. It was the chief engineer, Rich Pusatere.
He wanted to know what they were doing about the list. The ship was heeling over so far, Pusatere said, that he was having trouble keeping his lube oil pressure up.
The lube system bathed the huge turbines and the propeller shaft in highly refined oil to prevent friction. All the oil ran through a closed system of pipes and gears and collected in a sump—a large shallow pan—below the huge bull gear. The mouth of the system’s suction pipe, much like the plastic tube on a liquid soap container, sat twenty-three inches right of the centerline of the ship, ten inches above the base of the pan. If oil levels were high, the mouth would remain deep in oil. But with all the ship’s pitching and rolling, the oil sloshed away from the mouth, causing the pump to suck air.
At home, when you’re low on liquid soap, the tube attached to the pump hovers above the liquid. You can pump all you want, but it will never draw soap. Either refill the bottle, or throw it away.
That’s exactly the situation Pusatere was facing. He had a main pump and a backup pump if the first one failed, but neither would work if the suction mouth wasn’t making contact with the lube oil. What’s worse, the backup pump hadn’t been working well on prior voyages according to Jimmy Robinson’s turnover notes. It had been scheduled to be rebuilt.
If both pumps failed, Pusatere had a gravity tank located high above the engine room loaded with reserve oil. By opening up a valve, he could get about nine minutes’ worth of lubrication to flow down into his turbines before they seized completely.
His lube oil problem was compounded by the fact that El Faro left Jacksonville on September 29 with low oil levels—at 1,225 gallons, about 200 gallons below the recommended operating volume. One former El Faro chief engineer testified that he always ran the system at higher levels to prevent loss of lube oil suction, especially when he anticipated foul weather.
If Pusatere lost his lube oil system, he’d lose the turbines. They’d shut down almost immediately. If he lost the turbines, they’d have no way to steer El Faro through the hurricane. She’d drift, turn her broad side to the seas, take on water, and eventually succumb to the ocean. The solution was simple: they had to steer her into a smoother ride, get her vertical.
Davidson listened to Pusatere’s concerns. Severe winds on his port side must be blowing them over more than usual, he told him, as he’d told his officers. He couldn’t see the waves in the dark and with all the ship’s movement, it was hard to physically judge exactly how much the ship was hanging as she rolled from side to side, but he could feel it.
That slow movement indicated flooding. But all the howling and rocking in the black night were fatal distractions.
Chapter 17
The Raging Sea
23.50°N -73.85°W
At 5:00 a.m. El Faro was drowning. An angry sea raged on, joining forces with the power of Joaquin’s eye wall to form a thirty-five-mile-wide, aqueous tornado. Lightning shattered the darkness, turning torrents of rain whipping across the ship’s windshield into bright white claws. Furious gusts made a deafening howl on the bridge. The ship jerked and plunged as though she had lost her mind with fear.
In the oppressive roar, Captain Davidson planted his feet at the chart table, gripped the grab bars, and once again began rationalizing conflicting weather reports. BVS and NHC put Joaquin’s eye at different points on his map. Was he north of the storm? In it? South of it? Desperate for an explanation, he blamed the discrepancy on the failings of modern technology.
“Here’s the thing,” Davidson told his chief mate. “You’ve got five GPSs on this ship, so you’re gonna get five different positions. I use one weather program—BVS.”
Davidson refused to consider the idea that the BVS report was simply wrong. It told him where the ship was relative to the hurricane’s path calculated more than nine hours before but Davidson dismissed anything that countered his faith in it, including the NHC’s reports, Weather Underground, and his own colleagues. He couldn’t face the fact that every single decision he’d made since the beginning of the voyage had put his ship in dire straits. And that the course change he’d commanded Danielle to make at two o’clock in the morning—without consulting his weather reports—had sealed El Faro’s fate.
What kind of man is capable of facing such excessive errors of judgment?
Shultz knew where they were relative to the storm. He’d been keeping a close watch on the barometer. He saw that it was damn low, 960 millibars, indicating that they were frighteningly close to Joaquin’s eye. In the final hours, he would monitor that barometer as if it were his secret Cassandra, cursed to tell him the truth even when his captain refused to believe.
