by Rachel Slade
Nearly everyone in the coast guard has at least one great rescue story. You could casually talk to someone like Commander Charlotte Pittman, a former national champion rower, now running media relations out of the US Coast Guard headquarters in D.C. Give her an hour or two and she’ll reveal that she’d been a coast guard helicopter pilot in Alaska where, on moonless or stormy nights, it was so dark that it took every bit of her concentration to avoid hitting the six-thousand-foot-high mountains all around.
One night on a rescue mission to help a disabled boy in a remote village, the wind was blowing so hard that rain washed across Charlotte’s windscreen sideways. We’re used to watching rain falling down, so either her instruments were right or her eyes were right. Charlotte had to battle her instincts not to pitch the bird to get the rain going the way her brain told her it should. Two emergency techs in the back of the helicopter had no idea what mental gymnastics their pilot was going through, and their confidence in her kept Charlotte focused. After a while, though, she couldn’t fight off her impulses anymore.
She turned to her copilot, who was older and more experienced, and said, “I’m fucked up. Can you take over?” He did. After a few minutes, Charlotte noticed their airspeed dropping. “In training, they tell us that when you start losing your grip on reality, you physically pull into yourself,” she says, holding an imaginary control stick above her lap and pulling it closer into her body. The copilot was unconsciously slowing the helicopter into a hover. She turned to him and said, “Hey, are you okay?” He answered, “I’m fucked up too.” She says the only way they got home was by working together, talking each other through it, and remembering the sick boy in the back of the helicopter.
At the US Coast Guard’s D-7 Search and Rescue Command Center in downtown Miami, Chancery’s days could be just as psychologically harrowing. He regularly got calls from cruise ships requesting medevac for passengers with medical emergencies—often heart attacks. Frequently, a boat’s EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio beacon) went off, requiring the coast guard to determine whether or not there was a true emergency. Occasionally, Chancery’s team got a call from a boater who spotted an emergency flare. In that case, he would send out a helicopter or two to find out what was going on. There were vessel collisions and sinkings. Everything—every single call that came into the command center—was investigated using the coast guard’s regional assets: a handful of helicopters, boats, and planes stationed around the area.
Coordinating a search and rescue from an over-air-conditioned, windowless room can be emotionally draining. Just two months before, on July 24, a couple of fourteen-year-old boys disappeared off the coast of Florida in a nineteen-foot, single-engine boat, triggering the largest search-and-rescue effort the Coast Guard had executed in recent memory. Chancery’s team had nothing to go on except reports that the boys left from Jupiter, Florida, and may have been heading to the Bahamas.
Over the course of a week, dozens of vessels and air support scanned more than sixty-six thousand square miles hunting for the missing teens. Finding a boat without an initial position takes patience, especially so close to the powerful Gulf Stream, which has a tendency to pull things north around and down again, like a giant horseshoe. Chancery tried to calculate the possible drift of a vessel about the size of the one lost. Eventually, the boys’ capsized boat and a life jacket were found dozens of miles off the Florida coast far north of where they’d departed, but Perry Cohen and Austin Stephanos were never found.
Chancery arrived at the command center at 5:30 a.m. on October 1. He lived about twenty miles away from the downtown headquarters, but at that time of day, traffic was light. Getting to work on his Ninja wasn’t a problem.
Nestled among Miami’s brand-new skyscrapers, hotels, and condos, the coast guard’s concrete bunker of a building sits like a can of Bud among fine wines. It’s easy to miss the entrance, protected by an armed guard and a metal detector. Deep within, in a single room built for machines, not humans, the command center’s white walls and white floors are bathed in fluorescent light and the hum of air-conditioning. It’s a fortress, accessible only to those with the highest security clearance. Drug interdiction is a big problem in D-7, and one person always mans the law enforcement station, watching the computers and phones. On one wall, a giant grid of LCD screens show maps of the area, constantly updating with weather and vessel information.
That morning, Chancery and three other operations specialists on the day shift met with the guys coming off the night shift to get a sense of what was happening out there. They didn’t have much to talk about, since it’d been a quiet night, but they did discuss the weather—there was a hurricane idling a few hundred miles east of the Bahamas, which meant that the coast guard’s helicopters on Great Inagua Island (between Turks and Caicos and Cuba) and Andros Island (in the Bahamas) would be out of play if something came up that day. From the most recent forecasts, Chancery and his team knew that the storm was predicted to cut north. Maybe it would eventually hit land.
As soon as Chancery logged into the system and settled into his chair, he got an urgent email from the coast guard’s Atlantic Area command center, the central emergency station on the East Coast, located in Portsmouth, Virginia. The lieutenant commander who’d sent it followed up with a phone call to make sure someone had seen it.
Davidson had called Lawrence at seven o’clock that morning, warning TOTE’s man ashore that he was going to trigger an Inmarsat C alert message—a manually controlled distress call that sends out a ship’s location via satellite. Sure enough, that alert came into the Virginia command center about ten minutes later, at 7:13 a.m. from latitude 23.28’N; 73.48’W. The ship was traveling 235 degrees at 8 knots, approximately a third her normal speed.
