Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  How many people in the office had DPA training? He didn’t know. But he wanted to reassure the coast guard and the NTSB that TOTE works as a team. That statement was supposed to make everyone feel like TOTE had this whole vessel management thing under control.

  During testimony, Lawrence wasn’t able to describe the responsibilities of his fellow managers, and he couldn’t tell the coast guard who in the company had the authority to defer maintenance on the ships. He also couldn’t tell the coast guard exactly which of his duties had been delegated to which people within the company.

  Although he was the designated person ashore for the captain and crew to contact in the event of emergency, he didn’t notify the answering service when he was away, even when he knew he wouldn’t be reachable. He was satisfied by the fact that his cell-phone number was posted around the ships—folks could call him directly. Of course, that’s assuming they had cell service. If someone had a problem while at sea, they’d need to ask the captain for permission to use the satellite phone. That would entail an awkward conversation if the purpose of the call was to alert shoreside personnel that the top officer was making a fatal mistake, like sailing directly into the path of a hurricane.

  The call center number, which was to be used in a marine emergency or when crew members had other issues, such as human resources problems, was also posted around the ships. The people at the call center had been given the phone numbers of “eight or nine people” at TOTE. In an emergency, the call center operator would just start calling down the list until she or he got a responsible human being on the other end of the line.

  It appeared that “safety” meant leaving a paper trail that all necessary drills had been done aboard the ships.

  Monitoring tropical weather, however, was not part of the company’s safety protocol. When El Yunque had issues with the mechanism that deploys the lifeboats, that wasn’t considered a safety issue. When the Polish riders were doing all kinds of dangerous work aboard El Faro in rough weather, that wasn’t considered a safety issue. Loading and stability of the vessel—that wasn’t a safety management issue; that was a “safety concern,” and it was the captain’s responsibility. Monitoring or fixing the buttons and D-rings on El Faro’s deck to which cargo was secured wasn’t Lawrence’s purview either. That had been delegated to port engineer Tim Neeson, who only learned that he was responsible for that work during the Marine Board hearings.

  “Were you aware that the vessels were operating close to their [Plimsoll] marks on the TOTE run in Puerto Rico?” This question for Lawrence came from an NTSB accident investigator on the panel questioning witnesses, Mike Kucharski. He was a salty former ship captain from New York with several decades’ worth of sailing experience—someone who’d actually mastered El Faro when she was the Northern Lights.

  “No, sir.”

  If a master had a concern or question about stability or routing, who should he go to? Lawrence gave a vague answer—anyone in the office could help steer the master to the right person, he said. Maybe the port engineer would know. “Again,” he said, “it’s kind of a team sport. If we don’t have the answer, we find the answer.”

  If a master had a question about his routing, say when a storm was forming in the Atlantic, who should he turn to?

  “You got a lot of expertise in our office,” Lawrence said. “Combining hundreds of years of experience whether that be my maritime background for 40-plus years . . . I’m positive we could address any questions the vessels bring to us.”

  TOTE also lacked vessel-specific heavy weather plans—and provided no risk analysis or training for any of its staff, officers, or crew at the commencement of hurricane season.

  “It’s the master’s responsibility for preparing for a storm and for doing his voyage planning . . . we don’t tell the masters what to do,” Lawrence reiterated.

  In spite of Lawrence’s supreme delegating skills, an external audit conducted the year before the accident recommended that TOTE hire an additional person to assist him in his duties. Instead, the company opted to shift more of Lawrence’s responsibilities onto other people already working there.

  A picture was emerging of a disconnected and distracted executive team and an overburdened staff that actually did most of the work.

  The weekend before the accident, Lawrence was on the West Coast for a wedding. Then he traveled to Atlanta for an industry meeting and returned to his home in Jacksonville on Wednesday evening, September 30. The next morning, he missed Davidson’s emergency call. While he was traveling, Lawrence had not delegated anyone in the company to fill in for him.

