Into the Raging Sea

by Rachel Slade

  Thanks to improved technology, however, meteorologists have gotten much better at predicting a hurricane’s track. In the early 1970s, one seventy-two-hour NHC forecast projected a hurricane’s path nearly seven hundred miles off its actual course. Even now, however, the further out the forecast, the higher the error rate. In 2015, the seventy-two-hour track error averages run below one hundred miles, but one 120-hour forecast that year was nearly 350 miles off base, an error large enough to stick out like a big middle finger on the NHC’s neatly descending error rate chart. That hurricane was Joaquin.

  Meteorologists’ ability to forecast how a hurricane will intensify hasn’t improved significantly in forty years. The NHC still can’t accurately predict whether a storm will whip itself into a frenzy or fizzle out. Nearly all its models, including its flagship—the Global Forecast System—told meteorologists that Joaquin would succumb to shear forces and quickly disperse.

  But one model nailed both Joaquin’s track and intensity from the beginning. It was the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, or ECMWF. As the dissenting voice among the more than fifty models that the NHC forecaster had at his fingertips, the ECMWF was easy to dismiss.

  It’s an open secret in the meteorological community that the ECMWF is consistently better than the NWS. The one question that gnaws at America’s scientists is why.

  The ECMWF is Europe’s equivalent to the National Weather Service, but it draws funding and talent from more than thirty countries. Its 350-plus multilingual, multicultural staff not only gathers data and predicts weather, it also offers its findings to all of Europe, including Iceland and Turkey. The center actively engages with university researchers to enhance climate understanding. Unlike the cash-strapped National Weather Service, the ECMWF, with an annual budget of $100 million, offers robust workshops and research grants to draw a large scientific community to help improve its capabilities.

  Much of the ECMWF’s efforts go to refining its formidable computer model, which runs on some of the world’s largest supercomputers—absolutely necessary to crunch the inordinate amount of data required to create an accurate picture of the complex and dynamic global weather forces. (It’s important to note that the European center’s model relies on a wealth of free climate data from the US, but charges high prices to non-E.U. entities for its forecasting packages.) All of this computing power has made the model more accurate than ever.

  It should go without saying that the researchers working at the European center embrace science and are supported by an international community that values evidence-based conclusions. Make no mistake—no one spends a minute there debating whether climate change is real.

  Few American politicians understand the importance of NOAA’s work—the parent agency of the NWS. Politicians see it as an easily cut line item. After all, who are its constituents? A few scientists with their satellites, Hurricane Hunters, and weather balloons seem like a colossal waste of money. What’s more, their data—which presents incontestable proof that oceans and the atmosphere are warming at alarming rates—is an affront to climate-change deniers.

  Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that a May 2017 White House budget proposed to cut NOAA’s budget by 16 percent. The Washington Post reported: “The budget ‘blue book’ for NOAA, which details the administration’s funding recommendations, specifically directs the agency to ‘reduce investment in numerical weather prediction modeling.’ It calls for a $5 million funding cut ‘to slow the transition of advanced modeling research into operations for improved warnings and forecasts.’”

  Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, said the cuts “would have serious repercussions for the US economy and national security, and for the ability to protect life and property.”

  Without advanced weather prediction tools, Americans will have less accurate information about imminent hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding—catastrophic events that will continue to escalate as climate change gains speed. Shipping and air travel will become riskier propositions, as all industries will have less time to prepare or avoid increasingly intense storm systems. Every citizen will shoulder the financial burden when insurance companies demand higher premiums to cover widespread damages. Costs everywhere, for everything, will grow dramatically.

  Another proposed White House budget cut: 14 percent, or $86 million, from the US Coast Guard. The agency spends the bulk of its budget on stopping illegal drugs from entering the US. In 2016, the coast guard seized $6 billion worth of cocaine and seven thousand people trying to illegally enter the country. (Notably, marijuana seizures have dropped significantly since the drug became legal in many US states.)

  But the pride of the organization is its elite rescue swimmer program, which has saved an incalculable number of lives since it was launched in the mid-1980s, including 33,500 people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These heroic saves depend on top-notch equipment and training.

  Less known, but perhaps critically important, is the coast guard’s role as a regulator of America’s commercial vessels. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t make headlines, until there’s a colossal tragedy and everyone looks for someone to blame.

  Several high-profile critics, most notably Vice Admiral James Card, have questioned the coast guard’s expanded role under the Department of Homeland Security. In a damning report issued in 2007, Card wrote, “The Coast Guard has had a long and proud tradition of serving the country and marine industry through a robust and very professional Marine Safety program. U.S. safety standards, U.S. inspections, and the U.S. licensing system have been models for the rest of the world.

  “Many point to the Coast Guard’s increased role in Maritime Security and its move to the Department of Homeland Security as primary reasons for the deterioration [of its safety programs].”

  The sinking of El Faro triggered much soul-searching at coast guard headquarters in Washington, DC. Captain Neubauer was devastated by the loss, he told me a year later; he took the sinking personally. “Before the accident, I didn’t think a US vessel would undergo something like that,” he said. “Something of that size. We had the inspections program in place and I thought that with all the modern technology available, we’d never have something like the Marine Electric again. I thought we’d done the job. I thought all those big, unsafe vessels had been taken out of the fleet.”

