Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  Had the voyage of El Faro sailed into a hurricane of fake news?

  Then Greene passed the buck. It was as if this whole business was beneath him.

  “Sir,” Greene continued, “I’m the president of the company with twenty-six ships in a fleet. I provide strategic direction. I have qualified individuals within the portfolio areas, officers in the company. I expect them to dedicate the time that is required and necessary and appropriate to fulfill their duties in the capacities that they serve. And I rely and trust and count on them to do that, as I oversee a significant company.”

  Later that day, Commander Mike Odom, the former rescue swimmer, focused on procedural operations once again. Odom was one of the coast guard’s few traveling ship inspectors who go around the world boarding vessels to make sure they comply with the most current regulations. He’d seen a lot of questionable practices in the American merchant marine.

  Odom asked whether TOTE had developed contingency plans that would guide how shoreside personnel dealt with a vessel in specific emergency situations. He was thinking about the hurricane—a very specific situation, but an expected one, considering the fact that TOTE sailed in the Caribbean. What was TOTE’s directive to its employees when a massive hurricane threatened its assets?

  Once again, Greene replied that TOTE followed the letter of the law, implying that if there was a failure, it wasn’t the company’s fault, it was the law’s. He said on no uncertain terms that TOTE’s safety management system (SMS) complied with the US Coast Guard’s regulations. Which it did.

  In fact, those regulations are pretty loose. Instead of providing a model or clear guidelines, the coast guard merely requires that shipping companies have a safety management system. That’s like making a kid take a test that her teacher will never grade. What incentive does that kid have to do a good job?

  The law says that every company has to have some kind of manual that details how crew and shoreside management should deal with various situations. The specifics of that manual—how it’s written, what it covers, how it addresses each anticipated issue—are left up to the individual company. No one approves or evaluates it. The coast guard would like to be more proscriptive about the contents of these manuals, but there’s a tacit agreement that any additional guidance would burden shipping companies.

  In contrast, the International Maritime Organization (the branch of the UN dedicated to regulating shipping) issued an International Maritime Safety Code in 1987 in response to a spate of accidents caused by major management errors. This code, adopted by most of the world’s merchant fleet (with the exception of the US), offers clear SMS guidelines, has been continually tested and updated, and has resulted in safer shipping worldwide.

  Before the hearings, members of the Marine Board asked TOTE how the company’s staff learned about this SMS, and TOTE said that everyone aboard its ships was required to read and understand the manual. The coast guard pressed TOTE for more training information. After all, the SMS was useless if no one in the company was familiar with its standards and protocols. Especially in the event of an emergency, who had the time to digest a manual? So, the coast guard wanted to know, how did TOTE make sure everyone knew what was in that document?

  Well, TOTE answered, we have a training video that the crew is required to watch. After much prodding, TOTE produced a VHS copy of said video. But they couldn’t locate a VCR to watch it.

  “I understand you’re telling me that your safety management system is in compliance with the treaty,” Odom said to Greene. “But did you have specific plans that identified specific emergencies? Did you have contingency plans based on known risks to your vessels along with plans required by the code to support the vessels from shoreside?”

  “You know, I don’t have them in front of me,” Greene said. “I’m the president of the company. I have a staff that administers this.”

  Exasperated, Odom lost a bit of composure: “But did you guys ever have any discussions about the hurricane season? Not specific to the vessel, but in the company? Did you guys ever discuss hurricanes, upcoming hurricane season, and have any type of scenario, an exercise, training, or any of that with respect to the weather alert season?”

  “We addressed the season last year by promulgating the safety alert that you’ve highlighted as an exhibit,” Greene replied dryly. He was referring to a brief memo sent to all TOTE shipmasters at the beginning of the 2015 hurricane season reminding them that it was hurricane season.

