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

In the silence, darkness, and coolness of the final hour before dawn, Davidson used his chief mate as a sounding board as he tried to determine whether Joaquin posed a threat.

Shultz was taller and softer than Davidson, and a year older. His thin brown mustache and sparse goatee obscured a smattering of acne scars. As chief mate, he was responsible for the loading and securing of cargo and overseeing the unlicensed crew. Although weather routing was the second mate’s job, Shultz was flattered that Davidson had opted to consult with him that morning.

“This NHC report puts the storm further south than last night,” Shultz observed, studying the newest message out of Miami.

Davidson didn’t like Tropical Storm Joaquin’s slow, lumbering movements. It was traveling at about four knots. And the newest NHC assessment of the storm—that it was heading southwest—contradicted the ship’s forecasting software, which had the storm turning north. “Look, remember how we saw this storm out here the other day? It’s just festering,” he said to Shultz. “I’m anxious to see the newest BVS report.”

El Faro was equipped with a third-party weather forecasting software package called Bon Voyage System (BVS). Its interface is lush, much more visually inviting than the all-caps text advisories coming from NOAA, which need to be plotted out by hand on the ship’s paper charts.

On BVS, weather comes preplotted on a pastel-hued digital map. The tiny islands of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos appear as beige strands in a light blue sea. Mariners can plug in their ship’s course and fast-forward through time to watch how weather systems are predicted to behave as they sail to their destination. Click and it’s tomorrow. Here’s your ship (based on your projected speed and course) and here’s the weather. Click again and it’s two days from now. You’ve moved, the weather moved. Click, click, click. It’s five days in the future, and there you are, safely in port. It all looks so clear, so real. Solid and dependable.

Nearly all people glean more information faster from data visualizations rather than alphanumeric code. That’s just how our brains work. Davidson, whose elegant handwriting reveals a man with a strong aesthetic sense, preferred to get his weather from the highly graphic BVS software. It put all the information—ship and storm location, plus their projected courses over time—on a single chart. On the bridge, this information was recorded on separate paper maps, one for the ship’s course, one for the storm, requiring a mental workout for an officer to precisely understand their relative positions. “I’m connecting now,” Davidson told Shultz and retreated downstairs to his stateroom to download the 5:00 a.m. BVS update via satellite.

It took a minute for his desktop to get the information and process it, but once it did, a small red circle with two helical wings represented Joaquin. It hovered far west of the Bahamas. Around the storm was a series of wavy concentric circles—bands of color depicting predicted wind speed from dangerous orange to so-so yellow to benign light green, then darker cobalt, and finally, the neutral baby blue of a calm sea. A dark scarlet line showed Joaquin’s predicted path.

The storm would move a little farther southwest, BVS told Davidson, then cut north toward South Carolina. El Faro could easily skirt below the system, as long as she kept up her speed. The captain clicked the forward arrow and saw the future: tomorrow, the ship would be halfway to San Juan and Joaquin would be nearing the US coast. As he clicked forward in time, El Faro moved along its expected route, and Joaquin inched farther and farther north, away from the islands. They’d be fine.

What Davidson didn’t know was that due to a clerical error, the 5 a.m. BVS forecast he’d downloaded that morning was identical to the one sent six hours prior. Because BVS took several hours to process NHC data before issuing a report, that error meant the weather forecast Davidson was looking at was based on raw data nearly eighteen hours old. The report depicted Joaquin as a northbound tropical storm when, in fact, by dawn on September 30, most forecasters, including the NHC, recognized the system as a slow-moving, full-blown Category 3 hurricane that might not budge from its southwesterly track.

According to Davidson’s BVS report, they’d see some weather—winds and waves, maybe twelve to fifteen feet—the aftershocks of the storm. He sent the update to the computer terminal on the bridge for the other officers to see. “This doesn’t look too bad,” Shultz said, examining the projection when the captain joined him. “The ship can handle it.”

“We’ll see what the schedule looks like,” Davidson said, clicking through to Friday. He took the opportunity to lecture his new chief mate on the finer points of routing a ship. “Joaquin’s gone a little south,” he said. “This is why you watch the weather all the time. All the time.” He cleared his throat then added, “Absolutely.”

As dawn approached, El Faro was one hundred miles north of the Bahamas. If they maintained their current heading, they’d sail east of the island chain into the deepest Atlantic—a straight shot to Puerto Rico. But if Joaquin didn’t turn north as predicted, they could get into trouble.

A land map shows the Bahamas as a series of spindly islands and cays running from the Florida peninsula to Cuba’s eastern tip. A nautical chart or satellite photo tells a very different story: the Bahamas are in fact the highest ridges of two huge limestone masses built up over millennia by the creation and compression of coral reefs. Known as Little Bahama Bank and Great Bahama Bank, these plateaus were once dry land before sea levels rose following the last Ice Age, creating extremely shallow areas that block deep draft vessels from accessing the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic.

