Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  In the twenty-six hours of recording, there were hours and hours of silence while the two people on the bridge—officer and helmsman—drove the ship and watched for hazards, steeped in their own thoughts.

  It took twenty-two days, working ten hours a day, for the team to transcribe the VDR. The result was a five-hundred-page transcript, longer than any ever produced by the NTSB.

  Doug may not have been affected by the audio, but the ex-mariners on the team were. The voices of those lost haunted them and turned a tragic case into a deeply personal one. The dead whispered in their ears long after they took off their headphones.

  Chapter 31

  Twenty-Four Minutes

  23.28°N -73.48°W

  At seven o’clock on the morning of October 1, Rich Pusatere was trying desperately to restart El Faro’s propeller. He lacked enough lube oil to overcome El Faro’s list, so the giant turbines, gears, and driveshaft sat frozen in time where they’d lurched to a halt an hour before.

  Without power to steer her through the waves, the ship surrendered. She rolled onto her side like a wounded whale, easing deeper into the water, while thirty-foot surges ravenously tore at her decks, rocking her hard, filling her holds with the weight of the sea.

  A dozen stories above him, Shultz said, “I think that water level’s rising, Captain.”

  “Do you know where it’s coming from?” Davidson replied.

  At that point, Shultz had finally secured the open hatch cover above three-hold and had witnessed the mountain of water building up there. “I buttoned that scuttle up as hard as I could, and I don’t know what else I can do,” he told Davidson.

  While down there, Shultz also had a conversation with Pusatere who told him that when they got thrown over to port, a car may have careened into the fire main, rupturing its connection to the sea. Water might have rushed in through that hole. When they started pumping water using the fire suppression system, he guessed, they were inadvertently pumping floodwater from one hold into another, redistributing the weight.

  “When you went down there before, was there anything near the fire main?” Davidson asked Shultz.

  “I couldn’t see because the water level’s too high,” the chief mate replied. “The fire main was below the water, dark black water. And I saw cars bobbing around.”

  “The cars are floating in three-hold,” Davidson said. Then he added with a laugh, “That makes them submarines.”

  “My concern is stability,” said Shultz. “I have no concept of how much water may be sitting down there.”

  Davidson used the phone to call his chief engineer. “You think this list is getting worse?” Pusatere must have said yes. “Yeah,” Davidson said. “Me too.”

  Davidson decided that pumping out water was their only hope, but they didn’t know which compartments were flooded. In desperation, he told his engineer to open all the valves on the manifold so that they could pump all holds at once. But if any of those holds were water-free, air would get into the system and destroy the prime, rendering it useless. He was willing to take that risk.

  Then the engine room called up: the bilge alarm in two-alpha hold went off. El Faro’s watertight doors between cargo holds were beginning to fail. Water was working its way from giant room to giant room, distributing liquid weight evenly along the inside of port hull, pulling her further down. They were losing buoyancy.

  Jeff Mathias called up to the bridge and informed Davidson that the situation was dire. Then he asked about the downflooding angle of El Faro.

  Davidson didn’t know about the ship’s downflooding angle. He wasn’t familiar with the term.

  “What’s it called again?” Davidson asked Mathias over the phone. “Okay, we’ll check that.”

  The downflooding angle of El Faro could be found somewhere in the chief engineer’s office, Mathias told him. So Davidson asked Pusatere to look for it. But before he did that, he told Pusatere that he was going to ring the general alarm and wake everybody up. “We’re definitely not in good shape right now. Just trying to control that list and see where the water’s coming from.”

  He asked Shultz to make a round on second deck and see what he could see. His chief mate gave him a stricken look. The winds were up to at least 130 miles per hour. No one could stand on the second deck without getting swept right out to sea.

  “You all right?” Davidson asked him.

  “Yeah,” Shultz said. “But I’m not sure I wanna go on second deck. I’ll open a door down there and look out. It’s chest-deep water washing over the deck.”

  “That’s fine,” Davidson said.