  Throughout his daylong testimony, Greene maintained that his employees were above reproach, that TOTE’s mariners were the world’s best, and that they complied with all national standards and regulations. But the evidence didn’t support that. A month after El Faro went down, TOTE issued its monthly safety memo—a roundup of lessons learned in the past thirty days—to its staff. There was no mention of the cargo ship that had been lost under their watch. Apparently, there were no safety lessons to be gleaned from the loss of El Faro.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, CAPTAIN EARL LOFTFIELD, ONE OF THE MASTERS OF EL Yunque, gave the public the first inside look at what it was like to work at TOTE. Like many captains, Loftfield was a passionate yet practical man. He loved the sea but understood his role in the larger shipping system.

  Loftfield had worked for TOTE for more than a decade. He was the man who mastered El Yunque out of Jacksonville to Puerto Rico on October 2, the day after El Faro disappeared. The experience of steering through the sister ship’s wake weighed on him heavily.

  Loftfield was a literary man, drawn to poetry and proverbs. Shortly after his return from that voyage, he published a piece called “The Sister’s Journey” on his union’s website. It was there that he reprinted an email he sent to John Lawrence on October 4, 2015, at 10:30 a.m., as his ship encountered the last remains of El Faro:

  “Latitude 23-23.910N, Longitude 073-57.451W. This is the apparent point of origin for plume of oil rising and creating a slick. At this location, oil was black on the water and air smelled strongly of same. We found the slick after traveling through a debris field for 25 miles, at times having as many as fifty simultaneous sightings of pieces of insulated containers.”

  On the following day, Loftfield gathered his crew in the mess hall of El Yunque to debrief. Of that event, he wrote, “Significance of what we have witnessed is acknowledged. The Pain. The Rage. The Knowing. Cautionary mention of predators ashore wanting to exploit the grieving and the possibility of ‘hearing the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.’”

  Five days later, he held a memorial on the deck of El Yunque. “Crew gathered on the bow,” he wrote. “Moonless night. Sea was flat. Eternity over the rail. With each of 33 strikes of the ship’s bell, a flower was dropped in the water. Our ritual is complete. The mark on our souls will endure forever.”

  The heavens sent signs, which he recorded: “Lightning began far in the distance—two points to port and continued throughout the watch. A meteor burned bright, arcing towards the lightning. We sailors see what we see and have our judgments about what is indicated.”

  Loftfield addressed the Marine Board in measured tones and chose his words carefully. He said that he was deeply fond of the Ponce-class ships: “They made them long and skinny and aggressive looking, sort of like a barracuda. They’re very attractive, with a very pointy front end and a very pointy stern. Like a ’70s muscle car, which has a lot of steel on it.” He was such a fan of the ships that in 2010, he invited John Glanfield and other former Sun Ship employees to tour El Faro when she was docked in Philadelphia. Glanfield was thrilled to be aboard one of his babies again.

  But, Loftfield told the board, the ships had their limitations. Although TOTE’s safety management system recommended that crew maintain stability with ballasting or by moving cargo, Loftfield said that that just wasn’t possible at sea on the Ponce-class ships. Their design didn’t offer a lot of ballasting flexibility, and you certainly couldn’t shift around shipping containers without crane
s.

  Further, the ships’ streamlined shape made them less stable in the water. To illustrate his point, Loftfield introduced the concept of “block coefficient,” a ratio that defines a vessel’s stability by comparing the shape of its hull to a solid box. The more you camber the sides of a boat’s hull to reduce drag, the tippier it gets. Think of a flat-bottomed skiff versus a narrow and shapely kayak. A barge, which is shaped as much like a block as any ship (and, therefore, is very inefficient from a drag perspective), has 100 percent block coefficient, Loftfield noted. A racing sloop, with its sharply angled deep keel, has a very small block coefficient.

  “Modern [cargo] ships have a much larger block coefficient than the PONCE class ships,” Loftfield said. New ships, he said, look like a solid block of steel. The Ponce-class ships were all curves. “When the [El Faro] was tied to the dock,” he said, “out of 790 feet, there’s maybe 120 feet that actually touches the dock. For a barge, the entire length touches the dock.” El Faro was designed for speed, not stability.

