by Rachel Slade
Marlena had seen an opening. I’ll support you and stand by you the remainder of the way. But eventually you’re going to have to come off that ship because I keep getting so many signs and it’s scaring me.
James said, Don’t do that. Don’t do that.
Recently, James had been doing a lot of planning, “getting things in order,” Marlena says. He was making sure the kids were situated, making sure she had her degree. She found his behavior strange.
“So I took that as confirmation that God was telling me that it’s time for me to prepare myself,” Marlena says. “Build myself up and make sure I do everything I need to do to raise my kids, and do whatever it is to get everything squared away and situated. Everything that me and him discussed, everything that I can think about, it runs through my head every day. Because I can hear his voice, our conversation. It’s just like he knew he was leaving.”
One day in July, Marlena was in class when she missed a call from James. Why didn’t you answer the phone? I was trying to call you, he’d said.
Well, I was taking a test, she told him.
You have to learn to answer the phone sometimes, baby, James had said, because one day you may not be able to hear from me.
James boarded El Faro in September and told his wife that he didn’t know when he was coming home. The ship was going to be retired. James wasn’t clear about what was next for him. Are you going to be home for little James’s birthday? Marlena asked, because it was on Halloween, October 31. Her husband had answered, I don’t know. I just don’t know. But I’ll tell you this: If I don’t make it there, to the birthday party, I need you to meet me in the Bahamas.
Meet you in the Bahamas?
Yeah, that’s where we gonna be at. We’re gonna be in the Bahamas. She didn’t understand what he meant by that.
Marlena’s phone rang on the morning of October 1. She was working at Baptist Hospital, and the woman on the other end asked for her. I’m calling from TOTE, she said. I just wanted to let you know that we were tracking El Faro, which is what your husband, James Porter, is on.
Correct, Marlena answered.
We were tracking them and somehow they went into the eye of the hurricane.
“My heart literally dropped,” Marlena recalls. “I went into a panic attack but I’m staring at this wall. And as I’m looking at this wall, it’s like the vision that came to me before. I could see a ship going down. The first question that I asked her, I said ‘Did the ship sink?’ She said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. No, Mrs. Porter, we’re not gonna say that. We’re not gonna speculate that the ship sunk.’ ”
The woman had continued: We’re doing the best we can. We got everyone out there. They’re going to search for them. We’re going to make sure we bring them home safe and sound.
“But I already had that feeling like he’s not coming back,” Marlena says. “He’s not coming back.”
When Laurie Bobillot got the call from TOTE, she assumed the worst, having already received that ominous email from her daughter, Danielle.
TOTE wasn’t prepared to deal with the dozens of alarmed family members now demanding information about their husbands, wives, daughters, sons, and parents who were on El Faro. The first family conference call was “complete chaos,” Deb Roberts remembers. “Everybody was just so upset and wanted answers. People were butting in and beeping in and out and they weren’t muting their phones. It was just so frustrating.”
But in that conversation, Deb learned that El Faro had lost propulsion. That the ship was listing at 15 degrees. And that the ship had been beset by Hurricane Joaquin. “I didn’t know what listing meant. I didn’t know what ‘beset’ meant.”
During the phone call, TOTE assured family members that the company would pay for their travel and accommodations in Jacksonville while the coast guard searched for the ship. Many of the crew’s families were based in Florida, but not Deb. “I’d already had it in my mind that my husband Robin and I were going because I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand being so far away, just so helpless.”
She immediately bought plane tickets for herself and her husband. She got tickets for Mike’s girlfriend, Kelsea, too. And she got a ticket for Kelsea’s mother because she knew that she didn’t have the emotional capacity to take care of the young woman who’d recently entered her life.
They booked tickets from Portland, Maine, to Jacksonville through JFK, but Deb still hoped for the best. “Honestly in my head I thought, Okay, so this storm is clearing now. They’ll be able to find the ship. By the time we get to Jacksonville, they’ll know where they are. And Mike will come off that ship. And I will take him home.”
