Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-three mariners, one megastorm and the sinking of El Faro

This exchange is one of the most contentious pieces of El Faro saga. Much time has been spent parsing Davidson’s apparent request to take the Old Bahama Channel home, which he did via email earlier that morning to multiple managers at TOTE’s Jacksonville office. Did he actually need the company’s permission to reroute? His request was carefully worded and thoughtful:

“I would like to transit the old Bahama Channel on our return North bound leg to Jacksonville? This route adds approximately 160 nautical miles to the route for a total of 1,261 nautical miles. We need to make around 21 knots for the scheduled 10:05, 10:45 arrival time at Jacksonville pilot station.

I have monitored Hurricane Joaquin tracking erratically for the better part of a week. Sometime after 9/30 0200 she began a southwesterly track early this morning. Adjusted our direct normal route in a more southeasterly direction towards San Juan, Puerto Rico, which will put us 65 plus/minus nautical miles south of the eye. Joaquin appears to be tracking now as forecasted and I anticipate us being on the backside of her by 10/01 0800.

Presently, conditions are favorable and we’re making good speed. All departments have been duly notified as before. I have indicated a later than normal arrival time in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Anticipating some loss in speed throughout the night. I will update the ETA tomorrow morning during our regular pre-arrival report to San Juan Port, etc.”

Was Davidson planning to plow through in spite of the looming hurricane because he felt pressure to get to Puerto Rico on time? Had TOTE chastised him for playing it safe and going through the Old Bahama Channel in August during Tropical Storm Erika?

TOTE maintains that scheduling was never an issue. The captain is in complete command of the ship and its route. TOTE says that in all instances, safety comes first. The company claims that this email exchange was simply a formality—regardless of how one might read it, Davidson had full command of his vessel and his course. He did not need permission to take a different route.

That may be true at TOTE, but most ship’s masters I interviewed tell a different story. Although a few can’t believe that a company would pressure anyone to go into a storm, most captains (both foreign and domestic) say that fending off schedulers and managers is simply part of the job. The office worries about customers and profits; captains worry about everything else. Sometimes their interests diverge.

A captain’s best attitude, my sources say, is the one that keeps crew and cargo safe. With pride, they’ve told their schedulers: You can find another captain or fire me, but I’m not putting this ship or cargo in danger. I can always find another job. They say that it’s absurd to take orders from a person sitting behind a desk. He or she can’t see what’s going on at sea, usually lacks nautical experience, and can’t imagine the conditions the crew is dealing with. Sure, the ship might be able to pull through a weather system, but if a new car breaks loose and smashes up fifty others, would it really matter that they arrived on time?

Regardless, some people, for whatever reason, cave to economic pressures. They assess their risk and decide they’ve got too much to lose if they defy the shipping company. It’s not worth fighting. One ship’s master told me about the time he was ready to ship out of Antwerp when a storm kicked up off the coast of England. He kept his vessel in port while another captain in his fleet chose to steam ahead. The ship that sailed was battered and beaten by the waves and winds, but it did get to the next port. The first captain showed me a photo on his iPhone of the resultant damage: mayhem aboard. Everything—the cars, trucks, and containers—was smashed to bits.

Davidson didn’t get an answer to his request right away. On September 30, the one person on land in charge of keeping TOTE’s ships safe at sea was attending an industry conference in Atlanta. His name was Captain John Lawrence, TOTE’s designated person ashore (DPA) and the manager of safety and operations. Lawrence was responsible for the welfare of twenty-six vessels. When he was out of the office, it wasn’t clear who was supposed to take calls or emails in his stead. TOTE didn’t have a clear organizational chart to address that inevitability.

TOTE’s officers aboard the ships didn’t understand the company’s structure, either. Davidson sent his message to half a dozen people, assuming someone at TOTE would eventually respond.

Lawrence seemed like a questionable choice for the job of safety officer at a shipping company. In 2010, he held a similar position at a New York–based tug and barge company when one of his Delaware River tug drivers pushed a barge right over a disabled duckboat filled with tourists, killing two people. The duckboat operator tried to radio a warning the tug driver that he was heading straight for them, but never got a response. During the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation of that incident, the tug driver admitted that he’d been using his cell phone and his laptop for personal reasons belowdecks instead of keeping watch. Following a criminal trial, the tug driver went to jail. What kind of safety culture had Lawrence fostered at that company that would allow such a thing to happen?