On a calm day, the banks’ waters are a hypnotic cerulean, easily distinguishable from the dark, deep waters around them. But on rough and windy days, when the water surface is shredded by winds, few landmarks will warn you that you’re about to hit a submerged wall, until you do.

A handful of underwater canyons provide deep but narrow shipping highways. The Northwest Providence Channel, for one, runs east to west, separating Little Bahama Bank to the north from Great Bahama Bank to the south.

The Old Bahama Channel is another natural canyon—a fifteen-mile wide chasm between the Great Bahama Bank and Cuba. It’s such a popular route that NOAA’s nautical chart number 11013 shows it as a divided highway, complete with purple arrows reminding mariners that traffic here follows the right-hand rule. Tolerances in the channel are tight, though, bound by hidden seventeen-hundred-foot-high cliffs that plunge down into the abyss.

For centuries, mariners have threaded their way through these channels, sounds, and astonishingly deep trenches, losing countless ships when storms forced them onto the unforgiving shoals, leaving an estimated $400 million worth of Spanish plunder between Cuba and Florida. In August 2015, just a month before El Faro’s ill-fated voyage, treasure hunters announced the discovery a Spanish galleon sunk by a hurricane in 1715 off Florida’s coast, a find that yielded more than $1 million worth of gold coins.

After countless casualties, prudent mariners started favoring the Straits of Florida, which provide wide and deep passage from the southern tip of the Sunshine Sate along Key West, clear all the way to the northwest coast of Cuba, and into the Gulf of Mexico.

On the Puerto Rico run that morning, playing it safe meant following that same line: adjusting El Faro’scourse 50 degrees south, right now, and taking the Straits down along the lee side of the island chain to the Old Bahama Channel. That would add 160 miles to the voyage, and at least five hours to their arrival time.

One month earlier, Second Mate Charlie Baird had convinced Davidson to take this same route to avoid Tropical Storm Erika, a move that shifted their ETA six hours later and burned 504 more gallons of fuel. Erika turned out to be a dud of a storm. It never developed into a hurricane and rumor has it that TOTE wasn’t pleased with Davidson’s decision to take the long way around. In hindsight, it seemed like an overcautious move that cut into the run’s profit. Fuel costs $38,000 a day to keep El Faro running full speed ahead. Port labor is also pricey. Time and fuel—it was always a delicate balance.

There was pressure to save on both, and Davidson had blown it once. He wasn’t going to blow it twice in the same season.

Davidson knew that early on Friday morning, two days from now, stevedores and hundreds of trucks would be lined up at San Juan Port waiting to unload El Faro’s cargo. By Friday afternoon, supermarket shelves across the island would be fully stocked with the goods she carried. By Monday, provisions would be low, and the trucks would line up again for El Yunque, El Faro’s sister ship, to bring another haul. TOTE’s ships were Puerto Rico’s lifeline. Any delay in arrival would set off a costly chain of events.

Davidson couldn’t afford to screw up with TOTE again. In the cutthroat world of shipping, prudence didn’t always pay. As a master, you had to be willing to push your luck. He’d lost a good job once before for playing it too safe when he ordered a tugboat assist after one of his ships developed steering problems.

Davidson decided to take his chances with Joaquin. Atlantic hurricanes always cut north eventually, and the ship was fast. They could easily outrun this one.

He and Shultz marked a point on their map east of the Bahamas and set a course nine degrees more southerly than the normal route, a slight change which they hoped would keep them out of trouble. “I think that’s a good little plan, Chief Mate,” Davidson said after spending an hour hashing it out. “At least I think we got a little distance from the center. We’re gonna be further south of the eye, about 60 miles south of it. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine. Not should be—we are gonna be fine.”

He knew they’d probably feel the aftereffects of the storm and wanted the ship secured for heavy weather. “Take a hard look at some of that cargo down there,” he advised his chief mate. “Delegate the men to look at the lashings as you deem necessary.”

Davidson’s warning about the lashings made the chief mate reconsider what he’d witnessed the day before when the stevedores were loading the trailers and containers onto the ship. He didn’t think they’d secured them properly but didn’t make a big deal out of it. “The longshoreman was doing the lashing wrong and I was trying to help,” Shultz told Davidson. He was the new guy on the ship and felt awkward criticizing their work.

“Go right to the foreman—cut out the middleman,” Davidson advised him. “I do it all the time.”

“They just don’t do the lashing the way it outta be done,” Shultz repeated in frustration. It was his job to make sure loading was done right, but it had all happened so fast, and he hadn’t yet established solid relationships with the workers he was overseeing.

