by Rachel Slade
If a loose car floating in three-hold had hit the fire pump causing a breach in the hull, the ship would have flooded very quickly.
Stolzenberg thought a lot about these various scenarios and wanted to get a closer look at the wreck. He also wanted that VDR.
In April 2016, he boarded the R/V Atlantis, an oceanographic research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, owned by the US Navy. Two undersea vehicles they carried with them would work in tandem to document the accident site and, with luck, locate the VDR. The automated underwater vehicle (AUV) was a tethered machine with broadband sonar that ran along a preprogrammed path, identifying anything that approximately fit the size and shape of the ship’s mast. Its twenty thousand feet of fiber-optic cable alone probably cost $1 million.
The SENTRY, another autonomous vehicle, was equipped with searchlights and high-resolution cameras. It followed behind the AUV and was programmed to investigate each target the AUV identified. Unfortunately, the AUV’s margin of error was thirty meters, so often it took a while, sometimes as much as forty-five minutes, for the SENTRY to find one target.
The AUV and the SENTRY could never be in the same area or they risked crashing into each other, so sometimes the tech team sent the SENTRY on a wild goose chase far away from the scene while the sonar worked closer to probable sites.
As before, the team aboard divvied up the watches, monitoring the computer screens in the nerve center to see if they could detect the mast. But they were stumbling in the dark.
The techs from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who ran the robotic equipment sat down with Eric as they were heading out to the accident site. They said, Remember: At fifteen thousand feet, there’s no guarantee you’re coming here tomorrow or the next day. Things go wrong down there. Every photograph, every dive, every view could be your last, so treat it as such.
During the first couple of days, Stolzenberg got a good taste of what they were talking about. Fittings on the vehicles’ casings leaked, small things went wrong, and Stolzenberg quickly learned that, Yeah, this could be the last time we see things. The autonomous vehicle took two hours to sink down fifteen thousand feet, and two hours to surface, which meant four hours of waiting each time they brought it up to upload and process its data. Time gnawed away at everyone’s patience. They only had six days over the wreck to find the VDR, and everything was an exercise in frustration.
The sonar picked up countless targets—automobiles, shipping boxes, and car batteries—resting quietly on the seafloor. It identified personal effects, standard household goods, bicycles, toiletry items, dolls, and roof flashing, all eerily still in the deep. The mast was big, about as big as a container. All the ship’s containers had fallen off as it went down and were now showing up on the sonar as nice, bright targets. There was an impossible amount of stuff to go through.
While the SENTRY investigated each of these targets, small, strange-looking deep-sea creatures wandered in front of its high-resolution lens. Three miles down, it was another world, now littered with the detritus of terra firma.
Wreckage distribution told Eric a lot about how El Faro fell through the water. From the wheelhouse north was mostly cargo; from the wheelhouse south to the hull was ship debris. The first mission identified where the house was, so, he concluded, the mast must be somewhere between it and the hull.
With four days left, hundreds of possible trails to explore, and two hundred identified targets to investigate, Stolzenberg threw a Hail Mary. They had to limit their search to the area between the hull and the house.
As soon as they committed to Stolzenberg’s plan, the trail got hot. They found railing from the wheelhouse, the ship’s stack, and a piece of steel with a porthole, all of which told them that they were in the right place.
They picked through the trail of debris, investigating everything they encountered. That night, when his shift was up, Stolzenberg refused to leave his post in the tiny control room. He’d been up for twenty-four hours but couldn’t pull himself away from the monitors. He could see maybe three or four meters in each direction, and a lot of “snow”—tiny particles that got caught in the spotlight—but he knew they were getting close.
A few minutes into the next watch, the SENTRY missed yet another target and had to swivel and go back. This time when it turned around, one of Stolzenberg’s team members saw a flash of light to its right. What the hell was that?
They steadied the robot and slowly approached the area from which they’d seen the flash. “Then,” according to Stolzenberg, “we were like, holy moly. That’s the reflective tape on the VDR!”
The superreflective tape wrapped around the VDR canister was no wider than two inches, but it bounced the high-intensity lights of the underwater search vehicle back at its camera. Just beyond the VDR, Stolzenberg could make out the three legs of the mast coming at right angles to the SENTRY; the rest was buried in mud.
“I guarantee you that on the first Apache mission, Tom went right by this thing,” Stolzenberg says. “You have to be so close to see anything down there with that much junk around. You almost have to be on top of the stuff.”
The tech team didn’t want to get the SENTRY’s tether tangled up in the mast, so they approached with caution and documented the scene. At 2:00 a.m., when they were certain that they’d found the VDR, they sent an email back to the NTSB.
The next day, they deployed the autonomous vehicle with its high-resolution lens to document the entire site. During that mission, the SENTRY took more than forty thousand photos, which the NTSB later patched together to create a map of the scene.
Meanwhile, they had to figure out how to extricate the VDR from the mast’s clutches. The steel canister was held to the mast with two quick-release bands. Although it sat proud, you couldn’t just scoop it up. You’d need a highly skilled robot to spring it free, drop it in a basket, and carry it three miles to the surface.