When they got to Portland, they discovered that their plane was delayed due to communication issues.
Sitting in the airport, waiting for the plane, Deb saw a fiftysomething woman approach the counter. As she talked to the attendant, the woman broke down. Deb sat next to her husband, watching. The stranger’s depth of frustration and desperation mirrored her own. This was an El Faro mother, just like her. She knew it. Deb followed the woman with her eyes as she walked slowly back over to the rocking chairs and stared out at the tarmac.
Deb walked over quietly and touched the woman’s hand. “Did I overhear that you have someone on El Faro?” she asked.
“Yes,” the woman answered. “My daughter.”
“My son is on that ship.”
Laurie Bobillot explained that she had moved to Wisconsin with her boyfriend a few years before and was trying to sell her Rockland house. Danielle, her daughter, a deck officer for TOTE, had been living there but shipped out half of the year and Laurie didn’t think it made sense to keep the place and pay taxes on it. In September, Danielle had dutifully packed up her things. A few days ago, she’d flown back to Jacksonville to take over as second mate on El Faro.
Laurie stayed in Rockland after Danielle shipped to prep the house for real estate agents. Her daughter’s two cats, Oprah and Spot, wandered around the remaining furniture and moving boxes, wondering what was going on.
When Laurie got the call from TOTE, everything that had happened in the past year came into sharp focus—Danielle’s sense that her shipping career was coming to an end, her reluctance to get back on El Faro, her strangely emotional final email early that morning. There’d been so many signs. And now Laurie sat alone in the Portland airport, heading not to her boyfriend in Wisconsin, but to Jacksonville.
Watching the planes, waiting for some good news, Laurie looked up at the soft-spoken Maine woman standing next to her. The woman’s face spoke of grief, fear, and hope—they were two mothers searching for their children. She instantly felt a deep sense of connection.
Deb and Laurie began working as a team. Worried that they’d miss their connecting flight in New York, they pleaded their case to the flight attendants who assured them that they’d call ahead and have the pilot hold the flight for them. The group sprinted like mad through JFK and arrived at the next gate just as the plane to Jacksonville was pulling out. That’s when Laurie lost it, releasing the heartbreak raging inside her.
“You don’t understand,” she roared. “Our children are missing out in the middle of the ocean somewhere.”
Chapter 22
Ships Don’t Just Disappear
Clearwater Air Station commanding officer Rich Lorenzen had to make a career-defining decision. Should he send his aircrew into a Category 4 hurricane to search for El Faro?
Lorenzen had served in the military for three decades—including ten years with the US Coast Guard—and in 2015, was the top officer at Clearwater, one of the coast guard’s biggest and busiest air stations. He was responsible for the welfare of more than five hundred pilots, rescue swimmers, and mechanics who provided air support to all of coastal Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean basin, and the Bahamas.
These were men and women programmed just like him—highly trained thrill seekers—whose jobs demanded that they balance their adrenaline addictions with unwa
vering discipline. Everything they do comes with risk, every decision has consequences. Every protocol comes with a checklist to assess danger each step of the way. The USCG motto is Semper paratus, always ready.
Most rescue pilots have the cool demeanor of race cars drivers—exquisitely sensitive to minute changes in their environment but highly directed in response. No action is wasted. Because they’re in the business of saving lives, not taking their own.
By the time I met Lorenzen, he’d retired from the coast guard and was working as an emergency medevac pilot for Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Clearwater, Florida. A fiftysomething guy looking every bit the part, he still sported his regulation haircut, now completely gray, and moved with the agility of an athlete half his age. When he met me, Lorenzen was wearing a flight suit on his taut frame. Flying never gets old for guys like him. Even with a storm brewing outside, he said he couldn’t wait to strap himself into a helicopter, start her up, and take to the air.
Lorenzen led me to his small office on the top floor of the hospital where, as we talked, I watched the sky blacken through the window behind him. The gales came with a roar, pelting the rain obliquely as the rooftop antennas dodged and bowed. Turning around to admire the dramatic finish of a days-long storm system, Lorenzen’s eyes positively sparkled.