Shifting cargo doesn’t only cause damage, it can break loose and kill a man. It can go right over the deck or wreak havoc in the holds. It can set off a domino effect during heavy seas, throwing the ship over, causing a perilous list. Globally, ships lose an average of about six hundred containers each year to storms, collisions, and groundings. Now that they were at sea, Shultz worried whether they had enough chains to double- or triple-lash if they needed to. If he’d looked at the cargo-securing inventory, he’d know that the vessel was short 170 lashing rods and missing more than a thousand required turnbuckles and twistlocks. Even if he had the equipment on hand, though, trying to lash at sea was miserable—it’s nearly impossible to maneuver around a loaded ship like that to chain things down. The cargo is packed tight, and if something did come loose while you were trying to secure it, you could be crushed. They were too far gone. Hopefully, the chains would hold.

Shultz spent the next several minutes logging alternative routes and waypoints into the ship’s GPS system. He wasn’t completely sure he trusted Joaquin, and he wanted to give the other officers various options if they ran into trouble. The storm had proven an unpredictable and erratic foe; Shultz wanted to work out as many escape routes as he could.

Logging in all those new waypoints (which made a high-pitched beep with each entry), irritated Davidson.

“It’s a good little diversion,” he scoffed at Shultz. “Are you feelin’ comfortable with that, Chief Mate?”

“Better. Yes, sir.”

“You can’t run every single weather pattern,” Davidson barked. His chief mate was already rubbing him the wrong way, and they’d only been up for an hour.

Shultz didn’t want to piss off Davidson. He was brand-new to the ship, new to the captain, and relatively new to the Atlantic. He’d come from shipping for years in the Pacific Northwest and was happy to be on the Puerto Rican run, at least temporarily, closer to Florida where his petite native Brazilian wife and two teens lived. He was a dedicated husband who vigorously embraced his wife’s Catholicism.

Nothing was more sacred aboard a ship than respecting the chain of command. Though he had as much experience as Davidson, Shultz knew to defer to his captain in all things to ingratiate himself to his superior. If he thought that sixty miles from the eye of a major storm didn’t sound right, he kept it to himself. A challenge like that could be viewed as insubordination. Shultz had kids approaching college age. Like everyone else, he had expenses. He needed this job.

Outside in the wild Atlantic, however, there were ominous signs.

At 6:40 a.m., Davidson watched the rising sun set the eastern horizon aflame, reminding him of an old adage. “Look at that red sky over there,” he said to Shultz. “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. That is bright.”

For thousands of years, sailors have viewed crimson skies at dawn as a bad omen. Science backs this up: Red has the longest wavelength in the color spectrum—powerful enough to penetrate the dust and moisture kicked up by an atmospheric event, such as a major storm. Other colors in the rainbow get scattered by thick storm clouds, leaving the sky a blazing scarlet.

Dawn on September 30, 2015, was distorted by a terrific atmospheric event brewing dead ahead of El Faro.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_1107b70c-2d66-5667-9e6a-12e06f37aabc)

THIRD MATE JEREMIE RIEHM (#ulink_1107b70c-2d66-5667-9e6a-12e06f37aabc)

28.42°N -78.47°W

Third Mate Jeremie Riehm arrived on the bridge shortly before his 8:00 a.m. shift and watched the tropical sun rise into an unctuous sky. Another steamy Caribbean day ahead. The air-conditioning had been cranking all night and now it was chilly on the bridge in spite of the stickiness of the morning outside.

The scorching sun would soon beat down on the metal roof of the wheelhouse, so Jeremie wore a T-shirt and shorts under a light jacket. His thick brown hair flopped into his eyes. He’d brusquely brush it up and back with his fingers giving it a permanent flip. Forty-six years old, he looked like a rugged, slightly stockier Brad Pitt.

“You hear about the storm?” Chief Mate Shultz asked Jeremie.

“Yes, I’m aware of it,” he answered. “Caught a little bit of it on the news. I heard it’s gonna be a hurricane tomorrow or later today according to the Weather Channel.”

Shultz took Jeremie over to the chart table to show the new course he and the captain—who was downstairs getting breakfast—had prepared earlier that day. The chief mate pointed to Joaquin’s projected course, drawn in wax pencil on a clear plexiglass panel laid over the paper nautical chart. Tiny numbers scattered across the white sea indicated depths in fathoms; there was twelve thousand feet of ocean below them. The shallow Bahama banks blocking their escape route to the west appeared as a scorpion-shaped expanse of light blue. Sinuous purple lines represented the elaborate network of underwater communication cables that link the United States to the Caribbean islands, South America, and Europe—cords that could be cut by the keel of a ship if it dragged over them.