  It was during Lawrence’s travels that Davidson sent the long, carefully reasoned email to his safety officer requesting permission to return through the Old Bahama Channel because he had concerns about Hurricane Joaquin. Lawrence did not reply to Davidson’s request.

  Why not? “Because I was surprised [Davidson] was asking permission,” he said. “I saw no reason to answer at that time because we still had a couple more days before he would even be starting that route.”

  The email, at the very least, should have alerted Lawrence to the fact that a hurricane was out there in the Atlantic, somewhere in the vicinity of his ships. But after receiving that email, the safety manager of TOTE Services didn’t bother to check the weather. That’s why his mind was a total blank when he got Davidson’s urgent voice mail message on the morning of October 1.

  (Lawrence also didn’t know that the emergency calling center’s code “PC” meant “Please call.” Did the call center have a log of their acronyms that you might need to know? “They may but I’ve never asked for it,” Lawrence replied.)

  When he finally talked to Davidson that morning, Lawrence said he knew the hurricane was somewhere in the Atlantic, but he wasn’t aware that El Faro had sailed anywhere near it. Neubauer pointed out that if Lawrence had read Davidson’s email sent the day before, then he would have known of the captain’s plan to go south of the hurricane by a mere sixty-five miles. That in itself should have set off alarm bells.

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Lawrence answered helpfully. “I was interpreting your use of the word ‘vicinity’ as meaning right on it.”

  Lawrence said that when got the emergency call, he didn’t infer that the ship’s proximity to Joaquin might have caused an issue. “I knew [Davidson] was having some type of problem that he wanted to contact and talk to me about. At that time, I did not, you know, put the two together that that was the reason for his call.”

  Davidson had told Lawrence that he had “free communication” with water and a “pretty good list.” Why didn’t these terms worry Lawrence? Why didn’t he go into full-on search-and-rescue mode?

  “I really didn’t speculate on the ‘pretty good list,’” Lawrence said. “Again, [Davidson] seemed very calm through the voice message, so I didn’t speculate until I talked to him and found out more information.”

  In order to get Lawrence on the line, Davidson had had to make a second call to the emergency call center, and that conversation was recorded. The audio of that call was played at the hearing and sent a chill through the room. Some people left the room before it was broadcast because they didn’t want to hear the voice of a dying man. You could clearly hear the panic in his voice. “Oh man,” he said to the operator. “Oh God. The Clock is ticking.”

  Lawrence had a ten-minute conversation with Davidson after that call, but the conversation wasn’t recorded—the emergency call center had patched him through.

  Why did Davidson express so much urgency to an anonymous operator and then compose himself when he spoke to TOTE’s man ashore a minute later?

  The NTSB had interviewed Lawrence before—he was one of the first witnesses the agency spoke to in Jacksonville shortly after El Faro disappeared. Even then, when the scene was fresh, Lawrence didn’t quite have the ability to piece it all together. He showed up to speak to a roomful of investigators from the coast guard and the NTSB, people who desperately want
ed to understand the tenor of that final phone call with the captain of a sinking ship.

  It was Lawrence’s moment in the spotlight. He’d been a safety manager for fleets of ships for much of his career, safety was number one, but now he couldn’t remember basic details about his brief conversation with the doomed captain of the one ship he’d just lost. Lawrence also failed to bring the notes he’d made that tragic morning.

  Instead, he gave vague answers to the investigators’ answers and continually reminded them that he was lost without his notes.

  He didn’t know whether El Faro was on emergency power from the diesel generator. He wasn’t sure whether the ship had lost power or propulsion or both.

  It didn’t take long for the investigators to show their frustration both about his foggy memory and the vague questions he’d apparently asked the doomed captain during that single critical phone call.

  “So based on your conversation with [Davidson], were you able to form an opinion as to how dire the situation was at that time?”

  “I think the only thing I can really say at this time is that his demeanor, it was very similar to the voice message he left. He seemed to be at the same calm level as that throughout the phone call. Very businesslike, matter of fact. He did not seem to panic.”