Lorenzen was contacted by D-7 after El Faro had been out of communication for more than twelve hours. For all he knew, the ship could be adrift in that hellish weather, taking on water with every roll. If she was gone, her crew might be clinging to life rafts or bobbing in survival suits, battling every wave, fighting for air in the choking spray of the black, ferocious sea. Thirty-three people struggling in the darkness, praying for the bright white spotlight of a Jayhawk or US Coast Guard plane. Salvation.
As the commanding officer in Clearwater, Lorenzen’s most important job was to weigh risk. To do this, he was part logistics expert, part cheerleader, and part psychologist. If even one crew member of El Faro was alive, he or she could still be saved. It had only been twelve hours and the seas were warm, reducing the risk of hypothermia—the way the majority of maritime victims die.
The will to survive is strong, Lorenzen tells me. He’s seen it himself—people overcoming unimaginable conditions, tenaciously clinging to life for days, awaiting rescue. Every coastie has a litany of stories to back that up.
Commander Mike Odom, one the coast guard’s first rescue swimmers, is a living embodiment of that.
On a stormy night in January 1995, Odom flew with his crew three hundred miles off the coast of Georgia to help three people trapped on a sailboat battling twenty-foot seas and gale-force winds. This was exactly what Odom had trained so many years for. He’d discovered his gift as a boy—swimming for hours every day as a mental escape from his tumultuous home life. When he was old enough, he left his rural Texas home and eventually joined the US Coast Guard.
By his twenties, Odom was a remarkable swimmer, strong enough to pass the coast guard’s punishing eighteen-week rescue swimmer program.
That January night, Odom was lowered from the Jayhawk into the Atlantic. As soon as he unclipped himself from the cable, invisible two-story-high waves pushed him under the water. When he came up, choking on sea spray, Odom was completely disoriented. It took him a minute to get his bearings. Then came a flood of adrenaline. He cleared his face mask and snorkel and began his powerful crawl toward the vessel to hoist the three boaters, one at a time, into the rescue cage to safety.
Each hoist exhausted Odom. On the last hoist, the helicopter’s pulley mechanism failed. Facing a three-hundred-mile trip back to land and quickly diminishing fuel, the flight team had to make an agonizing decision: leave now and abandon Odom, or try to get him back, risking everyone’s life in the process. Those were the kinds of questions the crew had been trained to answer quickly. The answer was clear. Mario Vittone, Odom’s flight team member and one of his closest friends, dropped a life raft down into the darkness, turned west, and headed to the mainland, eyes burning with hot tears.
Odom reached the raft and climbed in, but the churning sea kept tossing him out. Concerned that he would die of hypothermia and his body would be lost, he strapped himself to the float. Four hours later, he lost radio contact with the coast guard. His last message out: he was losing feeling in his legs; he was tired; he was cold.
A second helicopter crew arrived on scene about ninety minutes after that last message. When they focused their spotlight onto the bobbing life raft, Odom was motionless. They thought he was dead. A second rescue swimmer was dropped in the water and approached Odom; he shook and slapped him for about a minute, and Odom moved. He was severely hypothermic. But he was alive.
Now a youthful fifty, Odom travels the world inspecting ships for the coast guard. He keeps his dark silvery hair tightly cropped, but you can still make out a small patch of white in back—the mark of someone who has survived intense trauma.
The coast guard lore is rich with survival stories like these. Lorenzen told me about a FedEx driver who drifted in the ocean for more than seventy-two hours after his boat capsized off the coast of Florida. Thanks to his yellow shirt, he was eventually spotted by a sharp-eyed coast guard pilot and rescued. Steven Callahan, a sailor from Maine, overcame starvation, shark attacks, and dehydration to survive more than two months in an inflatable life raft, drifting eighteen hundred nautical miles from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean after his sailboat sunk. The coast guard had given up on him long before he washed up on the island of Marie Gallante.
These were the kinds of stories that sent otherwise normal, healthy people, with spouses and children at home, flying into hurricanes, diving into raging seas, searching for survivors.