Stolzenberg didn’t have that kind of robot with him on the Atlantis. He could only stare at his prize, sitting undisturbed on the ocean floor in the watery deep.
Chapter 29
The Proof is in the Pudding
With or without the VDR, the official inquiry continued. The Marine Board of Investigations met again in Jacksonville for a second round of hearings in May 2016. Many of the witnesses brought forth were experts in their fields, brought in to discuss the more technical aspects of weather reporting, stability calculations, inspections, and the cargo-loading software.
But two witnesses stood out: Captain Jack Hearn and Peter Keller, the executive vice president of TOTE. The testimony of these two men provided the starkest contrast between those who toil in the trenches and those who call the shots. One had made his living on the high seas for four decades, working with nature, machines, and the rough folks who sometimes end up on ships. The other ran various corporations from offices, boardrooms, conference rooms, and golf courses. It was as if they were from different countries, speaking different languages.
Yet both were critical to the modern maritime industry.
Captain Hearn had served as a shipmaster for twenty-five years, seventeen of those years as master in Alaska on the Northern Lights, the ship that would become El Faro. In 2007, Hearn was transferred from Alaska to helm the El Morro on the Puerto Rico run.
After complaining for years to TOTE about the El Morro, that vessel was eventually scrapped, and El Faro took over her run. But for Hearn, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Shortly after he was reunited with his beloved ship, the seasoned captain was forced to resign when it was discovered that some of the unlicensed crew had transported drugs on his watch.
On Hearn’s last day with El Faro, a new captain came aboard to take the helm. His name was Michael Davidson. Hearn was given less than an hour to download nearly two decades’ worth of knowledge about the vessel to Davidson. Then he was hustled off the ship.
Four years later, Hearn was still bitter about his treatment at the hands of TOTE. His “firin
g” gnawed at the fiftysomething father of five. He’d served his company well, more than well. Over such a long period of time in such a challenging environment, away from his wife and family, he’d maintained a practically flawless record of professionalism and good judgment. The idiots ashore had sullied an outstanding maritime career.
At the Marine Board hearing, Hearn didn’t mince words. In 2012 or 2013, he said, a number of shoreside positions had been eliminated, leaving incompetent staff onshore to run operations.
From Hearn’s perspective, operations manager Don Matthews was a poor substitute for Bill Weisenborn, the former manager with whom he’d worked until TOTE’s restructuring. Weisenborn had graduated from prestigious US Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point; he was an experienced mariner who’d soaked up invaluable knowledge working with multiple shipmasters over the years. That made him an excellent shoreside partner, and Hearn had worked closely with him on voyage planning and weather avoidance throughout his tenure at TOTE. Weisenborn even sent extra weather reports to the ships when they were out to sea. He cared about his people, even when they were out of sight of shore.
Before the restructuring, Hearn said, “If you changed your route, there would be a discussion and a joint decision because you just don’t change from the routine without advising and sometimes getting advice from the company about the need for the mission of the voyage. That’s how decisions were made. With the new group, I wasn’t always sure exactly who was making the final decisions.”
Matthews, Hearn announced to the room, did not have the marine background to be useful to an experienced seaman like him. Matthews lacked voyage and operational experience with the ship; Hearn would never seek help or advice from this man.
Family members sitting behind him cast knowing glances at each other. This was exactly the kind of testimony they’d been waiting for. They thought TOTE could be held accountable for downsizing to the point where necessary expertise was lost.
Hearn also shed light on why Davidson might have ignored the advice of his mates. Hearn said that as a captain, it takes a long time to develop a solid working relationship with a chief mate. You’re the one person in charge of a huge vessel, the cargo, and all the people aboard. It’s a tremendous responsibility. You’re not just going to hand over your trust to the person standing next to you, even if he or she had fancy credentials.
“It’s a year or two before a guy really gets the routine down of voyage experience, weather experience, seasonal experience, and expectations,” Hearn said. “It takes time. It’s not something that happens immediately.”
A captain might be even less inclined to listen to his chief mate, and more inclined to rely on his own instincts, if the captain thought his job was on the line. The stakes would be too high.
Hearn said that after sailing on El Faro for nearly two decades, he was very aware of her vulnerabilities. She had lots of openings that could cause flooding in bad weather, plus, she had a low freeboard, so he knew to avoid bad weather whenever possible. Her old steam plant demanded experienced people, the kind who knew the complex system so well that they could quickly deal with a situation if something went wrong. And things were always going wrong.
Toward the end of his time at TOTE, Hearn became increasingly concerned about the Ponce-class ships’ ability to handle the demands made on them. “We were going to full loads,” he said. That changed how the vessels handled. “The ship was very tender,” he said. El Faro righted herself more slowly. “You could even feel the ship list—lean over—as she rolled from a rudder command alone, let alone rolling with a heavy swell. There was always a concern that she wasn’t going to right herself adequately in other conditions.”