  The group reconvened later that day and this time Lawrence brought his notes. But those chicken scratches, scanned by the NTSB and folded into the permanent record of the investigation, contained woefully little information. Lawrence had recorded El Faro’s position, the fact that a scuttle had opened, and that they had considerable water in the number three-hold and no main engines. He recorded that they had a 15-degree list and ten- to fifteen-foot swells. They were trying to pump out the hold, but, Davidson said, they didn’t plan to leave the ship. That said, they were setting off their alarms to alert the coast guard.

  If a captain is at sea, in the middle of a hurricane, he’s lost propulsion and is taking on water, and talking about whether or not to abandon ship, doesn’t this sound like an emergency to you?

  Lawrence didn’t know. He couldn’t say. TOTE’s man on the ground responsible for keeping the crew of twenty-plus ships safe had no idea El Faro was about to go down.

  “I did not feel an immense emergency,” he said. “What alerted me a little bit was the one sentence he said, ‘We do not plan on leaving the ship.’ That did make an impression on me that maybe this is a little more serious than I was thinking at the time . . . He was calling me to let me know that he was going to be pushing emergency buttons, to give me his position and letting me know that he was not in a grave situation and that he was going to push his distress buttons.”

  A few minutes after he hung up with Davidson, Lawrence got a call from Chancery at the coast guard, and together they agreed, based on Davidson’s tone, that the ship was in a disabled phase, not a distress phase. “So what [the coast guard] said, reading between the lines [of my notes], they told me that they wouldn’t be sending anybody out at this time because it’s just disabled.”

  He didn’t push them on the idea that the ship might be in dire straits; instead he was relieved that the coast guard was assessing the situation and would take it from there.

  On the morning of October 1, a few people at TOTE’s Jacksonville office plotted the hurricane and El Faro’s last known position. El Faro was at the eye. “That’s when they started putting the pieces together,” Lawrence said.

  When the VDR was finally recovered from the seafloor, the public found out exactly what Davidson told Lawrence during that conversation. His side of the story was caught on tape and carefully transcribed, then posted online.

  From the dead man’s words, anyone could see that El Faro was in great peril.

  Chapter 28

  Mission Number Two

  On the USNS Apache in late October 2015, the CURV-21 proved a clumsy tool for searching in the sunless deep three miles down for something the size and shape of a coffee can. In short time, the CURV’s navigation system stopped working entirely. Its narrow cone of visibility, further limited by the short range of the vehicle’s spotlight, rendered the search time-consuming, and ultimately, in vain.

  Without navigation, the techs had to rely on dead reckoning to maintain their bearings. Using the main wreckage as a starting point, they drove the CURV in a radial pattern, always returning to the half-buried hull to reconfirm their orientation. As the vehicle crept through the city of junk, it used two sonars—high and low frequency for high and low resolution—to scan for anything metallic. There was a lot of metal down there, and most of it was shipping containers. Everything that the CURV detected had to be investigated.

  Obstacles would suddenly emerge from the darkness, blocking their way, demanding quick course changes to avoid a collision.

  The team often got disoriented in the murky dark. They’d drive the CURV far out from the main wreckage, or so they thought, and then come back upon it sooner than expected. It was clear to Tom Roth-Roffy that they didn’t know where they were. His worst fear was that they could breeze right by the VDR without knowing it. The whole endeavor seemed futile. There had to be a better way.

  After days at sea, the waves began to kick up, rocking the Apache enough to make people feel ill. Morale aboard dropped. The tech team wanted to go home. Debilitated by seasickness and dopey from Dramamine, Tom refused to quit and called the NTSB headquarters to tell his superiors as much. Headquarters agreed to enlist the help of their own research and engineering specialist—Dennis Kryer—in the search. He had a gift for finding things.