And now, as El Faro steamed full speed on a collision course with a hurricane, Lawrence was out of communication. No one in TOTE’s office was tracking any of their vessels, nor were they tracking the developing storm. It’s difficult to fathom how that could happen these days, especially since a ship’s location is publicly available on any number of vessel tracking websites. You don’t even need to log in. Just google a ship’s name and you’ll instantly find it anywhere in the world.

A logistics company’s most valuable assets, along with the cargo and the people aboard, are its vessels. Why wasn’t anyone at TOTE following them? One shipping company operator I spoke to said he considers the ships his children. He follows them constantly as they motor around the world. Denmark-based Maersk, among the world’s biggest shippers, doesn’t just follow its vessels’ tracks. It also installs cameras and microphones in the engine room, on the bridge, and in the cargo holds, which send video and audio back to the main office in real time. This information can help the Maersk managers quickly identify, solve, and even prevent problems. TOTE had no such monitoring equipment aboard El Faro.

TOTE’s reply to Davidson’s request finally came in more than five hours later—a simple, “Captain Mike, diversion request through Old Bahama Channel understood and authorized. Thank you for the heads up. Kind regards.” The email came from Jim Fisker-Andersen, director of ship management for TOTE, who was traveling back to his Jacksonville office from San Francisco, after overseeing some issues with the new LNG ship.

Why did Fisker-Andersen decide to reply to Davidson’s email? “Because there was an unanswered question that I didn’t want to leave open ended. I didn’t want the email to go unanswered,” he later told investigators.

When he was asked where Captain Lawrence was during that time, he said, “I don’t know.”

Did anyone onshore at TOTE track ships, Fisker-Andersen was asked. “No,” he said.

At least one person was tracking El Faro, though: Second Mate Charlie Baird.

From his South Portland home, he was glued to the Weather Channel that day. And with his girlfriend’s help, he was able to follow El Faro via her AIS (automatic identification signal) over the web. He watched in horror as she continued her course straight toward Hurricane Joaquin. Charlie sat all day on that sofa hoping against hope that someone on board had enough sense to turn the ship around.

CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_6a3c212b-ac08-55b4-89e5-3900925af777)

HULL NUMBER 670 (#ulink_6a3c212b-ac08-55b4-89e5-3900925af777)

Hull number 670 was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on November 1, 1974. Christened Puerto Rico, it would be one of the last ships to be built at Sun Ship.

Don’t bother trying to find the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock shipyard. There’s nothing left of the towering steel frames that once cradled ships while they were under construction, or the steel sheds that sheltered the pipe shop, the blacksmith shop, carpenter shop, and sheet metal shop. Nearly everything was leveled in 2004 to make way for Harrah’s Philadelphia Casino and Race Track. Where thousands of people built ships in a frenzy that lasted half a century, there’s now a five-eighths-mile elliptical track for thoroughbreds to race around a neatly kept lawn. You can bet on the horses or lose your savings at the blackjack tables inside, but you probably won’t be able to make out the skeletal remains of the towering shipways, now cut down to nubs, sulking at the water’s edge across the track from the casino.

Pull over to the grassy shoulder along Route 291 outside of the casino and you’ll notice a small cast-iron historical marker erected in 2007. It reads: “During WWII, Sun was the largest single shipyard in the world, with over 35,000 employees. It introduced the all-welded ship, which significantly increased ship production, and the T-2 oil tanker. Sun built over 250 WWII tankers, 40% of those built in the world and repaired over 1,500 war-damaged ships. Established by the Pew family, it was located at this site from 1916 to 1982.”

In the summer of 1961, twenty-year-old John Glanfield was looking for work. Tall, slim, with a wide-open face and a meaty handshake, he’d graduated from high school a few years earlier and, being mechanically minded, was thinking about fixing cars for a living. Most of his classmates had left town to serve in the armed forces but John felt compelled to stay close to home outside of Philadelphia and help his mother.

The Glanfields hadn’t had it easy. John’s father, orphaned and raised by German nuns in New Jersey, had served in Europe during World War II where he suffered a chemical weapon attack. He spent the next seven years in a hospital, lost a lung, and never fully recovered. He died the year John graduated from high school.

