Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  The C-130 made a high, wide arc out of the storm system and then took another pass straight into the cloud wall. Now Hustace had a better understanding of the storm’s anatomy. Flying low, the crew searched below and made callouts into the void. The plane hit the downdraft again and plunged dangerously close to the roiling seas. But this time, Hustace was confident they’d make it through. As soon as he could, he pulled them out of the dive, climbed up to safety, and went in again. And again. And again.

  With every pass, the crew searched the water to make out anything human from the milky churn. They were looking for a glimpse of red—the color of the thick neoprene survival suits issued to every mariner—orange life rafts, or the sharp edge of a lifeboat. (El Faro’s lifeboats were white, which hampered the chances that someone could spot them from the air.) The sea was a sickening riot of froth and foam billowing every which way, making it nearly impossible to make out something in the ever changing, tumbling landscape. Commander Scott Phy describes what it’s like to try to search in those conditions, “You’ll see a huge whitecap that looks like an overturned boat, all of your energy focuses in on that for a second, and then it vanishes.” This happened to the air crew several times a minute, for hours and hours.

  After a morning of brutal flying, Hustace’s team refueled in Guantanamo Bay and headed back into Joaquin, but the C-130 was starting to show its age. Panels inside were shaking off, bolts were coming loose. The turbulence was tearing apart the old plane, and they were five hundred miles from home. Eventually, they were forced to head back to Florida.

  Lorenzen says he’ll never forget watching the C-130 land in Clearwater at 4:00 on Friday afternoon. As he walked onto the airstrip to greet his crew, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Fuel was leaking out of the wing. “Literally that aircraft was getting jostled so hard that the turbulence caused the fuel line fittings to shake loose . . . I’m, like, whoa, don’t see that too often.

  “That’s the extent of the bravery and the confidence that crew had, sticking their nose in to try and find those folks. Because for all we knew at that point, we were going to find thirty-three people. Either in onesies and twosies in survival suits. Or maybe, thank God, in lifeboats. And that’s what we were waiting for, that’s what we were looking for.”

  They got within sixty nautical miles of the storm’s center—and found nothing of El Faro.

  Meanwhile, the command center in Miami was charting out a search plan for the following day, hoping Joaquin would back off, affording them better visibility. They deployed three H-60 Jayhawks to Great Inagua from Clearwater. The coast guard also had two C-130s from Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, standing by in Clearwater. Two cutters—the Northland and the Resolute—began to make their way toward El Faro’s last known position. They inched their way into the storm.

  At 5:04 a.m. on October 3, the first US Coast Guard C-130 took off from Clearwater, arrived on-scene by 7:00, and tried to run the aerial search pattern Miami had laid out for them. But working with visibility as low as one nautical mile, they couldn’t break through Joaquin’s strong rainbands. The crew reported that the hurricane-force winds caused significant sea spray, whitecaps, and swells of twenty to fifty feet. They saw nothing as large as a container ship.

  They were soon joined by an air force C-130 and a navy P8 jet.

  As Joaquin inched farther east, away from El Faro’s last known position, a C-130 finally spotted a debris field in the water 120 nautical miles northeast of Crooked Island. The coast guard sent its Jayhawk in to take a closer look. The rescue swimmer dove into the frothy seas to retrieve three life rings, one stenciled “El Faro.” It wasn’t a good sign.

  A second debris field ninety nautical miles northeast of Crooked Island revealed more detritus, presumably from the ship.

  On day three, seven aircraft completed a total of twenty-eight hours of flight time searching an area of 30,581 square miles.

  On day four, the weather cleared significantly with visibility at ten nautical miles, and winds down to 15 knots with two- to three-foot seas, meaning the cutters could finally get in there. The Northland arrived on-scene to take command of the search operation. Three C-130s, a navy P8 jet (a militarized Boeing 737), and a Jayhawk continued their hunt, along with three tugs chartered by TOTE, and the Resolute.

  At 3:00 that afternoon, a rescue swimmer investigated a fiberglass lifeboat from El Faro first spotted by a Jayhawk. The boat had been crushed; its propeller blades bent and fouled. The crew of the navy P8 spotted two additional El Faro life rafts, one of which was picked up by the Northland. Both were empty.

  Later that day, a twenty-seven-year-old rescue swimmer sat inside his Jayhawk watching a red immersion suit waving and bobbing in the water. Could there be a survivor in the suit? The swimmer had executed at least twenty-five rescues over his seven-year career and had flown a couple of search flights the day before. The weather was beautiful—warm waters, blue skies. They had been following their search pattern when his copilot had spotted the tiny red object. The pilot pulled the helicopter into a hover three hundred feet above the water as the swimmer clipped his harness to the helicopter’s bear hook and had the flight mechanic lower him into the water. Once down, he swam over to the suit.

  Within a few feet of it, the swimmer turned away in horror. Inside the red neoprene was a corpse. Floating for days in the warm salty waters, the head was triple normal size, “very bloated with a blueish skin tone,” the swimmer told the NTSB. It was his first confrontation with death. He’d been trained to rescue the living. He took a moment to compose himself, then looked up toward the helicopter hovering above him and drew his hand across his throat to signal to his mechanic that the person inside the suit was dead.