  Kryer asked the Apache’s tech team a lot of questions. He wanted the mass of the wreckage so that he could build a computer model of how the ship went down. He carefully studied the splash El Faro had created on the seafloor to determine its speed and direction when it hit, and he calculated the buoyancy characteristics of the hull and the house to predict their drift pattern. He used this information to come up with coordinates for the VDR’s location. “As it turns out,” Tom says, “he was pretty close.”

  Kryer recommended that they spend another few days extending the search much farther to the north of the hull. After a quick trip to Puerto Rico to refuel, the Apache returned to El Faro’s position, took one last look, and finally located the bridge 450 meters off the port bow.

  If the VDR was still attached, that’s where it would be. But the NTSB’s $1 million contract with the navy was up. The Apache team carefully hoisted the CURV on its three-mile-long fiber-optic umbilical cord back onto the deck and headed back to Virginia.

  Had Captain Davidson been pressured by TOTE? Was he missing critical weather information? Was he suicidal? Without the VDR, investigators could only speculate.

  But that wasn’t Tom Roth-Roffy’s style. If there was a way to get the VDR, even if it took extreme measures, the NTSB would do it.

  With the support of Congress, the NTSB received an additional $1.5 million to pursue a second mission in the Caribbean in April 2016.

  Tom Roth-Roffy stayed behind, leaving the job to NTSB’s Eric Stolzenberg.

  Stolzenberg began his career as an engineer in the merchant marine. He shipped around the world on supertankers and eventually got a land-based job as a naval architect—he’d studied the field as an undergrad at New York Maritime College—before joining the NTSB in 2008. Now in his early forties, he was generally younger and brasher than his NTSB counterparts. Tall with a head of thick brown hair, Eric played Will Smith to Tom’s straight-shooting Tommy Lee Jones.

  Stolzenberg watched the El Faro investigation from the sidelines for a couple of weeks, eager to jump in. He loved solving mysteries that required piecing together obscure clues. He was also drawn to the incident because, he told me, hurricanes fascinated him. He first got hooked in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria made a direct hit to Long Island, where he’d spent summers with his family.

  When the wreck of El Faro was located in November, Stolzenberg was designated the lead on the NTSB’s naval archi
tecture team. He immediately began acquiring any extant El Faro blueprints, as well as her loading diagrams and photos. He was sure that El Faro’s design played a major role in her undoing.

  Stolzenberg’s quest was to determine the sea conditions in which El Faro sank and use that information to create a dynamic model of the events leading up to her demise. He stepped onto El Yunque in December and homed in on her downflooding points. “A ship has an enclosed buoyancy,” Stolzenberg tells me. “When all the hatches are watertight, a ship remains buoyant. You cannot sink it. Physics dictate it can’t go to the bottom. You’ve got a balloon in there keeping it afloat. Poke enough holes in that balloon and the inevitable occurs.”

  On El Yunque, he could see how those vents, at a certain angle of heel, would get submerged.

  One big question: Did this design meet current codes, and if not, why?

  When El Faro was converted from roll on/roll off to a container ship in 2006, the regulators—the US Coast Guard and ABS—acquiesced to TOTE’s repeated requests that the work not be deemed a major conversion. Accordingly, the regulators did not redo El Faro’s damage stability index. “And that might be an oversight,” Stolzenberg says.

  A damage stability analysis determines how many holes you need to poke into a ship to make it sink. The calculation is based on probability—where a ship is most likely to get hit—and dynamic modeling.

  Stolzenberg says that determining a ship’s damage stability is both science and art. But at least it gives you a sense of a given vessel’s vulnerabilities. This would be critical information for a ship’s captain when he’s thinking about heading into a large storm.

  Just like John Glanfield, Stolzenberg saw the vents for what they were: ways for water to compromise El Faro’s buoyancy. The ship’s designers saw that, too, and equipped her with fire dampers—big steel louvers that could be closed to snuff out a fire. The dampers weren’t weathertight, but if closed, could slow the ingress of seawater during a storm. Crew on El Faro regularly tested the operation of these dampers during fire drills but never considered using them to protect the vessel in high seas.