  Loftfield also addressed the question of securing the scuttles. He said that chief mates would go down through the hatches to check the holds for water, but there weren’t any scheduled rounds to ensure the hatches were secured. Once again, the responsibility to keep the ship watertight was everybody’s job. Hence, nobody’s.

  Keith Fawcett, another Marine Board investigator, wanted to understand how TOTE operated after El Faro was lost. Did the company change at all? “Did they talk to you or communicate to you or discuss this at all with your sailing?”

  “It was certainly on everybody’s mind,” Loftfield answered. But he made it evident that there was no formal response.

  Then the captain expressed, better than anyone else could, some fundamental truths about the shipping industry: “In terms of sailing, it’s what I do. It’s what the ship does. It may seem cold and inhuman, but it’s the job. It’s why we’re here. So yes, there’s a casualty or there’s a mystery, there’s an unknown, it’s not business as usual, but we’ve got to go on with business. The shelves in Costco and Walmart [in Puerto Rico] emptied out after the sinking of El Faro and we were the link—El Yunque was the link—supplying an entire population. There was a job to do.”

  In his mind, Loftfield could balance the horror of losing El Faro with the demands of his job. When he sailed to San Juan two days after the sister ship went down, he recalls: “We had the rather amazing experience of crossing right through the debris field with all hands on lookout and finding where the oil was bubbling up from El Faro and passing directly over it. And an eerie calm passed throughout the entire place. It was after we had finally passed the oil slick and debris field that we came back up to speed. We got to Puerto Rico as quickly as possible.”

  Chapter 27

  Portrait of Incompetence

  Pinpointing responsibility for El Faro became a shell game. At the time of the accident, TOTE Services managed the vessel, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico owned it, and TOTE Shipholdings commissioned vessels; all were subsidiaries of TOTE, Inc., itself a subsidiary of a large, diverse logistics company called Saltchuk. All these separate yet related entities within the company obfuscated chain of command. That fact became obvious with the testimony of Tim Nolan, president of TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico. Nolan’s division was still based in Princeton, New Jersey. He had joined the company in 2013. Like many of TOTE’s executives, he was not a mariner; he had undergraduate and graduate degrees in marketing.

  Nolan had met Captain Davidson a couple of times and liked him. When Davidson was being considered by TOTE Services to master one of the new LNG ships, he asked Nolan for a recommendation; in turn, Nolan encouraged Admiral Greene to grant him an interview for the job, which he did. Shortly thereafter, the mysterious administrative issue aboard El Faro came up, and Davidson’s application was declined.

  Although TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico was considered the actual owner of El Faro and El Yunque, Nolan and his staff didn’t track their vessels. They left that responsibility to TOTE Services. During Hurricane Joaquin, Nolan didn’t get any notices from that division alerting him that not one, but two of his ships were traversing the path of a major hurricane.

  Tracking his assets wasn’t Nolan’s job. Instead, he was tasked with making money, making sure his operation remained profitable.

  Tom Roth-Roffy was mystified by how all the various entities within TOTE operated. But more important, how did Nolan, ostensibly the ships’ owner, make sure the management company was doing a good job? Was it possible that if they’d been wholly separate companies, he would have paid more attention to how closely that company was handling hiring, firing, safety, and ship repair?

  The question caught Nolan off-guard. Why, Nolan asked in return, in thirty years would his company suddenly question TOTE Services’s judgment?

  Desperate for a road map that would clarify TOTE’s chain of command, the Marine Board interviewed several TOTE executives and grilled them for information about who exactly reported to whom.

  Jim Fisker-Andersen was trained as an engineer but had little sailing experience and only a third assistant engineer’s steam license—the bottom rung in the ship’s engine room. At the time of the accident, he was director of ship management for TOTE Services, responsible for overseeing all ship engineering and maintenance. Previously, he’d served as TOTE’s port engineer in Jacksonville. He was promoted to his current position during the restructuring in January 2013. In his new role, he oversaw all of TOTE’s port engineers, including those who took care of the aging El Faro.