This apparent lack of stability worried Hearn and TOTE’s other experienced masters enough that in 2011, they convened through Bill Weisenborn to establish a margin of safety for the fleet of old ships, based on load calculations, below which they agreed they wouldn’t sail out of Jacksonville.
Hearn’s testimony ended on a sober note. As a captain, Hearn told the board, he always sought out a gentle ride. “You’re always concerned about every detail of the ship and you want to preserve the original stability and the original position of the ship as long as possible. Not only for cargo equipment, but personnel, efficiency of the voyage, maintenance, the work that’s being done, people are working around other components. Things that are hot, tools, steam lines and the galley, guys are moving equipment they could get hurt. So you want to keep the ship as stable as possible for the personnel living on board.”
There was a lot of shaking heads among those who’d lost their loved ones to stupidity or avarice. Now, the whole accident seemed completely preventable. If only wiser and more experienced people had been in charge.
IF THE TERM “CORPORATE GREED” WAS ON EVERYONE’S MINDS, THEY WERE about to get a fantastic display of corporate hubris. Executive vice president of TOTE, Peter Keller, the mastermind behind TOTE’s restructuring, lumbered over to the witness table. He was older, maybe seventy, and very tall, which gave him a hunched appearance when he leaned into the microphone to answer the Marine Board’s questions.
At the hearing he made it very clear to all that in his long, dazzling career, he’d mostly focused on the business end of shipping—restructuring companies, managing bankruptcies, consulting, overseeing acquisitions, and managing labor relations. He came across as an important man who didn’t have time for the niggling details of ship operations.
Keller had been consulting for various entities when, in the summer of 2011, he was approached by the American Shipping Group (a division of Saltchuk Resources) to look at one of its companies, then Sea Star, now TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico. “The company was not functioning effectively,” he said. “There were major issues with senior management in my view. The company was not properly organized. It had far too many people. It was overburdened.”
In a couple of months, Keller had, in his own words, developed a plan to “reorganize and redevelop that company.” It wasn’t actually a plan so much as a feeling—just bullet points on a piece of paper. Shortly thereafter, he was handed the reins of Sea Star to execute his vision.
Keller set about removing what he deemed redundancies within the company. He “changed out” most of the senior management. He “consolidated” the knowledge base in maritime operations. He says there were ten people in Jacksonville to oversee three vessels, and just as many in Alaska and New Jersey. “We knew we had too many people,” he told the board. “We had too many people,” he repeated.
“At no time,” he told the board, “did we ever not have competent people in both Tacoma and Jacksonville to work with the ships . . . And at the end of the day what we did is we put all that together into a more cohesive, better managed organization.”
The following year, Keller ordered the construction of the new LNG ships, assigned the leaner staff with the task of overseeing the launch of these new ships, and moved up TOTE’s executive ladder. To manage crewing and ship operations, he created TOTE Services. It was a “consolidation of resources,” drawn from staff once based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Tacoma, Washington; and Jacksonville. All three of these offices were combined into one central group, he said, that was eventually moved to Jacksonville. Bill Weisenborn and many others declined to relocate. The crewing manager, for one, didn’t mind making the move.
TOTE Services, as far as Peter Keller was concerned, was “very effective,” “reliable,” and “good.”
He lectured the Marine Board on the wisdom of downsizing: “One of the things that happens in organizations if they become too bloated—and I think we all know this—after you do have some reduction in staff, the organization will work better. That was exactly the case with Sea Star Lines,” he proclaimed. “And the proof with anything we do is, as they say, in the pudding.”
Keller’s arrogance pushed Tom Roth-Roffy’s patience to the brink.
During the proceedings, Tom had thought long and hard
about his NTSB career. He was a dedicated civil servant, a careful man, a thoughtful investigator. He saw people less skilled than him promoted out from under him, Peter principled. The meritocracy didn’t hold. A few months before the sinking of El Faro, he’d applied to SUNY Maritime to run their training ship, a fifty-five-year-old steamship called the Empire State.
Now, right before his eyes, in the testimony of Peter Keller and the rest of TOTE’s executives, he saw the worst of corporate America. He’d heard enough. He carefully prepared a line of questioning for Keller, then read it verbatim.
“Tom Roth-Roffy, NTSB. Good afternoon, Mr. Keller,” he began.
“Good afternoon, sir.”
“Just recalling what you said earlier about the work that you initially started when you started working with Sea Star. I believe you were in kind of a consultant role to evaluate the performance of the company and to make recommendations on restructuring.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, sir, do you recall if there were any formal reports that you had written or others had written that had documented the analysis and the recommendations that led to the eventual restructuring of the companies?”
“Most of it was verbal. There was one note that I remember sending that outlined eight or ten or eleven points that needed to be done from my view. Including things like the Philadelphia service and changing systems and process and people, things of that nature. But it was more verbal.”
“So there was no actual consultant formal report that would lay out the issues, the rationale and analysis behind the recommendations?”
“No, sir.”
People lost their jobs. Good people with a high degree of competence had been thoughtlessly purged. There’d been no formal plan. It was slash and burn.