Into the Raging Sea
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After sailing for forty years, Jack Jackson had met many guys like LaShawn Rivera and plenty of other unlicensed seamen who were much rougher around the edges. Trapped on a ship way out at sea, things could get ugly, sometimes violent, and you couldn’t just call the cops.
“You wouldn’t believe the fucking shit that goes on on these ships, ya know?” he said to Jeremie. “I’ve always had the bad luck of being around these crazy eccentrics. I mean, I’ve been with some real sickos, man. I mean, some real fucked-up people, man.”
Jack’s assessment was that during this tour, at least, they were sailing with some good people.
Jeremie looked out at the sweltering sea. Dazzling sunlight burned up the hazy dawn. He was happy to hear he wasn’t a sicko.
At 9:30 a.m., Davidson walked in. “What’s this silly thing telling us?” he asked, gesturing to the NHC weather alerts coming in through the SAT-C printer.
Jeremie joined him at the machine and studied the new data. “Showing the wind warning and all that stuff. We’re going into it.”
“We’re going into the storm,” Davidson said turning to face down the horizon. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
For Davidson, handling a massive cargo ship was a true test of a man’s mettle. Courage was a job requirement for taking the top post in the American merchant marine. You had to be ready to fight drunken seamen, confront recalcitrant officers, and wrangle more speed out of your chief engineer. And there was always the threat of the sea itself. That said, Davidson hadn’t yet seen much weather on El Faro. Erika was the first real storm he’d been through on that ship. And thanks to Charlie Baird, he hadn’t witnessed how El Faro handled in a full-blown tropical cyclone. Their route during Erika through the Old Bahama Channel took them south of the islands. They had forty-knot winds on their port side but were in the lee so the seas stayed calm enough that the crew had been able to work as they steamed through.
“Ship’s solid,” he told Jeremie authoritatively. “There was no shortage of swell running during that storm.”
“This ship is solid,” Jeremie agreed. “The hull itself is fine. The plant no problem. But it’s just all the associated bits and pieces, all the shit that shakes and breaks loose that’s the problem. And where the water goes,” he added prophetically.
“Just gotta keep the speed up,” said Davidson, perturbed that his third mate didn’t simply agree with him the way a third mate should. “And who knows? Maybe this low will just stall a little bit, just enough for us to duck underneath.”
Throughout the voyage, Davidson never referred to Joaquin as a hurricane. He called it a “low,” or a “storm,” or a “system,” continually downplaying Joaquin’s power, either to reassure himself or to firm his officers’ resolve.
Davidson then reminisced aloud about storms past. It was the mariner’s way of showing off experience. And balls. He’d earned his stripes: “The worst storm I was ever in was when we were crossing the Atlantic. Horrendous seas. Horrendous. We went up, then down, then down further. You’d roll a little bit into the trough, then you’d rise up a crest and come crashing down and all your cargo would break loose. The wheels on the vehicles aboard moved so much that the lashings loosened up. We were in that shit for two days. The engineers would be cleaning the fuel strainers every three hours.”
On a steam ship, keeping the fuel lines clear is critical—they’re the main arteries to the boiler. And they can get blocked. Heavy fuel oil, the kind used for older cargo ships, is thick, viscous, and dirty, rife with impurities and solids. Just like a bottle of wine that’s been stored for a while, sediment can settle at the bottom of the holding tanks and accumulate there. Sudden movement will stir up that gunk, which then clogs the lines that feed the boilers. To minimize this problem, the fuel lines are equipped with strainers—wire mesh trays that look like fryer baskets—and under normal operation, these have to be cleaned out daily.
In rough weather, with the ship tossing and turning, engineers might find themselves cleaning those strainers with greater frequency. One former officer told me that several years ago, when El Faro was in thirty-foot seas, an engineer had to clean out the strainers every three minutes. It’s arduous work, not as simple as dumping fryer oil. The whole fuel strainer assembly needs to be taken apart to access these strainers, then put back together.