The lieutenant commander told Chancery that he’d received two distress alerts—an Inmarsat C alert and an SSAS alert from a 737-foot ship in the Bahamas. The lieutenant commander added that he’d just gotten off the phone with a Captain John Lawrence—the designated person ashore for the ship’s company in Jacksonville, a company named TOTE. Lawrence had called ahead of the emergency alerts to let the coast guard know that he’d been in communication with the ship’s captain, and it wasn’t an emergency.
Lawrence said that over the crackly satellite connection, the shipmaster’s tone was calm. He’d assured Lawrence that the crew had everything under control. He said that they’d been taking on water through an open scuttle, had a fifteen-degree list, and had lost propulsion. But they were dewatering. Everything would be okay—they were simply setting off their alarms in case they needed help later. They wanted to make sure folks knew where they were.
In his retelling, Chancery makes sure I understand that in spite of this information, Lawrence told him that El Faro was in no danger of sinking. They discussed arranging for a tow, and Lawrence was calling salvage companies in the area to see if anyone was available.
The follow-up email from the Virginia-based lieutenant came shortly thereafter. It read:
“El Faro, San Salvador. We received the following Inmarsat C distress alert from motor vessel El Faro in position. MISLE reports it is 737-foot vessel. The vessel also activated its SSAS alarm. The command security officer for the vessel contacted the vessel and relayed their condition to us. POC John Lawrence. A scuttle opened in rough weather and the vessel took on water creating a 15 degree list. They stopped the ingress of water they are not at risk of sinking, but they are without power and engines. They are dewatering the vessel. Please assume SMC and work with RCC Bahamas to respond and report back with your efforts.”
(The US Coast Guard never misses an opportunity to use an acronym. MISLE is short for Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement, the coast guard’s vessel and marine incident database; SSAS is the Ship Security Alert System, the emergency signaling system; POC is Point of Contact; SMC means Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator; and RCC is the Rescue Coordination Center.)
Chancery didn’t know that
the ship was American, but he used a database to look up its name: El Faro.
Chancery’s first move was to plug the separate distress signals—the Ship Security Alert System (SSAS) and the Inmarsat alert—into his Search and Rescue Operations software on his desktop computer. It took him a few minutes. The alerts were about five nautical miles apart near a small, uninhabited island in the Bahamas called Samana Cay.
Emergency alerts go from ships to satellites and back to Earth. Where they ultimately get picked up depends on which satellite gets them first. In El Faro’s case, the distress alert went to a Norwegian satellite, picked up at a station in Norway. From Norway, the message was sent to Virginia, but the message was repackaged before it was sent. Between Scandinavia and America, some critical information was lost, including the ship’s course, speed, and time of reported position, which, by the time Chancery got it, was outdated.
Chancery’s training had taught him that secondhand information isn’t as good as first. He wanted to talk directly to the ship, so he needed the vessel’s satellite phone number. He called the person listed in his database under El Faro, a Captain John Lawrence, the same man who’d talked to his colleague in Virginia a few minutes earlier. “Hey, John,” Chancery said. “I’m calling you back. You were listed as the point of contact for El Faro.”
“That’s correct,” Lawrence answered.
“Do you have contact or direct communications with the vessel?”
“I did. They called me. I was just trying to call them back. And the satellite dropped the call. I can give you the phone number.”
“Yes, give me the phone number to the vessel. That’s fine.”
“Okay. Satellite number—you have to dial 8-011 first to get the satellite,” said Lawrence, who then passed along the information.
“All right,” answered Chancery.
“That’s what he called me on,” said Lawrence. “And I tried calling him back a few minutes ago to see if they had had any contact with you guys yet.”
“They haven’t.”
“Yeah, I talked to the other coast guard guy. Can you tell me what the plans are now? He said you were going to contact the Bahamas, I guess?”
“So here’s the deal,” Chancery said. “That depends. Right now, based off all the information you’ve provided, I’m not in a distress phase currently because they said they’re not at risk of sinking and they have dewatered. And I see they are without power and engines.”
“Correct.”
“Are they able to anchor that boat right there?”
“They’re forty-eight miles east of San Salvador, so I don’t think so,” Lawrence said.
“But the position that I’m looking at says they should be able to anchor,” Chancery said.
“Oh, really?”
“It’s not that deep. And they’re near some small islands.”
“You have a better map than me,” said Lawrence with a laugh. “I’m sorry, your last name was?”
“Chancery. And right now, yes, I am going to pass this information on to the Bahamas and you know, how we handle this depends on the situation because this is a large motor vessel.”
After he hung up with Lawrence, Chancery tried to call the ship more than a dozen times. “I was just dialing, dialing, dialing, dialing,” he says. “All right, I thought. I got to get a hold of this ship.”
Everything changed when Chancery got an EPIRB alert from El Faro. In his mind, this signaled that she was in a grave situation. “I was already moving to, There’s something seriously wrong here. If this captain had this happen, and now he’s not answering the phone, now I’ve lost communications with a mariner that’s in distress. We needed to get something moving here.”