  They debated what to do. If they hoisted the body into the chopper, they’d have to return to base immediately and would be out of commission for a day. But what if there were other survivors nearby? Hovering above the body, discussing options, they got another call: a P8 had spotted a second survival suit waving in the water about forty nautical miles west-northwest of El Faro’s last known position. It could be a living person. They hoisted the rescue swimmer into the bird and dropped a buoy equipped with a GPS locator. The second survival suit was empty; wave action had lent it an eerie lifelike appearance. The beacon they’d dropped with the first suit failed to operate correctly and the body was lost to the sea.

  Later, Captain Coggeshall of the coast guard considered what El Faro’s crew might have been facing. “Maybe they made it to the lifeboat or they had managed somehow to get a life raft in the water, but I couldn’t figure out how in thirty- to forty-feet seas you safely get from the deck of the ship into a life raft that is dropping out from under you. If you put the life raft in the water and it’s not tied to the ship, it’s going to blow away. So that leaves you with on option: entering the water in a Gumby suit.

  “But there isn’t a surface to the water in those kind of conditions. Your ability to protect an airway so you can breathe is marginal at best with the sea foam, the spray, the rain water. I know rescue swimmers that have deployed in storms and they talk about how, within a couple of feet of the surface of the water, you really can’t effectively breathe. And they’ve got a snorkel.

  “So I thought it plausible that the person in the survival suit we found had been on the bridge when the ship went down. And everybody else who wasn’t actively engaged in trying to save the ship had mustered in another compartment and was making preparations to abandon ship if it came to that. And then, I can’t speculate, you know, beyond that.”

  Could the man in the survival suit have been Davidson? As the captain of the ship, he might have been the only person on the bridge when the ship was going down.

  By Wednesday, October 7, a combination of air and water assets had searched a total of 274 hours, covering 195,601 nautical miles. They recovered an empty El Faro survival suit, a pair of soft shell coolers, a reefer cargo door, a Minnie Mouse doll along with dozens of o
thers, three life rings, one blue plastic parking curb, and an adult-size life vest.

  A Carnival cruise ship sailing through the area encountered the debris field; passengers stood in silence on the decks as their ship cut a swath through the remains of El Faro—a miles-long oil slick.

  Chapter 23

  Profit and Loss

  The US Coast Guard wasn’t always synonymous with safety. It took a massive movement to create laws that offered protections for the men and women working on America’s ships.

  Wildly lucrative, economically necessary, and extremely dangerous, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shipping occasionally ended in disaster, but the lives of sailors was not the young government’s concern. Under federal law in 1790, for example, sailors could be imprisoned for deserting a ship before the voyage ended, even if they had very good reasons to flee. That law stood fast for more than a century. Indeed, flogging aboard ships was prohibited by law only after 1850; corporal punishment was abolished in 1897.

  A merchant could load his creaky wooden vessel until its gunwales lapped at the brine, yet no one refused him passage. Along the docks, sober sailors eyed the teetering ship warily. Plied with drink or plagued by creditors, however, many men preferred to cast their lot with the open waters rather than submit to life in prison, either behind bars or behind a desk.

  If a ship sunk somewhere out there on the seas or sharp bluffs, if it stubbornly refused to appear at port at its expected time—its crew and cargo buried in a watery grave—insurance would reimburse the merchant for his troubles. Even in 1835, Americans’ boundless appetite for speed (and profit) did not go unnoticed. French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville observed:

  “The European navigator is prudent when venturing out to sea; he only does so when the weather is suitable . . . [The American] sets sail while the storm is still rumbling by night as well as by day he spreads full sails to the wind; he repairs storm damage as he goes; and when at last he draws near the end of his voyage, he flies toward the coast as if he could already see the port.

  The American is often ship-wrecked, but no other sailor crosses the sea as fast.”

  Likewise, the US Coast Guard had an economic, not human, mission. Formed by Alexander Hamilton, it was established to enforce customs laws rather than protect the men and women aboard the ships. Its officers boarded vessels only to check manifests to ensure that the government collected duties it was owed; if they saw a man float by clinging to a mast, they had no obligation to fish him out.

  With the advent of steam, a series of catastrophic boiler explosions within full view of women and children ashore spurred the industry to do something about its iron-bellied beasts. In a single year—1832—14 percent of American steam vessels, most on the Mississippi, were blown to bits by their own shoddily built boilers. Following the Civil War, a ship burst apart, killing all thirteen hundred veterans aboard. The merciless sea had once been the greatest threat to the pursuit of happiness; now manmade machines consumed people and ships with nearly as much fervor.