Davidson recalled that during the Atlantic storm, the ship’s engineers had to slow the turbines to protect their machinery. “We could only do six knots,” he told Jeremie. “The winds were 102 knots, force 12.” (Force 12 is the maximum level on the traditional Beaufort scale, an empirical measure of wind speed as it relates to sea conditions. The scale was widely adopted in the nineteenth century as a way to standardize mariners’ observations at sea. Force 12 refers to winds greater than 73 miles per hour and greater than forty-six-foot waves. On land, force 12 would cause “devastation,” according to the scale. At sea, the air would be thick with sea spray and foam, and visibility would be nil.)
“It was like that for a solid twenty-four to thirty-six hours,” Davidson continued, “I shit you not. This for a couple of days. It was bad. It was bad. We had a gust of wind registered at 102 knots. It was the roughest storm I had ever been in.”
Jeremie wasn’t the kind of man to one-up Davidson with his own sea stories. Ships are supposed to go around storms, not through them, though sometimes they get caught in something and have to fight their way out. But thinking about Davidson’s story made him consider El Faro, a ship he knew well. She didn’t handle storms gracefully. He’d seen it with his own eyes.
“The scariest thing I ever saw was that on this ship you’re a lot closer to the water, not far above the waterline,” he said. “At night we’d get into a trough and see the white line of the waves breaking right next to us, all the way up here on the bridge.”
Davidson was too captivated by his own tale to hear Jeremie. Just thinking back on that Atlantic storm got his adrenaline going. That was real seafaring there. A wild ride. He continued spinning his yarn: “We had a rogue wave on every seventh or eighth wave in a period. On the bridge, all hell broke loose. Before we went through that thing, I would’ve said no way could the knobs of a radio to get blown off. Well, it happened.”
Hell, maybe they’d get those kinds of seas this time. But maybe not. “I think we’ll duck down south enough and we’ll speed up,” Davidson said, just a touch disappointed.
At 10:30, another NHC weather forecast came through NAVTEX on the bridge. Jack tore the sheet off the printer. “It’s moving away fast,” he said, scanning the coordinates.
“No,” said Jeremie looking at it more closely. “It’s not moving away, not yet.”
He walked over to the weather chart they’d been working on and plotted out the latest forecast. They were heading southeast, skirting the islands on the Atlantic side, and Joaquin was heading southwest, right for them.
“We’re on a collision course with it.”
At the time, the winds were only blowing 55 knots at the hurricane’s center.
When Davidson left the bridge, Jack’s mind wandered to the seafarers of long ago in their sailing ships, crossing the Atlantic, encountering a hurricane for the first time. “I wonder what the first Spanish sailors, those that survived, thought when the eye passed right over them,” he said. “They’re thinking, It’s over.”
The two men laughed. When the center of the hurricane passes above you, it’s eerily calm; often, you can see straight up to blue sky. It’s easy to think the hurricane has miraculously cleared up. In truth, the worst is yet to come as the eye wall bears down.
“I think back then,” Jeremie said, “they didn’t know the difference between a storm and a hurricane. They figured a hurricane was just a really bad storm. All those ships that sunk, the Spanish probably said, ‘sunk in bad weather.’ Probably a goddamn hurricane.”
“No one believed them,” Jack said. “The survivors would talk about hurricanes back in Spain, and people would say, Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. We know what storms are. No you don’t know what this storm’s like.”
It’s true. The first Spanish explorers in the New World had no frame of reference for such deadly tempests; there aren’t cyclonic storm systems like that in the Mediterranean or along the Spanish coast. The earliest European descriptions of hurricanes emerged a decade after Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas.
Since arriving in the region in 1492 Columbus had learned about the spiraling storms that came every July through October from the Taíno, the native people of Puerto Rico and surrounding islands. The Taíno called these storms juracánes—acts of a furious eponymous goddess, which they depicted as a disembodied head adorned with two propeller-like wings. She looked remarkably like the hurricane symbol you find on modern maps.
Columbus was sophisticated enough, or frightened enough, to use tools the Taíno had given him to predict the approach of a juracáne as it advanced toward Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. He observed cloud formations and the swell of the sea and warned all to secure the city’s main port. His small fleet sheltered in place in a bay while the Spanish governor, dismissing the warning as witchcraft, sent some twenty-six ships laden with gold to their peril.