The crew of El Faro might still be alive.
But this was no ordinary search mission. Hurricane Joaquin had continued along its excruciatingly slow and destructive path all the way to the Bahamas—flooding the coasts, tearing roofs off houses, and heaving the Emerald Express inland. Then Joaquin took a sharp hairpin turn out again. Seduced by the warm waters that birthed it, the storm went back east—almost directly over the last reported position of El Faro—to feed on the deep tropical seas, growing into a monstrous Category 4 hurricane, whipping the skies and seas of the Atlantic in its cyclonic frenzy.
Sending helicopters into that morass would be disastrous. Lorenzen’s only choice was launching a C-130—a turboprop cargo and transport plane with a 132-foot wingspan—from Clearwater five hundred miles to El Faro’s last known position to see if they could spot the ship.
The coast guard doesn’t normally launch its planes into hurricanes. The C-130 is the workhorse of the military, with a two-thousand-mile range, but its big airframe and giant wings make it unpredictable in extreme turbulence. C-130s cost up to $30 million new, so the coast guard gets the navy’s hand-me-downs; they’re coddled and cared for, Lorenzen says, but you just don’t know how and when they’re going to fail.
The aircraft definitely had limitations. Now Lorenzen needed to know his crew’s, “So I sat down with [Lieutenant Commander] Jeff Hustace, one of the first pilots I was going to ask to go fly into this. I asked him, ‘Hey, what are you comfortable with? What can the aircraft do? If you’re comfortable launching, I’m going to ask you to try and get in.’”
Characteristically, Hustace said he’d try. People who join the aircrew of the US Coast Guard don’t shy away from opportunities to test their skills.
Lorenzen’s decision to green-light the mission was bolstered by his knowledge of storm systems. Flying into a hurricane isn’t like in the movies, he says. You don’t just hit a wall. As you move progressively through the outer bands of the hurricane, “the wind goes up 20 knots, then 30 knots. Ten minutes later it’s up to 50 knots. Gradually that storm starts picking up as you get closer and closer.” In other words, each band tests your skills as you work your way to the eye.
Lorenzen’s most important function as a commander was to remind Hustace that he and
his team had choices. If at some point Joaquin took charge, they could turn back: If things start getting too hairy, he told the flight team, and you’re getting tossed up and down, and there’s lightning striking all around you, well, we don’t want to lose a crew over this as well.
That message helped Hustace and his crew make critical decisions for the next twelve hours. Their commanding officer trusted them to use their judgment first. His words would stay with them and eventually propel them deep into the storm.
Seven men—pilots, mechanics, and a dropmaster (trained to huddle inside the plane’s open cargo door while airborne and drop flares, life rafts, and other critical supplies into the water below)—boarded the C-130 at Clearwater Air Station at 4 a.m. on October 2. It would take them several hours to reach the Bahamas at first light. Along the way, the crewmen psyched one another up for some hairy flying—the coordinates they’d been given put them right at the center of the storm.
As day broke, Hustace found himself in a blinding haze of thick clouds. At higher altitudes, Joaquin’s rainbands—thunderstorms of increasing intensity that form concentric circles around the eye wall—forced him to drop lower so that his crew could get visual contact with the water’s surface. He eased the C-130’s yoke to settle the plane at twenty-five hundred feet above sea level as he nosed deeper toward Joaquin’s core. Winds and rain rattled the aircraft; anything loose inside went flying.
And then they hit it: a huge, powerful downdraft caused by the low pressure between rainbands, which forced the C-130 into a near-instantaneous altitude loss of greater than nine hundred feet. If they’d been flying any lower, they’d have slammed into the water.
Hustace pulled them out of the dive and turned the plane away from the storm, then checked in with his team over the intercom. The crew was shaken up, but okay, and fully committed to the mission. They were looking for a huge American ship with thirty-three people aboard. That was a lot of potential survivors. To hell with a little turbulence. If there was anyone out there, if they could save even one person, they would. They’d come this far.