  But dangerous ships increased everyone’s risk—financial risk, that is. Ship hulls were insured through industry-only clubs, such as Lloyd’s of London. Whenever there was a loss, all shippers got hit with higher premiums. Someone had to wrestle this risk under control. So shipping companies decided to regulate themselves. The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), a nonprofit founded in New York in 1862, was founded by merchants to establish design and construction standards for America’s seagoing vessels. Like its British cousins, the society eventually adopted the Plimsoll mark; published wood-, iron-, and steel-hull guidelines for naval architects; and provided inspection services to their members in an effort to ensure America’s merchant fleet adhered to high standards.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, shipping was booming; the US population almost doubled each decade—from four million in 1790 to sixty-three million in 1890; concomitant with this unprecedented growth came unprecedented demand for boats and barges to move raw materials, manufactured goods, and people. But as the population spread inward from its coasts, opportunities on land superseded jobs on water. There are incredible photos of San Francisco Bay during the Gold Rush showing the harbor literally choked with skeletons of rotting sailing ships abandoned by mariners who’d seek their fortunes in the hills. Sailors on the East Coast had signed onto the ships in droves, rounded Cape Horn, and came up the California coast, only to desert their vessels as soon as they reached port.

  Desperate for crews to hoist the sails or feed coal into steamships’ ravenous boilers, companies hired third-party agents to coerce sailors, by hook or by crook, into signing on. In major ports including New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore, shipping companies teamed up with “crimps”—boardinghouse owners who took advances on sailors’ wages in lieu of payment to cover their lodging and other expenses, including liquor and prostitutes.

  Shipping companies paid sailors’ wages directly to the crimps, creating a system of indentured servitude. The companies also offered bonuses, known as blood money, to agents who signed men up for voyages. This system rewarded criminal methods. Agents regularly disguised themselves as sailors, offering rounds of drinks to unsuspecting seamen who then awoke from a liquor-induced haze aboard a ship, their future earnings already spent. Sometimes agents shanghaied sailors by force—clobbering them on the head, forging signatures, and dragging them unconscious onto a ship while the captain conveniently looked the other way.

  Mariners fought these nefarious practices for years but had little sway over a corrupt political system committed to supporting the moneyed end of the industry. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, crusading mariners, especially foreign-born seamen, began to organize. Joining miners, factory workers, and other workingmen and -women, they fought for safer working conditions, better pay, and better protections. Their efforts were hampered by historically entrenched racism, especially on the East Coast where white men refused to join together with their fellow black sailors, but organizers eventually gained traction on the West Coast where most seamen were white Americans or European immigrants.

  This movement—paid for in blood, sweat, and tears—laid the foundations for America’s most resilient unions. The American Maritime Officers (AMO) union, the International Organization of Masters, Mates & Pilots (MM&P), the Seafarers International Union (SIU), and a handful of others continue to wield impressive power over the shipping industry a century later.

  The sinking of the Titanic coupled with other major maritime tragedies in the early twentieth century, along with the successes of the organized labor movement, reinforced the need for a strong maritime regulatory agency. The volatile steam engine and its failings finally bound capitalism to workers’ welfare.

  From the moment labor organized, America’s power brokers have hacked away at it. William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, used his tabloid papers to disparage all unions, but especially the maritime unions. He called organized labor anti-American at best, communism at worst. Case in point: conservatives loathed the fact that merchant seamen received medical care through a system of public health hospitals first established in 1789. Seamen’s hospitals were founded to prevent the spread of disease and, over time, grew to serve military dependents, coast guard personnel, and the poor. These hospitals were once financed by a tax on imported commodities, but as of 1884 that money went straight into the Treasury’s general fund rather than specifically supporting seamen’s health. After World War II, Republicans went to great lengths to dismantle the hospital system in support of their tax-cutting agenda. As president, Ronald Reagan finally succeeded in eliminating the hospitals from the federal books, and now the entire population those facilities once served, including America’s mariners, receive care at private hospitals at private hospital rates.

  Labor is a tiny fraction of shipping costs—about 4 percent. Officers and seamen are paid according to strict union rules. They receive regular training through their unio
n halls and are represented by union lawyers when there’s a dispute. They get their insurance and pensions through their unions as well and count on the unions to represent them in federal and industry negotiations.

  Fuel is a major drain on shipping profits. To power a medium-sized ship across the Atlantic demands as much as $40,000 a day. Every penny counts.

  Unable to cut salaries enough to please their shareholders, shipping companies have saved a few dollars by cutting staff. Watches on the bridge were once divided among four mates; now three people share the twenty-four-hour watch period, meaning longer shifts and increased risk of exhaustion. In the days of Morse code, a dedicated radioman handled all shipboard communication. That position is gone; now the on-duty mate must man emergency messaging, along with all of his or her other responsibilities. That’s how two full-time jobs magically become one.

  Respected ship captains once retired ashore to become port captains—seasoned experts on land who advised captains at sea. They were well versed in the ways of the merchant marine, the weather, the ships, and the subtleties of staffing a vessel. Older mariners who worked with port captains say that in an apprenticeship industry like shipping, port captains’ experience was invaluable in running a vessel. They’d discuss weather and routing and use their prodigious experience to guide younger captains in all things, including managing their diverse crews.

  The man who filled that role for TOTE’s ships, Bill Weisenborn, quit the company in 2012. He didn’t want to relocate to Jacksonville and didn’t like all this restructuring and downsizing. The port captain is a luxury of the past. Now port engineers—those trained on running the ship’s engines—are expected to do it all. If an engine fails, it’s catastrophic and impossible to ignore. An incremental breakdown of knowledge and leadership can go undetected for years.