In their attempt to reconcile the hurricane with biblical or classical references, Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century came up empty and called it the devil’s work. But actual mariners had a vested interest in understanding these unprecedented tempests, in spite of the church’s tenacious hold on apparent truth. Juan Escalante de Mendoza, captain general of the New Spain fleet, covered hurricanes and their dangers in his mariner’s guide published in 1575, writes Stuart Schwartz in his book, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina.
Mendoza called them “a fury of loose contrary wind, like a whirlwind, conceived and gathered between islands and nearby lands and created by great extremes of heat and humidity.”
This account reveals a surprisingly accurate understanding of the storm’s mechanism. Mendoza also noted signs of an imminent hurricane, including odd behaviors among birds, which are exquisitely sensitive to shifts in barometric pressure. When they sense a pressure drop, they might try to outrun it. The result is unusual species showing up in unexpected places, sometimes migrating from America to Europe to escape a hurricane. A few days before a storm, birds might go into a feeding frenzy to bulk up before winds and rains wipe out their feeding grounds. All these behaviors are easily observable.
Schwartz writes that Mendoza was “careful to mention that ‘the things that are to come, you know, sir, only God our Lord knows, and none can know them unless it is revealed by His divine goodness.’ Prediction of the weather always treaded dangerously close to the Church’s disapproval of divination.”
Chapter 5
A Hurricane Is Not a Point on a Map
A hurricane is not a point on a map.
It is not an object that exists in space and time. Rather, it’s a huge catharsis—a brief, explosive event when nature’s forces combine to spin off the ocean’s heat into wind. Over its brief life span, a hurricane expends the power of ten thousand nuclear bombs. It’s a spectacular display of thermodynamics in a complex, evolving, moving system.
Like a cancer, a hurricane is a lethal distortion of the stuff of everyday life. The earth’s winds harmlessly swirl about us, creating patterns in the clouds, kicking up waves for surfers, and nudging planes around the planet. All these heavenly movements are tendrils of much larger systems, like the jet streams that forever flow east, caught up in the rotation of Earth. Thanks to the jet stream, winter storms always pound New England in February when arctic air from Canada drifts south over the plains, gets swept east in its current, and is carried to the warmer air over the Atlantic Ocean.
Although the earth’s meteorological picture is as vast as the planet itself, it is very sensitive, prone to disruption, fickle. A butterfly-wing-like change in pressure or temperature in one place can cause a small piece of the continuum to break away from the mainstream like a recalcitrant teen. It often fades into the ether. But sometimes, when conditions are right, it can escalate exponentially, causing astounding damage to anything in its path.
Perhaps to domesticate these mighty systems, we give them names—Katrina, Sandy, Mitch, Joaquin. We mark them on our maps and say this is where she is. We draw a line and say this is where he will go. As if one day, a storm named Katrina rose out of the Gulf of Mexico like a Japanese monster hell-bent on ravaging New Orleans. As if you could put a beacon on her and track her every move as she made her way to her target. As if there were some kind of motive behind the destruction.
TROPICAL DEPRESSION ELEVEN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 1: 0300 UTC MON SEP 28 2015: TROPICAL DEPRESSION CENTER LOCATED NEAR 27.5N 68.7W AT 28/0300Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE NORTHWEST AT 2 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 30 KT WITH GUSTS TO 40 KT.
Every hurricane begins as an atmospheric low, or depression, in the bottom layer of the earth’s atmosphere—the troposphere—which reaches up to seven miles above the planet’s surface. The low acts like a vacuum, pulling up warm, moist air from the ocean, which spirals around it in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere. If conditions are right—plentiful warm, humid air—the currents corkscrew upward around the low pressure zone at increasing speeds. When that heated air hits the much cooler upper atmosphere, it condenses, shooting out of the hurricane’s top like a whale’s spout, away from the center, and falls to earth as rain.
Feeding on the temperature and humidity differential between the hot ocean and the chilly upper atmosphere, the tropical storm thrives. Air currents around the center pick up heat, and with it, speed, as the center’s pressure drops even lower, intensifying the cycle. “Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs,” wrote Herman Melville.
