Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  “Mr. Hamm,” Davidson advised, “stand up, hold on to that handle. Just relax. Everything’s gonna be fine. Good to go, buddy. You’re good to go.”

  “You all right?” asked Shultz the AB with compassion.

  “How you doing, Frank?” Davidson chimed in. “You want a cup of coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you like it? Black?”

  “Just black.”

  “You want the chair, Frank?” Davidson asked.

  “Yeah, yeah. Yes, sir.” The big man sat down at the wheel, no longer concealing his fear. This was the worst weather he’d ever been in.

  Davidson bravely stared down Joaquin, trying to ease Frank’s panic. “It sounds so much worse up here on the bridge,” Davidson said. “Down below, it’s just a lullaby. It’s only gonna get better from here,” he announced to the troops. “We’re on the backside of it.”

  But they weren’t.

  At 5:43, Rich Pusatere called to the bridge with more bad news.

  It wasn’t just wind heel that had sent El Faro leaning far over to starboard, he told them.

  They were flooding.

  The scuttle on the weather deck that led to three-hold—the ship’s largest hold—had been left open. It might have been left ajar during loading. It might have been closed but poorly secured. It might have been so banged up over time that it could never have been properly sealed in a storm like that. Regardless, every wave that washed over the deck sent an ocean through the deck opening into the bowels of the ship. The water was collecting on the starboard side, where she was already leaning due to wind heel, adding extra weight that pulled El Faro farther over, preventing her from properly righting herself. She wasn’t coming back up. Jeff Mathias was right.

  Water was also coming into the engine room through a door leading to three-hold that was supposed to be watertight.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Davidson said. He sent Shultz down to the second deck with a flashlight to find out what was going on. “On your way down there, knock on Mike Holland’s door.” Rich needed all hands in the engine room to man the pumps, and he had requested his third assistant engineer.

  Shultz headed for the bridge door when Rich called up again. “Where’s the water coming from?” Shultz asked him over the phone. The captain took the receiver, listened, and repeated what the chief engineer told him: “Bilge pump running. Water rising.”

  Davidson instructed Rich to move ballast from starboard to port to try to right the ship. A minute later, he decided to turn the bow farther to the north. They were now at close haul to the wind. He hoped that this change would help center the vessel, giving his crew a chance to see what was going on down below.

  Davidson commanded Frank to steer them into a heading of fifty degrees.

  “Left twenty,” he told Frank.

  “Left twenty,” Frank repeated.

  Things weren’t getting better, Rich told Davidson. If the starboard list was such a problem, the captain figured, then he should turn the ship even farther to get the wind on the other side. “I’ll get it going in that direction and get everything on the starboard side to give us a port list and then we’ll be able to get a better look,” he told his chief engineer.

  Davidson’s solution was overly simplistic. True, if they turned just a few more clicks more to the west, Joaquin’s powerful northeast winds would catch El Faro on her starboard bow and throw the whole ship over to port. But such a maneuver poorly timed could cause the ship to instantly capsize if the bow dives in the wind and a wave crashes onto the deck, sending her into a catastrophic roll. Anyone who has tried to handle a sailboat in huge gales knows that when you tack—point your bow to the other side of the wind—it’s very violent. The power of the sail’s boom when the wind catches it and it flies across the keel can knock a person out.

  El Faro didn’t have a boom, but she did have cars, trucks, and containers straining against their chains and lashings.

  “Left twenty,” Davidson told Frank.

  “Left twenty,” Frank repeated. They were turning the mammoth ship into a heading of 350 degrees—north-northwest—exposing their starboard side to the storm.

  Remembering that he’d tried to ballast his way out, Davidson grabbed the ship’s phone to reverse his commands. “Stop transferring the ballast from starboard to port,” Davidson ordered his third engineer.

  Danielle came up to the bridge at six o’clock. It wasn’t time for her watch, but she couldn’t sleep through the storm. When she saw their new heading, she was astonished. “Three-five-zero!” she cried out. Why had they changed course? Were they heading back to Jacksonville?