  Fisker-Andersen was in San Francisco tending to problems with Isla Bella, TOTE’s expensive new LNG ship, when El Faro sailed into Joaquin.

  Port engineers were required to regularly evaluate ships’ masters; the lowest-level engineer was in charge of judging the work of the highest-level deck officer. The two men worked in completely different orbits. One worked with machines, the other managed people.

  Maybe that’s why during Fisker-Andersen’s tenure as director of ship management, Davidson’s evaluations didn’t get done. Fisker-Andersen may never have asked his port engineers to do the work. Time went by. Files remained empty. Regardless, the office people got promoted. If paperwork like evaluations failed to get done, Fisker-Andersen said defensively, it was the fault of human resources.

  To whom did the ship captains report to? Fawcett asked him. Uh, nobody, Fisker-Andersen replied. The master was the master of the ship. He could use any of the resources ashore, sure, but he didn’t report to anyone.

  Who made sure the ships were being properly maintained? Who audited the port engineers? Not my jurisdiction, Fisker-Andersen informed the Marine Board. That would be the realm of TOTE’s designated person ashore, Captain John Lawrence.

  Some of the most bizarre, or rather, most confused testimony came from that particular gentleman the following day. His official title was TOTE Services’s Manager of Safety and Operations, a job he’d taken in February 2014. He was the same man who had missed Davidson’s first emergency phone call ashore and then was reconnected through the calling center for a single brief conversation, the last contact anyone ashore would have with the ship before it disappeared.

  As the designated person ashore, Lawrence was responsible for fielding all questions from ship crews while they’re at sea, and in that role he reported directly to Admiral Greene. For all intents and purposes, he was fairly high up the food chain at TOTE.

  Lawrence, in his own words, oversees safety for TOTE. In short, his job is to implement the company’s safety management system (SMS) and keep it up to date.

  TOTE’s SMS included a pair of manuals that provided procedures for the safe operation of El Faro, as well as a list of safety drills. The manuals included instructions about what to do in the event of loss of propulsion, flooding, and abandoning ship. Formally, weather wasn’t identified as a risk to TOTE’s ships. The one mention in the manual: “Severe weather is to be avoided where possible by altering the track
of the vessel. Instruction for maneuvering in extreme weather can be found in ‘The American Practical Navigator’ HO Pub. #9.”

  Throughout Lawrence’s mystifying testimony, the clearest message was that in the year or so that he had been working for TOTE, he’d passed most of his responsibilities off onto other people or departments.

  “Yes, my responsibility is the safety management system for the entire company, for roughly twenty-seven vessels,” he said to the Marine Board panel. “Let me go back—it’s my responsibility to ensure the system is working as my position of a designated person. And to monitor the system and maintain the manuals. But again that’s everybody’s job.”

  How did he monitor the safety system and maintain the manuals? Audits, he said. Internal audits, in Lawrence’s view, were about checking the master’s paperwork. Lawrence delegated these audits to others in the company and hired third parties to perform external audits. He had auditors who audited the audits. Suffice it to say, there were plenty of people shuffling paper around, yet no one had ever audited any of the vessels’ voyage plans or stability calculations as far as he could remember.

  Lawrence’s original job description said that he was responsible for evaluating officers, and certainly evaluating officers was required under the company’s SMS, but he claimed that that task was no longer his responsibility. Whose was it? He didn’t know. When a deck officer at TOTE was repeatedly caught sleeping on his watch, Lawrence declared that that wasn’t a safety issue; it was an HR issue.

  Although his position as the designated person ashore required certification by code of some sort, he said, he wasn’t sure what that code was. He wasn’t aware of “any actual certificate for DPA training,” he said. “I don’t have one myself. It’s just basically the experience, but I’m not aware of a specific certificate.” He didn’t know whether certification was required of the person who filled in for him when he was away. (In fact, there was no such certificate.)