Growing up in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, John was bound to discover shipbuilding sooner or later. Fewer than three miles away on the banks of the Delaware River—the same river that General George Washington had crossed during an icy winter to surprise the British and win the Battle of Trenton—was Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, the country’s largest shipyard. One day, John hopped on his bike and pedaled out to the Delaware River where he was immediately offered a job at the busy shipyard. The pay wasn’t great, but the future opened wide.

Sun Ship was a tight, mature operation at a moment of intense innovation. As soon as he saw the gigantic steel hulls under construction, and the four thousand people employed to paint, weld, rivet, and outfit them, John was hooked. “I can remember my first day walking up the gangplank onto a ship that was only partially built,” he told me. “It had the double bottom part of the side shell and there were all these guys in the engine room and all these planks and staging. And it was like, oh my God, I just love this. I was in love with the thing right off the bat.”

For a twentysomething guy with nothing but a high school degree, Sun Ship offered the opportunity to be part of something big, a chance to grow. John apprenticed as a pipe fitter and worked his way up, taking small salary bumps as he went, earning a few more dollars each year for his young family, until he was overseeing the work of dozens of men. Sun Ship took care of its supervisors, providing a complimentary hot lunch to all managers like him. On Thanksgiving, the company gave every single worker a turkey and $25.

Sun Ship’s own history followed the victories and setbacks of America itself. It was founded during World War I by two brothers, J. Howard and Joseph N. Pew, now better known as the progenitors of the Pew Charitable Trust. The brothers had inherited the seeds of a great fortune from their father, Joseph Newton Pew, who had bet big on the industrialization of a nation emerging from the ravages of the Civil War.

In the late nineteenth century, Washington, DC, finally unfettered by the demands of the agrarian south, financed the railroads, canals, and skyscrapers that would drive a new economy. Joseph Newton Pew invested in the lifeblood of industry: energy. He bought up Texan oil fields and tapped into natural gas veins in the backwoods of his native Pennsylvania. Like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (who’d eventually do business with him), he profited not just from government investment but also from the seemingly endless waves of immigrants pouring in from Europe and Asia who were willing to work for little pay and even fewer labor protections.

Joseph Newton Pew died in 1912, leaving Sun Oil Company (later Sunoco), in the hands of his highly educated sons. By 1916, the pair agreed to take over their entire energy distribution chain by building the hulking tankers necessary to transport their liquid gold from their oil fields in Galveston, Texas, to their refineries near Philadelphia, and then around world.

On October 30, 1917, a few months after the US entered World War I, Sun Ship’s first vessel, a 430-foot tanker christened Chester Sun, was launched off the banks of the Delaware River. “In spite of the terrific downpour,” J. Howard Pew told the Philadelphia Inquirer the next day, “everything went as smoothly as clockwork. We wouldn’t postpone the launching, for the superstition of the sea has it that if a launching is postponed, the ship will be a ‘hoodoo’ vessel [a cursed or bad-luck ship]. If everything goes as smoothly for the Chester Sun as the launching went, she should be anything but a ‘hoodoo.’”

Dozens of orders kept the yard humming for years, especially from the company’s oil division, which drove Sun Ship’s engineers to constantly innovate their designs. They perfected the welded hull—lighter, and quicker to build than the riveted hull—and the double hull, which added a layer of protection against leaking.

When the Depression hit, orders for new ships slowed to a trickle. But the Pew family, like many major owners of the day, believed that companies had an obligation to take care of their employees. Sun Ship retained nearly all its workers by paying them two days a week, whether or not there was a ship in the yard.

Keeping employees through tough times paid off for Sun Ship. By 1937, as World War II loomed, the US government began looking for a shipyard to fill orders for hundreds of vessels. Sun Ship was ready to go, replete with a huge, trained staff. At its peak during the war, the shipyard employed more than thirty-five thousand women and men, including my paternal grandfather, who had taken a hiatus from his clothing manufacturing company to sire my father and join the war effort. In 1944 alone, Sun Ship launched an astounding seventy-five tankers and military vessels.

When John Glanfield rode his bike to the shipyard in 1961, the place was abuzz, but with a different kind of energy. Sun still built ships, about six or so per year, but it had diversified. Taking advantage of its sophisticated large-scale industrial design, engineering, and custom machining departments, its executives began landing contracts in a broad range of industries. Working inside the cavernous hull of a seven-hundred-foot-long steel ship was exciting enough, but the occasional top-secret government projects that came along made a young guy like John thrill with excitement.