Instead of retreating, Davidson dug in. He killed the autopilot and called out steering commands to his helmsman, Frank Hamm, peering into the vast darkness as if staring down a mortal enemy, trying to anticipate its next swing.
Midships. Rudder left ten. Right twenty.
Now this was taking command.
“Hard right,” Davidson told Frank Hamm.
“Rudder is hard right,” Frank confirmed.
“Our biggest enemy here right now is we can’t see,” Davidson called to Frank with growing frustration. Then he announced to all on the navigation bridge: “We’re on the backside of the storm,” even though there was no indication that that was true.
Once again, Davidson turned to Shultz for assurance that this weather wasn’t all that bad. “You get seventy days of this shit up there in Alaska,” Shultz dutifully parroted.
Everything loose on decks below was slapping wildly in the gales; containers yawned over the decks as if weighing the odds, then plunged overboard and floated away. Jeff Mathias had watched all this from down below. He fought his way against the bucking ship up to the bridge to find out what the hell they were doing about it.
Up there in the tower, the winds were louder. The night was blacker. The raging sea, cloaked in darkness, was chilling in its ferocity. Flashes of lightning illuminated a brutal watery world of monstrous waves and seafoam. Jeff waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, then studied the captain with incredulity. Finally, he yelled out, “What’s the wind speed?” Davidson didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t hear. Mathias asked again.
“We don’t know,” the captain shouted back. “We don’t have an anemometer.”
Mathias was a mariner as well as a farmer. At forty-two years old, he’d spent his life learning about man’s machines and man’s crops, and the colossal damage Mother Nature could inflict on both. He was knowledgeable and intuitive and he knew how a ship should feel. This one wasn’t right. When she rolled, she wasn’t coming back up to center.
“Never seen it hang like that before,” he yelled at Davidson.
“Never? We certainly have the sail area to cause a list like this,” Davidson told him, once more blaming the ship’s pronounced lean—up to 18 degrees—on the wind blowing square against the port side of the ship.
As El Faro rolled to starboard and lingered there, Mathias wondered aloud about the chief engineer, Rich Pusatere, no doubt toiling deep down in the ship’s engine room, trying to keep the steam engine going. Davidson told Mathias that the engineer was having trouble with lube oil pressure. More alarm bells went off in his head. As a chief e
ngineer, he knew that loss of lube pressure spelled doom.
Jeff’s concern spurred Davidson to adjust their course once again. He told Shultz to change El Faro’s heading from 100 degrees (zero is north, 90 is due east) to 60 degrees (northeast), closer to the wind. Davidson assumed things would shift around, but maybe getting her upright would help his chief engineer address his oil problem.
In fact, it was a huge change. Instead of running parallel to the waves, the ship would be nearly perpendicular to them. At that point, instead of rolling, El Faro would pitch. She would muscle her way up every swell, hang for a moment over the crest, then race down into the trough like a roller coaster, her bow crashing into the sea when she reached the bottom, causing a magnificent splash.
Pitching would cause new problems for the engineers: Every time the ship tipped into a dive, the propeller would come out of the water. Without resistance on the blades, the screw would spin wildly, radically changing the load on the engine. If this speed went unchecked, the force of the shaft spinning that fast would cause catastrophic engine failure. To prevent his overspeed relay from tripping (which would immediately kill the propulsion system), Rich had to gear down the shaft’s RPMs by hand each time the stern came out of the drink.
The officers on the bridge could only guess how high the waves were. Winds at 100 knots form thirty-foot seas. But that’s only an average. Every third or fourth wave could be fifty feet. They were steaming their way up a mountain of water and rolling into deep troughs. As dawn broke, they would be blinded by the waves created by the bow as it crashed into the brine.
Any minute now, Davidson thought, the wind will shift, confirming they’re south of Joaquin. But he was wrong. El Faro was deep in the grip of an eye wall so powerful that no engine on earth could pull the ship out. The barometer plummeted to 951 millibars; they were right next to the eye.
With the ship rising, falling, and slamming in the darkness, it felt like a free fall each time they surfed down a wave. At the wheel, Frank Hamm was pale and stricken. His fear was palpable. Davidson turned his attention to his panicky AB.