Joaquin was born as a tropical depression off the Canary Islands, three thousand miles east of Puerto Rico, a birthplace strange and rare for tropical cyclones because it was so far north. Designated Tropical Depression Eleven, it remained a loose cluster of showers that meandered across the North Atlantic toward the Caribbean. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami ran their computer models and concluded that the system would dissipate. Over the course of a few weeks that September, however, Eleven defied the odds to become a cohesive system.
Even as Joaquin matured, dozens of computer models at the NHC in Miami predicted its demise. Some didn’t, but they were dismissed as outliers. On Monday, September 28, the day before El Faro departed from Jacksonville, the NHC issued an advisory: “The forecast for T.D. Eleven is to maintain tropical depression status while drifting slowly NW and will likely dissipate by the end of the week due to unfavorable winds aloft.” When Joaquin failed to comply, it took NHC forecasters by surprise.
In spite of a moderate shear—competing crosswinds that most forecasts predicted would blow it apart—at midnight on September 29, Eleven evolved into Tropical Storm Joaquin.
TROPICAL STORM JOAQUIN/ADVISORY NUMBER 6: 0900 UTC TUE SEP 29 2015: TROPICAL STORM CENTER LOCATED NEAR 26.6N 70.6W AT 29/0900Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE WEST AT 4 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 35 KT WITH GUSTS TO 45 KT.
Throughout Joaquin’s evolution from depression to hurricane, the NHC could only guess at how it would develop, and what path it would take. The center issued discussions—carefully worded explanations of its forecasts of the storm system’s path and intensity. Embedded within these discussions were clear admissions of ambivalence: “There is considerable uncertainty among major models with the details of track . . . intensity and timing not only of Joaquin, but also the surrounding environment,” the center wrote at 2:47 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 29.
The same uncertainty was included in its weather discussion issued thirteen hours later.
Uncertainty in forecasting can be quantified. When models contradict one another, uncertainty is expressed as a probability.
In the course of everyday life, we don’t often encounter uncertainty. Gamblers and hedge funders may weigh odds all day, but most of us aren’t sure what to do if someone says she’s 30 percent sure she’s wrong. How do you process that, especially in a world where so many decisions are made for us by technology?
“If the definition of wisdom is understanding the depths of your own ignorance, meteorologists are wise,” says Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor who has dedicated his life to understanding weather and climate. “It’s wise but it’s a wisdom that is not recognized. If you say there’s a lot of uncertainty in this, in the modern world, it’s translated as You don’t know anything.”
Due to uncertainty, prudent mariners follow the 3-2-1 rule: Three days ahead of a hurricane’s forecasted position, stay three hundred miles away; two days ahead, keep out of a two-hundred-mile radius of its projected center; one day ahead, stay one hundred miles away from its eye in all directions. The rule is based on the fact that hurricane paths are erratic and unpredictable, so it’s smart to give the system a wide berth.
But mariners often need to make binary decisions based on nebulous weather forecasts. On October 24, 1998, the elegant Fantome, a 679-ton staysail schooner built in 1927, departed Honduras for a six-day Windjammer cruise. A thousand miles away, Hurricane Mitch rumbled in the Caribbean Sea. As Mitch picked up strength, the captain of the Fantome got nervous and discharged his passengers in Belize City, then headed north toward the Gulf of Mexico to outrun the storm.
Forecasting Mitch proved extremely difficult due to weak steering winds, but the official NHC prediction, issued with multiple caveats, was that the storm would go north toward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. When the Fantome’s captain received that forecast, he hove to and headed south, unwittingly right into the hurricane’s path, which, contrary to forecasts, took a left turn toward Central America. On October 27, fighting hundred-mile-per-hour winds and forty-foot seas, the Fantome was lost forty miles south of the hurricane’s deadly eye wall.
Slow and unyielding, the Category 5 storm’s winds and rains killed more than eleven thousand people in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, making it the second-deadliest storm in the Atlantic’s history.
HURRICANE JOAQUIN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 11: 1500 UTC WED SEP 30 2015: HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 24.7N 72.6W AT 30/1500Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE SOUTHWEST AT 5 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 70 KT WITH GUSTS TO 85 KT.