  At 7:27, the captain told his chief mate and chief engineer that he was going to ring the general alarm. He wanted everyone to muster on the starboard side, the high side of the ship. “Make sure everybody has their immersion suits and stand by. Get a good head count.”

  Containers were peeling away and crashing into the water. The noise of the wind and waves on the bridge was deafening. Two minutes later, Davidson ordered abandon ship. “Tell ’em we’re goin’ in!” he yelled.

  Danielle ran down to her cabin to grab her life vest, the captain’s, and one for Frank. She would not return. Captain Michael Davidson and Frank Hamm were left alone on the bridge.

  “Okay, buddy, relax,” Davidson told his helmsman.

  He looked out over the deck of his sinking ship into the howling dawn. In the whiteout of the foam, spray, and sea, he could see stacks of containers breaking free from their chains and yawning over the side before plunging down into the depths. “Bow is down,” he observed. “Bow is down.”

  Over the radio, Davidson told his crew to throw their rafts in the water and get off the ship. But how could they even walk out onto the deck in those winds, let alone deploy a life raft? Everything—people, rafts, life suits—would be whipped away by Joaquin and into the waves, or thrown back against the ship’s steel hull to be crushed. The air was solid with salt and water. You couldn’t breathe out there. The crew probably crowded around the door leading to the second deck watching in horror the hellish world beyond through a porthole. Their survival instincts kept them there, huddled together.

  El Faro rolled farther into the wind, exhausted by the fight, until her deck edge dipped into the brine. Superheated Caribbean waters beckoned her in. The ship’s floors turned to the sky and became walls, her walls became ceilings. She was going gently into the eternal night of the deep ocean.

  Two people remained on the bridge as she sank.

  “Captain,” Frank Hamm pleaded. “Captain. Captain.”

  Davidson braced himself on the high side of the bridge, looking down what was now the steep ramp of the floor. At the end of it, the heavy seaman was pinned to the corner by gravity and fear. He couldn’t climb up to the starboard side of the bridge to get out. The angle of the floor was too steep.

  “Come on, Frank,” Davidson said. “We gotta move. You gotta get up. You gotta snap out of it. And we gotta get out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come up.”

  “Help me.”

  “You gotta get to safety, Frank.”

  “Help me,” Frank cried out.

  “Frank, don’t panic. Don’t panic. Work your way up here.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re okay. Come on, don’t freeze up, Frank. Come on.”

  “Where are the life preservers on the bridge?” Davidson shouted into the din. No one answered. He turned back to Frank. “Follow me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “My feet are slipping. I’m going down.”

  “You’re not going down,” Davidson yelled.

  “I need a ladder.”

  “We don’t have a ladder. I don’t have a line.”

  “You’re gonna leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving you. Let’s go.”

  “I need someone to help me.”

  “I’m the only one here.”

  “I can’t. I can�
�t. I’m a goner.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Just help me.”

  “Frank, let’s go,” Captain Davidson said. “It’s time to come this way.”

  Chapter 32

  Spirits

  In the summer of 2015, Jill Jackson-d’Entremont packed up her house in Bucks County, outside of Philadelphia, and moved to Florida. She missed living near her childhood home of New Orleans and missed her two bachelor brothers, especially Jack Jackson. He’d spent so much of his life shipping out that she rarely got to spend much time with him. Now that the siblings were close to retirement age, Jill wanted to encourage her brother to focus on his art—his painting and sculpture. Jack had talent.

  By late September, Jill was in her new apartment, surrounded by moving boxes. She hadn’t set up her internet yet but being disconnected for a few days was fine by her. With a presidential election coming up, she didn’t need to know everything going on with the world. It was nice to be unplugged for a while.

  Jill had taken charge of her life and should have been happy, but as September drew to a close, she began to have feelings of dread. What was it? The stress of relocation was finally behind her, so it couldn’t be that. Maybe it was her health? She felt jittery.