John built rocket casings for NASA, nuclear reactors, catalytic towers for the oil industry, wind tunnels, and—the one that he still rhapsodizes about in hushed tones fifty years later—the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a decoy deepwater drilling rig financed by the CIA.

The official story was that billionaire Howard Hughes commissioned the vessel for his underwater mining company. In fact, “Project Jennifer” was paid for by the CIA to recover a sunken Soviet submarine lost off the coast of Hawaii. It’s rumored that the sub was sunk when a rogue team of Soviet sailors wrested control and tried to fire a missile at Hawaii, tripping a fail-safe, which caused the missile to explode as it was exiting the torpedo tube. The agency desperately wanted to study the sub to prove that America’s Cold War opponent had equipped its vessel with nuclear missiles and torpedoes.

While the Soviets hunted in vain for their lost vessel, Sun Ship’s offshore drilling decoy parked right over the sub, precisely located by the navy’s system of hydrophones in the area, which had heard the doomed vessel explode and sink. Once in position, the belly of Hughes Glomar yawned wide above the ocean floor, dropped a giant claw thousands of feet down, clamped onto the sunken sub, and pulled the mangled wreck up into her hollow hull. After closing up, the operators dewatered the hold and stood in awe of their prize.

Shipbuilding was demanding work but John was enthralled. He loved the “camaraderie of the people, the fact that your work was appreciated,” he says. “Guys worked hard in all kinds of weather—rain, snow. The heat in the summertime was brutal. In the hull of a ship with the sun beating down, sometimes the tools got so hot you couldn’t pick them up.”

He’d come home dirty, tired, and satisfied, his clothes riddled with burn holes from errant welder’s torches or tangles with sharp objects. His wife, Dot, learned to shop in thrift stores, buying John three used coats per season; after a few months at the shipyard, they’d be nothing more than rags. Each night, John would stomp his shoes, knocking off the white, glistening, deadly flakes of asbestos. The heat-insulating material, cut by handsaws on-site, was used to wrap the steam pipes of the turbine engines that drove ships’ propellers. John would shake out his jacket before sitting down to dinner, the kids playing nearby. “I’m lucky now,” he tells me, “because all the people that I worked with are dead. The difference is I never smoked. If you smoked, you were doomed.” Researchers have determined that smoking can increase risk of asbestos-related diseases by 90 percent.

John learned how to sequence construction in the shipways, very useful knowledge for the elite naval architects working at their desks in Sun’s brick office building, worlds away from the noise and chaos of the construction zone. Even though he lacked an engineering degree, he was frequently pulled into meetings to help the architects work out the complex steps required to execute their designs.

One day, hull designer Eugene Schorsch presented the Sun Ship team with plans for a sleek, revolutionary new class of vessel he was working on, something called a roll on/roll off “trailer ship.” This one would be a game changer.

At the time, the United States ruled the global economy. Because Europe hadn’t yet fully recovered from the ravages of war, American exports were in high demand. A sign on a bridge up the Delaware River installed in 1935 proudly declared: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. It was never more true than in the early ’60s. America had laid the groundwork for industrialization after the Civil War. Now it was reaping the rewards, shipping its goods everywhere, especially to Europe and Asia.

But imports were beginning to creep in. By 1970, the US would experience a trade reversal from which it would never recover.

To stay competitive, American manufacturers had to up their logistics game. After all, most of their exports had to traverse at least one ocean—either the Pacific or the Atlantic. Unless someone figured out how to ship goods cheaper and faster, Americans would lose market share to local outfits in Asia and Europe. But loading and unloading cargo was still stuck in the nineteenth century. On the docks, boxes, bags, and goods of all sizes and weights were at the mercy of an army of longshoremen who worked with ships’ crews to strategize how to pack all that random stuff into a hull.

Sometimes it would take days to load a vessel, affording seamen plenty of time to blow their money on drink, girls, or gambling. That was, of course, part of the fun of pursuing a living on the high seas, but it wasn’t efficient. And it was expensive. The more handling, the more expensive the export.

As long as a ship idled in port, it was losing money. But nearly every American port depended on unionized longshoremen and stevedores to carry cargo onto ships, then stow and lash it down. These thousands of dockworkers were pricey and potentially problematic. If they called a strike, they could close the port, costing shipping companies serious money. They’d done it before; they could do it again.