  In late 2017, the NTSB and US Coast Guard each released a report summarizing their findings of the El Faro investigation. Families of those lost, mariners, and the media consumed these reports, seeking answers to the whys and hows of this great tragedy.

  The coast guard report provided a detailed timeline of El Faro’s final voyage, much of it based on analysis of the VDR, expert testimony, and study of El Yunque. Ultimately, the report lay the lion’s share of blame on Captain Davidson. At the press conference, Neubauer admitted that Davidson would have been stripped of his license, based on the evidence they had. He had made several fatal mistakes. He ignored his colleagues’ warnings and stayed in his cabin throughout the night when he should have been up on the bridge. He failed to practice the most basic weather avoidance procedures and deliberately put his ship and crew in the gravest danger.

  Mariners’ responses to the coast guard’s assessment were mixed. Those who work at sea are superstitious and do not relish speaking ill of the dead, especially to landlubbers. They want to protect their own. And while they do acknowledge that Davidson’s judgment was off, they want us to understand that he didn’t act alone.

  From the ill-fated design of El Faro to TOTE’s leadership vacuum to lack of government oversight, professional mariners know that it takes legions of bad decisions and judgment errors to sink a ship.

  At the very least, these mariners had hoped that the coast guard would shine a light on TOTE’s failings as a company. Few of TOTE’s shoreside executives were qualified for their jobs, and some may have been grossly unqualified. They thought that the crew
ing and human resources managers made a mess of a delicate staffing situation and left their officers and crew divided and distracted; people were promoted and fired without proper evaluation. But as long as the ships were reaching ports at appointed times and making money, TOTE’s executives seemed satisfied.

  The official accident reports addressed TOTE’s restructuring and cronyism only glancingly. TOTE received a few service violations for minor issues that added up to a slap on the wrist.

  TOTE’s lawyers, paid for by the shipper’s insurance company, rushed heartbroken and desperate family members to settle. A tempting payout—half a million dollars—would be theirs if they gave up the fight and agreed never to sue the company again. After months of waiting for their percentage of these comparatively modest settlements, the families’ lawyers encouraged their clients to take the money. They wouldn’t have their day in court. One by one, families reluctantly accepted the money and went home to pick up the pieces of their lives.

  The cargo insurers, however, relentlessly searched for ways to get their money back. In the spring of 2017, they launched a $7 million lawsuit against StormGeo, the Norwegian company that owns BVS. Lawyers representing the cargo insurers argued that the BVS software provided “outdated and erroneous” data about the hurricane’s path, which led Davidson to his fateful decisions. “The late captain was clearly unaware of the delayed and inaccurate hurricane locations and projections being proffered by the BVS 7,” the complaint said. “Tragically, so strongly did the late captain trust the accuracy of the BVS 7 product that, when, on several occasions the vessel’s mates suggested a change of course, he rejected those suggestions.”

  TOTE was unrepentant to the end. The company didn’t even bother to file an internal incident and investigation record for the sinking of El Faro. At TOTE headquarters, it was as if the accident never happened.

  In 2016, TOTE sent El Yunque to Alaska as a backup ship in the Pacific Northwest trade. She steamed through the Panama Canal and up the California coast, and finally docked in Tacoma, Washington. This time, US Coast Guard inspectors knew what they were looking for. They boarded her carrying the small steel hammers that they use to check the condition of steel on ships. When they tapped at parts of El Yunque’s ventilation trunks, their hammers went right through them. The steel had turned to dust.

  The coast guard demanded that TOTE rebuild the trunks, but the company decided that making their ship safe would cost too much money. El Yunque made her last voyage from Tacoma to Brownsville. Empty, covered in rust, she limped to Texas and was scrapped.

  Captain Neubauer’s group also issued thirty-one safety recommendations to the commandant, who would then decide which to pursue—and which to ignore. The first recommendation was requiring that all new and existing multihold ships have high-water alarms wired to the navigation bridge. Properly working alarms would have alerted Davidson to the flooding in his ship much earlier.

  Second, the report suggested that the coast guard conduct a thorough review of regulations concerning ventilators and other hull openings and make sure that all these vulnerabilities are considered when calculating downflooding angles on vessels. Had Davidson known about his particular ship’s vulnerabilities, he might have made different choices.

  Third, eliminate open lifeboats for all oceangoing ships in the US commercial fleet. That should have happened long ago. It was one of the most important recommendations to emerge from the Marine Electric tragedy, but hulls built before 1986 had been grandfathered in. Why should a ship’s age preclude it from safety equipment that’s standard on all other vessels? In fact, shouldn’t older ships be better equipped, since they’re more vulnerable? If the US Coast Guard had had any power over the industry it regulated, it would have mandated enclosed lifeboats on El Faro when the ship was modified in 2003. That ruling might have saved lives. It’s possible that Davidson delayed abandoning ship until the very end because he knew that El Faro’s open lifeboats would be useless in Joaquin. Sure enough, both lifeboats recovered after the ship went down—one floating, one on the ocean floor—had been severely damaged.