  On October 1 at 7:45 in the morning, Jill thought she was having a heart attack. A heavy pressure bore on her heart and she felt waves of panic shudder through her body. She resisted the urge to go to the hospital because she didn’t want to mess with her insurance company, but she felt like she was dying.

  Later that evening when she was visiting with friends, Jill found out about her brother’s ship. The disappearance of El Faro was all over the news. Her friends said Jack’s a tough guy. He’ll be fine. Jill considered going to Jacksonville to join the rest of the families awaiting news, but her friends encouraged her to stay. They said this could go one of two ways: either he’s alive, and they’ll visit him in the hospital and he’ll get better because he’s a strong guy, or he’s gone. So she didn’t go. She waited at home. There wasn’t anything she could do anyway.

  Jill tells me that what she felt that morning was Jack’s plasma leaving his body.

  Her brother Glen was listed as Jack’s emergency contact, but he never got TOTE’s call. He lived in New Orleans and his landline was down—a car had hit a telephone pole a few days before the accident. He didn’t have internet access, either; he stubbornly clung to his archaic flip phone. Like his sister, he didn’t feel he needed to be fully plugged into the news cycle.

  After El Faro sank, Jill moved to an old house with three fireplaces in New Orleans, close to Glen. She kept a photo of Jack on her mantel and talked to the photo by electric candlelight while eating dinner every night. When she was packing for the Jacksonville hearings, she put Jack’s photo in her bag. That night, after washing dishes, a teacup jumped from the drying rack into the sink. Her first thought was that the house moved. A day later, it happened again. She decided Jack didn’t like being smothered in her bag. She took out his photo and returned it to the mantel. The next night, the cups stayed put.

  Jenn Mathias didn’t believe in the supernatural. Whenever she went to church, she’d always think to herself, Yeah, right. She only wants to talk about things she can see or hear. But after her husband, Jeff, died, she went to a medium. She wanted to find out whether he’d suffered during his final moments.

  On the morning before I met Jenn for the first time, I walked my daughter to school and observed a flock of cardinals. They usually travel in pairs—a male and female—and I thought the ten or so in the tree above us was unusual enough that I stopped and stared. “Isn’t that weird?” I said to my daughter.

  A few hours later, I was in Jenn’s home enjoying a cup of coffee when she mentioned that she’d visited a medium. “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He told me that Jeff communicates through birds. And Jeff’s bird is a cardinal.”

  Weeks after Rochelle Hamm’s husband died, she got a phone call from a stranger in southern Florida. They’d found her husband’s helmet—it had washed up on the beach. She showed me the photos on her phone of the green plastic helmet. It looked brand-new, no scratches whatsoever, clearly labeled “Frank” with a black Sharpie. Nothing else of El Faro washed ashore. She says her husband sent it to back to her, to let her know that he loved her.

  Marlena Porter says that her husband’s last words to her were, Meet me in the Bahamas. At the time, she didn’t know why he said that. But now she does. El Faro went down off the coast of the Bahamas. That’s where her husband will always be.

  “God allowed it,” Pastor Robert Green declares of the El Faro tragedy. The pastor, who lost his stepson, LaShawn, shares the mysticism he finds in the names and numbers of this horrendous event. In Spanish, el faro means lighthouse—both a warning of dangers and a light in the darkness. The lighthouse has been used as a metaphor for God—a beacon of hope—for centuries. Even the storm’s name, Joaquin, is the Spanish version of the Hebrew name Joachim, which translates to “raised by God.”

  Thirty-three people died when El Faro sailed into the storm and to Pastor Green, that’s significant. “Thirty-three means something,” he says emphatically. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, thirty-three is the number of promise, the numerical equivalent of amen. The name of God, Elohim, appears thirty-three times in Genesis. God demanded that Noah build an ark dozens of times; his final request, number 33, came with the covenant that he would never again flood the world. In the New Testament, Jesus lived thirty-three years and in that time accomplished thirty-three miracles.