  “Hi,” Davidson said to her casually.

  “Hi,” she said, echoing his apparent calm. “How are you, Captain?”

  “How are you? A scuttle popped open and there’s a little bit of water in three-hold. They’re pumping it out right now. Chief’s down there with Jeff Mathias. They’re closing the scuttle.” No big deal, he implied.

  Rich called up to the bridge with more alarming news. Water wasn’t just coming through the scuttle. It was coming through the ventilation trunks. The ocean was pouring through the louvered vents above his engine room and flooding everything. It could short out his console.

  The lube pressure wasn’t coming back, either, in spite of their course change.

  Davidson confirmed that they were bilging as much as possible, then turned to steering the ship, reversing his commands.

  “Right twenty,” Davidson commanded, sending them back through the wind.

  “Rudder right twenty,” Frank repeated.

  Shultz called up to the bridge on the handheld radio. He was on the second deck with his flashlight, knee-deep in water, trying to steady himself while looking through the scuttle above the three-hold. With every slam of El Faro’s bow, however, water splashed out from the hold over the edge of the open hatch. The massive cargo space must have been heavily flooded. Thousands of gallons of water had somehow gotten into the belly of the ship. It wasn’t wind heel that had pinned her down to starboard. It was the weight of the water.

  In the whipping winds and waves, Shultz secured the scuttle. But it was too late.

  Danielle stood on the bridge next to Davidson, waiting for orders. When the captain talked about getting the latest BVS report, she quipped, “It’s stormy.” What else did he need to know? She was exhausted by nerves and fright.

  “If you don’t need me—” She was about to leave. But there was something about Davidson in that moment that appealed to her compassion.

  “You want me to stay with you?” she asked him.

  “Please.”

  “Down to 950 millibars,” Davidson noted. That’s astonishingly low. “Feel the pressure dropping in your ears just then? Feel that?”

  Frank Hamm had his hands on the wheel, but he was visibly shaken.

  “Take your time and relax. Don’t worry about it,” Davidson told the panicking man standing before him, gripping the small ship’s wheel. They couldn’t just pull over and wait it out.

  “Stand up straight and relax,” Davidson told him.

  “I am relaxed, Captain,” Frank replied.

  “Relax. Steer the direction we’re going.”

  At that moment, the wind finally caught the starboard side and violently threw the ship to port, along with everything she carried. Below, a tidal wave of water, cars, and trucks crashed against the inside of her port hull, pulling the ship into a deep roll. If El Faro capitulated far enough, it would exceed its stability and capsize.

  The lube oil in the sump sloshed over to the opposite side of the pan, too, far away from the suction mouth. Pusatere lost oil pressure completely. Without oil, the emergency trip shut off the turbines. Although the boilers continued to crank out steam, the giant shaft in the engine room came to a halt. Three minutes later, El Faro lost propulsion.

  Davidson, Danielle, and Frank waited in shocked silence on the bridge. Time slowed to a crawl. The sky
began to take shape. Dawn.

  Chapter 18

  We’re Gonna Make It

  Shultz, Davidson, Danielle, and Frank Hamm braced themselves on the bridge holding their breath, waiting in the howling dawn for word from the engine room. Without propulsion, they couldn’t steer. Instead the old ship lolled helplessly in the churn of the sea until her bow pointed longingly back to Jacksonville. For several agonizing minutes, Davidson stared at the ship’s phone, hoping that Rich Pusatere would call with good news. In the engine room, the chief engineer was trying to get the turbines back online but water was sloshing around everywhere, pouring in from above, seeping through the watertight doors. He didn’t have enough oil to get his lube pressure up.

  Third Assistant Engineer Mike Holland was opening valves in the engine room manifold to bilge three-hold. It would take hours to pump out all that water. “Is there any way to tell if you actually have suction and it’s pumping?” Davidson asked him over the ship’s phone.

  Not really. Unless someone could look over the side of the ship and actually see the water flowing out of the hull, it was almost impossible to tell. There was even a chance that, as Holland opened valves, water got inadvertently pumped into other holds. Mariners who knew those ships told me that the combination bilge/ballast system aboard never worked well; the valves between the two intake and outtake systems were always getting pinned open by chips of rust or paint causing ballast water to flood the fourth decks.