Usually when a vessel sends out a distress alert, its location goes with it. “An EPIRB alert marks the boat right on the map,” Chancery says. “Boom! Here’s where the EPIRB is.” But El Faro’s emergency alert beacon wasn’t GPS enabled. It was an older model that hadn’t been updated since it was installed nearly a decade earlier. Instead, it eked out a few distress pings between 7:36 a.m. and 7:59 a.m.—read as a “406 unlocated alert”—which the coast guard picked up, but couldn’t effectively use.
To accurately pinpoint El Faro’s position, low earth-orbiting satellites would have had to pass above the ship while its EPIRB was pinging so that they could use the Doppler frequency shift to estimate the its location. In the twenty-four critical minutes that El Faro’s EPIRB pinged and then vanished forever, no satellites were in range. This would prove one of the most frustrating hurdles in the massive search-and-rescue mission to come. No one knew exactly where the ship was.
With growing urgency, Chancery reached out to his operations team in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos where a total of three MH-60 Jayhawk midrange helicopters, plus an MH-65 Dolphin short-range helicopter were stationed on Andros and Great Inagua Islands. He already knew their answer, but he had to try. He said to the aircraft commander, “Man, I got something going on. If I need you, can I get you guys to go in?” The pilot answered, “No, we can’t even pull the bird out of the hangar.” At this point, the storm was getting close. There was no way they were sending their helicopters out in that.
Chancery turned back to his computer to try to find vessels close to El Faro. Maybe someone was out there who could help. Nearly every ship has an automatic identification system (AIS) on board that regularly reports its position, via satellites, to parties that monitor marine traffic. Websites like vesselfinder.com make this information available to anyone with a computer. The coast guard can access AIS data to get both the ships’ positions and contact information. In this case, Chancery turned on everything to search hundreds of miles around El Faro’s last known position. He identified a few vessels in the area and tried to contact them one by one. He finally got hold of the Emerald Express, the only boat even close, about sixty miles from where he thought El Faro might be.
He said, “Hey, what’s your weather like out there?”
They were sheltering in the lee of the southernmost island in the Bahamas and were seeing eighty-mile-per-hour winds, thirty-to forty-foot seas. “I want you to do callouts for the SS El Faro. I’m looking for them,” Chancery told them. “Here’s my phone number. Call me back if you establish communications with them.” They never did.
The Emerald Express was having problems of its own. Joaquin was pounding the small Panamanian-flagged barge with twin engines too weak to overcome the force of the storm. A crew member of the Emerald Express later told a reporter, “The winds just threw us where it wanted to. We almost rolled two or three times and we lost one empty container. That’s when we started to prepare life jackets to abandon ship.” But they hung on, tossed around like a cork, and finally made it into a shallow inlet so flooded at the time that the crew thought they were still in deep water. When the flooding abated, they were shocked to discover that they’d been grounded twenty-one miles inland on tiny Crooked Island.
Chancery had run out of options. Inside the command center, it looked like just another day—the other officers were doing their thing, hunched over their computers. But Chancery began to feel panicky. Oh my God, something’s, something's really wrong here, he said to himself. Big American container ships don’t just vanish. He went to his commanding officer, Captain Coggeshall, for guidance.
Coggeshall had been a coast guard pilot for twenty-some odd years. He’d seen a lot and knew people. He replied, “Hey, NOAA has these Hurricane Hunter C-130s”—large, fixed-wing aircraft sturdy enough to fly into the eye of a storm. See if you can get them on the phone. Call whoever you need to.”
In his three years at D-7, Chancery had never reached out to NOAA before to request the use of one of their planes. But he was willing to try. Because when it came to search and rescue, no one had ever said no to him before. And obviously since it’s a C-130 aircraft, he thought, they can’t land, they can’t pick anybody up out of the water, and they can’t hoist. But they’re there. They�
�re over it. He asked NOAA, “Can you make callouts? Can you get a hold of the ship? Can we find out what’s going on?”
But you can’t just fly into a Category 4 hurricane and look for a ship. Visibility is next to zero. You need coordinates. Otherwise, where were they supposed to look? Calculating El Faro’s position proved near impossible. Chancery had been given three conflicting data points—the ship’s AIS, the location from the SASS, the Inmarsat coordinates—all collected at different times. Which one should he work off of?
And if the ship had lost propulsion as the captain said it did, then the vessel was drifting, but in which direction and at what rate? Chancery tried building a drift model like the one the coast guard had used to try to find the two boys off the coast of Florida. But to get quality output, he’d have to overcome several hurdles. For one thing, the modeling software he was using maxed out at 50-mile-per-hour winds, and he had reports that the winds out there were at least 80, maybe 100.
Worse, the software was designed to model vessels a third of El Faro’s size. Then things went from bad to awful. The coast guard had just upgraded its entire modeling software system a few weeks before. They were still working out the bugs on October 1 but hadn’t provided their operators the option to switch over to the old system in the event that the new one failed.
The coast guard’s servers couldn’t keep up with the calculations Chancery was inputting, and they started crashing. He had to reboot his computer again and again, losing data every time. Either the case got corrupted or was unrecoverable. Later on, the entire program and sometimes even the entire workstation would reboot or close out midscenario. Chancery would spend twenty minutes calculating a drift scenario, and then “it would just be gone.”