Weak, meandering, dispersed Joaquin was precisely the kind of storm the NHC has trouble forecasting, says James Franklin, director of the center, as we sit in his Miami office a year and a half later. James has two MIT degrees, rimless glasses, and a quiet, analytical manner. He speaks in complete paragraphs. But his quiet demeanor belies an intrepid soul. James used to fly in NOAA Hurricane Hunters, straight into tropical storms. The Gulfstream IV is a high-altitude jet that flies in and around hurricanes recording conditions and dropping sondes (disposable devices outfitted with a parachute) that gather critical data about the storms as they fall from the sky. The planes often ride hurricane updrafts, and then on the very inside edge of the eye wall where the air all rushes down, plummet more than nine hundred feet.
“Have you ever been on the Tower of Terror ride at Disney?” he asks me. “It’s basically a big elevator where you get dropped. So it’s sort of like that. I did that for seventeen years.”
Joaquin just didn’t look like it meant business, until it did. “By getting the intensity forecast wrong,” James says, “that contributed to our getting the track forecast wrong. If we had correctly anticipated that Joaquin was going to beat the shear and remain a stronger storm, that would have argued for a forecast more to the south.”
James explains why even with advanced computers and significant amounts of data, we still can’t accurately predict the future 100 percent of the time. In fact, an important part of the NHC meteorologists’ job is to keep tabs of, and learn from, error. The NHC is one of the few government offices that obsessively tracks its own mistakes; meteorologists use these errors to improve their models and methods.
On the NHC website, there’s an entire section dedicated to its own errors going back to 1970. Multiple line graphs detail two kinds of errors: track errors and intensity errors. What path the storm takes depends on the larger forces around it. Like a leaf floating down a powerful river, it can get caught in swirling eddies, loop back, cut loose, and stall in slower currents near the riverbank. Meteorologists often think of weather systems in terms of fluid dynamics. But unlike a leaf, the hurricane is a nine-mile-high engine—making its movements and behavior even more difficult to predict.
Heat is the fuel that drives the hurricane’s engine. The more heat the system absorbs into the upper atmosphere from the warm waters below, the faster it spins, converting the heat’s energy into powerful winds. That’s why hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere occur late in the season, after the summer sun has warmed the southwestern Atlantic up to 84 degrees.
As oceans continue to warm due to climate change, hurricanes will get more intense because they’ve got more fuel to convert to energy. We’ve already witnessed proof of this; several tropical cyclones have broken records in the past decade alone. Hurricane Sandy, which pounded the New Jersey and New York coasts in October 2012, was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, spanning eleven hundred miles. A year later, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines became the strongest tropical cyclone to hit land ever recorded, with one-minute sustained winds recorded at an astounding 195 miles per hour, killing at least sixty-three hundred people. Hurricane Patricia intensified at an unprecedented rate off the western coast of Mexico two years later, churning out record-breaking maximum sustained winds of 215 miles per hour.
Hurricane Irma, followed by Hurricane Maria, revealed exactly how destructive these systems can be. The huge Category 5 hurricane blasted through Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. Its tornado-like winds knocked out the entire power grid and nearly all cell-phone infrastructure and cut a swath of devastation, peeling off roofs, stripping away all vegetation, and causing widespread flooding. Ports were closed, and much of Puerto Rico’s shipping infrastructure was compromised by winds and flooding.
In the aftermath, Puerto Ricans found themselves without fresh food, water, and electricity. Hospitals, schools, homes, and factories went dark. Some towns were completely wiped out. Tankers were unable to dock or unload; without fuel, emergency efforts ground to a halt. By mid-October, more than 1.2 million people on the island lacked access to potable water.
HURRICANE JOAQUIN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 13: 0300 UTC THU OCT 01 2015: HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 23.8N 73.1W AT 01/0300Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE SOUTHWEST AT 5 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 100 KT WITH GUSTS TO 120 KT.
Joaquin would continue this superheated superstorm trend with its own series of unprecedented stats. As it was forming, it traveled westward, but a ridge of high pressure blocked its forward progression, redirecting it south over the hot Bahamian waters—about 86 degrees—two degrees hotter than ever recorded at that time of year. This was the heat Joaquin needed to thrive. For sixty hours, the storm fed off these warm waters and rapidly intensified. At 2 a.m. on September 30, about 170 miles east-northeast of the small Bahamian island of San Salvador, Joaquin became a hurricane.