  High water alarms were sounding in the engine room but no one on El Faro knew where all the water was coming from or where it was going. The old watertight doors between holds began weeping; some of the man-doors inside those doors may have been left open during loading. Water rained down onto the engineers from the ventilation ducts in the ceiling and seeped through the doors protecting them from the holds. Soon every chamber in the ship would be filled with seawater.

  Davidson ordered Holland to open all the valves on the bilge system to pump all the holds at once. But if some spaces they were pumping were dry, the entire system would gurgle and sputter to a halt.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. The ocean had found another way in.

  Twenty feet below the waterline on the starboard side was the ship’s main fire pump. It was connected by a short length of pipe to a small hole in El Faro’s hull. The pump was designed to draw seawater through piping to the engine room manifold. From there, engineers could open and close valves to direct water to extinguish fires anywhere on the ship. The crew regularly used this system to wash down the ship’s decks, so the main valve between the fire pump and sea was nearly always left open.

  As the cars in three-hold slipped their moorings and floated free, they crashed back and forth against the hull with every roll of the ship. Some cars probably slammed into the fire pump, busting the pipe, causing an eight-inch breach in the hull. At that depth, the pressure of the sea was tremendous. Using Bernoulli’s equation, one small hole twenty feet below the waterline would look like a fire hydrant, blasting water at an astounding 161 gallons per second. Water exploded into El Faro, causing immediate and catastrophic flooding.

  Rich Pusatere suspected this was happening but couldn’t stop it. At their best, his bilge pumps moved sixteen gallons of water per second. No way they could keep up.

  Davidson felt that El Faro was drowning and yet he waited to sound the general alarm. In that ferocious hurricane, they were far safer on a sinking ship than battling 100 mile per hour winds in El Faro’s open lifeboats.

  He told Danielle to go downstairs and wake up Jeremie. She’d been groggy when she first arrived on the bridge, but now she was wide awake. On her way to his cabin, she changed into her work clothes. When she got back to the bridge, Davidson asked her to prepare an emergency message to shore. He assured her that it was just a precaution.

  Danielle sat down at the communication desk and scrolled through the preprogrammed messages in the ship’s system. Which one should she use? Flooding? Disabled and adrift? “I would do a bunch of them,” Davidson told her. Who should she send it to? Davidson advised her to pick addresses off the provided list. He didn’t mention anyone specific. She found an address for the coast guard and an email for TOTE.

  At 6:39, the message was ready. She waited for Davidson to give her the word. “Don’t send anything yet,” he told her.

  Frank Hamm noticed water dripping from the bridge ceiling. “Nah, that’s okay,” Davidson said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Without RPMs the rudder was useless. Frank had nothing to do. He stood up and took a cup of coffee with Splenda. Now that they rolled with the waves instead of fighting them, it was a little easier to move around the ship.

  Jeremie came up to the bridge as requested. “Am I relieving watch?” he anxiously asked. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” The captain sent him downstairs to bang on doors.

  “I want everybody up,” Davidson told him.

  Wind ripped a piece of handrail off the deck and sent it screaming by.

  “On the El Morro,” Danielle said, “we were on the same run and one of the hurricanes developed right over San Juan. We took a 38-degree roll. Oh my lord, that was annoying.” She laughed brightly. “Imagine that.” She was comforted by the fact that she’d lived to tell the tale. They’d be okay. Another great sea story.

  Davidson picked up the satellite phone and called someone on shore. He left a message: “It’s miserable right now. We got all the wind on the starboard side here. Now a scuttle was left open or popped open or whatever so we got some flooding down in three-hold—a significant amount. Everybody’s safe right now. We’re not gonna abandon ship. We’re gonna stay with the ship. We are in dire straits right now. Okay, I’m gonna call the office and tell them. There’s no need to ring the general alarm yet. We’re not abandoning the ship. The engineers are trying to get the plant back, so we’re working on it, okay?”