  Most ships sailing under other flags have alarms when watertight closures, including scuttles, are breached. El Faro had none. The coast guard report recommended that all watertight doors and hatches set off alarms when they’re opened. That would have instantly alerted the ship’s officers that the three-hold scuttle on the second deck wasn’t secured.

  A network of CCTV cameras inside the holds would have alerted El Faro’s deck officers to what was happening in the holds without having to go down there. They would have been able to see cargo breaking loose, flooding, the source of that flooding. On El Faro, the mariners could only guess what was going on in the holds. The coast guard report recommended requiring cameras in unmanned spaces on all commercial vessels in the future.

  The report also suggested that all VDRs on commercial ships be installed in a float-free arrangement. In the event of an emergency, the unit would float away from the vessel and trigger an emergency signal. This way, the VDR would not go down with the ship.

  There was a sense, especially among the families of the unlicensed crew lost on El Faro, that the seamen lacked a way to communicate unsafe conditions anonymously to the coast guard. They may have feared retribution from TOTE if they complained. Rochelle Hamm in particular wanted to make sure that mariners at sea had access to a hotline to report critical safety concerns not being addressed by the ship’s personnel. The recommendations in the report included a shipboard emergency alert system so that crew wouldn’t have to ask officers permission to use the satellite phone. If the crew of El Faro had had access to one, maybe someone would have made a call to shore to alert TOTE or the coast guard that Davidson was pursuing a reckless course.

  Stronger guidelines would have ensured that TOTE’s safety management system adequately identified risks and contingency plans to protect its crew, and the report recommended that the coast guard do more than simply require that a company have a system in place. Instead, the organization should offer clear guidelines for what such a system should look like, and how it should be taught and implemented.

  The coast guard report also called for a comprehensive evaluation of merchant mariner training and credentialing. It was clear in the transcript of the VDR that some of the bridge officers didn’t have enough knowledge or experience to make a clear case for avoiding bad weather. Davidson did not understand the ship’s stability and downflooding angles, and he could not effectively manage his crew during the emergency. Basic rules of thumb, such as Buys Ballot’s Law, had been forgotten long ago. Had America’s maritime academies failed the merchant marine?

  The balance of the safety recommendations focused on the coast guard’s oversight of third-party classification societies, such as ABS. Recommendation number thirty asked that the commandant consider creation of a Third Party Oversight National Center of Expertise to monitor all parties performing work on behalf of the US Coast Guard. This was another a lesson learned in the Marine Electric investigation forty years ago, but legislators continue to cut funding to the coast guard, undermining its ability to regulate America’s commercial fleet. The agency’s only option is to entrust third parties with critical duties. One mariner at the hearings informed me that ABS was the “richest entity in the room.”

  Since the mid-1990s ABS has taken over about 90 percent of the inspection work of deep draft vessels the coast guard once did. The $1 billion Houston-based nonprofit gets most of its revenue from the companies it’s paid to monitor. Some say it’s like the fox guarding the henhouse. After all, the shipping companies are its only client. They’re paying the ABS to keep their crew safe, but their real interest is in keeping their insurance premiums low and keeping their vessels sailing. A ship in port is a ship that’s losing money.

  Many worry that ABS’s conflicts of interests, fueled by corporate demands, conspire to make American shipping increasingly dangerous. Perhaps to attenuate the coast guard�
��s regulatory zeal, the ABS recruits the agency’s top-brass to leadership roles. Currently, Rear Admiral James Watson, formerly of the US Coast Guard, was ABS, America’s division president until Jamie Smith, another former coastie, took over in early 2017. Many move into the private sector after retiring from the coast guard; a high-level position at the ABS can pay more than $1 million a year in salaries and bonuses.

  Others think of the ABS as a friendly, understanding, industry-focused organization. Which can only help America’s shrinking commercial fleet. Instead of coasties with clipboards, former merchant seamen from the ABS survey the ships to ensure they’re compliant with the latest safety standards. On short notice, they’ll come any time of day or night when the vessel’s in port. There’s a rapport. It’s not as contentious a relationship as merchant and coast guard.

  The US Coast Guard randomly reviews a percentage of cases approved by the ABS and lately, they’ve been finding more and more errors—most recently, in 2014, 5 percent of cases revealed 38 percent discrepancies. In several cases, an ABS representative approved automation ill-suited for the job required of it. In other cases, the classification society said a vessel’s design had structural integrity, but it actually wasn’t in compliance with the latest standards. There have been problems with the use of fire protection materials not properly tested, increasing the risk of fire, which at sea can be catastrophic. The coast guard worries that the classification societies lack proper training, procedures, and processes in place to oversee America’s aging fleet.

  In fact, ABS failed El Faro. Like most American ships, El Faro was enrolled in the coast guard’s Alternate Compliance Program, which shifted nearly all inspection responsibility from the coast guard to ABS. A full ship inspection is performed piecemeal over a period of five years by ABS’s surveyors and contractors who come aboard specifically to inspect certain things on their list. They’re supposed to keep an eye out for anything amiss, but they missed things.