  The number 33 in Kabbalah signifies “the end of suffering.” In Islam, thirty-three is al-Azim, the supreme glory, and considered the “perfect age”—how old believers will always be in heaven. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes thirty-three heavens ruled by Indra and thirty-three ruled by Mara. And consider science: the human spine has thirty-three vertebrae, and human DNA is made up of thirty-three turns.

  “God had a reason for sending this ship down,” Pastor Green concludes. “Shipping is an industry that needs to be led, guided. These seamen are so invisible that nobody’s concerned about their lives when they’re shopping in Walmart. We don’t think about the containers tied by hands to the decks. But these seamen are part of our society—navigating perils to bring us cars, gas, and other things. God wants to give us a warning. Shawn was one person but his life will touch one hundred thousand people.”

  In Maine, a week after Danielle was lost, her cat, Spot, suddenly passed away. He was young and healthy and was accustomed to long stints without her. At Danielle’s memorial service, the clouds above formed the unmistakable shape of an anchor.

  After the final family meeting in Florida, when relatives were told that the coast guard was ending the search, Deb Roberts and her husband navigated Florida’s rush-hour traffic to get to the beach, any beach. Eight years before, Deb had driven to Castine to see her son Michael Holland off before he sailed to Europe aboard the Maine Maritime Academy’s training ship. Now she was saying a different good-bye.

  Holding her shoes, she walked to the water to be closer to her son. When she finally felt the ocean lapping at her legs, she says, “I had this beautiful moment on the beach where I just felt Michael. I was crying, really crying hard. I was leaning down, sobbing, and then this huge wave came and got me soaking wet. I knew it was Michael. And I was, like, All right, Michael, I get it, I get it. OK, I’ll stop.”

  One fall day a year after the accident, I visited Frank and Lillian Pusatere’s home north of New York City on the Hudson. They were lovely, warm, and generous. We talked about their son Rich, their unfathomable loss, and what could have gone wrong on the ship. They took me to Rich’s childhood room. It was small and neat with a world map pinned above the twin bed marked with places Rich had traveled on the ships. As I studied the map, Lillian casually mentioned that three-year-old Josephine still talks to her daddy sometimes. At the end of every conversation, Rich remin
ds his daughter that he will always love her.

  Epilogue

  El Faro was created in one age and destroyed in another.

  In the four decades since she was built, Earth’s oceans have absorbed an astounding amount of heat—20 x 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules—equivalent to 360 times the total amount of energy used by all people on Earth in a year.

  We know that this man-made heat is penetrating the seas more than a mile down, creating a deep, rich supply of warm water to power increasingly devastating hurricanes.

  It’s payback time.

  The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season generated the highest total accumulated cyclone energy ever recorded. Multiple Category 5 storms tore up the Caribbean islands and coastal US. In September and October of that year, historic downpours in Houston and Florida (Hurricane Harvey), unfettered destruction in the Virgin Islands (Hurricane Irma), and total devastation in Puerto Rico (Hurricane Maria) left millions of people without electricity, potable water, homes, and access to medical care.

  During that single season, hurricanes caused more than $188 billion in damages and took dozens of lives.

  That money could have been spent building renewable energy infrastructure for our children.

  Hurricane Joaquin was the strongest October hurricane to hit the Bahamas since 1866, and the strongest Atlantic hurricane of nontropical origin in the satellite era. Its recorded wind speeds hit 155 miles per hour. Its lowest pressure was 931 millibars, close to a record.

  At eight o’clock on the morning on October 1, an Air National Guard Hurricane Hunter aircraft determined that Hurricane Joaquin’s center hit 942 millibars, proving that El Faro had drawn remarkably close to the eye. At that point, the hurricane’s 120-mile-per-hour sustained winds whipped thirty-five miles around its center.

  Yes, we have the science to predict hurricanes, but that science is only as good as the models we use to understand our world and the data we feed them. On land, weather stations are everywhere, recording minute changes in humidity, temperature, and pressure. At sea, there is significantly less atmospheric data available, and even spottier information about ocean temperatures and the depths of those warm wells—all critical to hurricane modeling.