  He hung up and once again declared that they were on the backside of the storm. Then he checked in with Rich; the engineers were still having trouble getting the engine back online, he told the captain, because of the list.

  Davidson picked up his satellite phone again and called Captain John Lawrence, TOTE’s designated person ashore. Again, he got a voice mail and left a message. At 7:00 a.m., Davidson called TOTE’s emergency call center. He had a marine emergency. Could he please speak to a qualified individual?

  Seven minutes later, Lawrence was on the phone. We have one side of that conversation:

  Hello Captain Lawrence. This is Captain Davidson.

  Sir.

  Yeah, I’m real good. We have secured the source of the water coming into the vessel. A scuttle was blown open by the force of the water, perhaps. No one knows. Can’t tell. It’s since been closed. However, three-hold’s got a considerable amount of water in it.

  We have a very, very healthy port list.

  The engineers cannot get lube oil pressure on the plant, therefore we’ve got no main engine. And let me give you a latitude and longitude. I just wanted to give you a heads up before I push that button.

  Our position is latitude 23-degrees, 26.3 minutes north. Longitude 73-degrees, 51.6 west.

  Yep, the crew is safe. Right now we’re trying to save the ship. But all available hands.

  We are 48 miles east of San Salvador.

  We are taking every measure to take the list off. By that, I mean pump out that hold the best we can, but we are not gaining ground at this time.

  Uh, right now it’s a little hard to tell because all the wind is on that side too so we got a good wind heel going. But it’s not getting any better. And I’m gonna guess, yeah, I’m, I’m—go ahead, sir. Go ahead.

  All right, priorities: We’re gonna stay with the ship. No one’s panicking. Everybody’s been made aware. Our safest bet is to stay with the ship during this particular time. The weather is ferocious out there. And we’re gonna stay with the ship. Now as—go ahead, sir.

  Right. The state of the weather: S
well is out of the northeast. A solid ten to twelve feet over spray. High winds. Very poor visibility.

  Fifteen degrees, but a lot of that’s with the wind heel.

  I can’t determine that at this time.

  That is correct. The engine room has informed me that they are pumping that hold. There’s a significant amount of water in there.

  That’s correct.

  Yep, what I wanted to do. I wanna push that button, that SSAS button. I wanna send some alarms on our GMDSS console. I wanna wake everybody up.

  Okay. I just wanted to give you that courtesy so you wouldn’t be blindsided by it and have the opportunity. Everybody’s safe right now. We’re in survival mode right now.

  Yep. Thank you, sir.

  Davidson hung up the phone and told Danielle to sound the abandon ship alarm.

  “Well, all hell’s gonna break loose with the messaging and stuff like that,” he told her.

  Then suddenly, “Wake everybody up!” he commanded urgently and angrily. “Wake ’em up!”

  “We’re gonna be good. We’re gonna make it,” he announced to the void.

  Part Two

  Chapter 19

  We’ve Lost Communication

  At 6:30 in the morning on October 1, Petty Officer Matthew Chancery was finishing his morning coffee. He was fresh off a three-day break, ready to start a twelve-hour shift monitoring distress calls from vessels in the 1.8 million nautical miles of ocean known as District 7. It’s the US Coast Guard’s busiest area, encompassing coastal waters from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas, all the way down to Puerto Rico. About two-thirds of all coast guard search and rescues happen here.

  Chancery had started his career in the Marine Corps; when his father fell ill, he began looking for other ways to serve his country. After talking to recruiters in various military divisions, he found himself drawn to the coast guard. He liked their mission of helping, not hurting. It’s something you hear a lot when talking to coasties: many served in the air force or the navy before switching over to the coast guard midcareer. Not that the other services were solely focused on killing, but they spent a lot of training time preparing for warlike scenarios that may never come, which can get tiresome. Most coasties get to use the skills they’ve acquired, if not daily, at least frequently. There’s always a drug interdiction, or a missing vessel, or someone abandoning ship. And in late summer, there were always hurricanes.