Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Slade

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover images © Mike Hill/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

Copyright © Rachel Slade 2018

Rachel Slade asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Designed by Suet Yee Chong

Ship illustration by Michael Chan

Map by Mike Hall

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008302474

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008302450

Version: 2019-05-16

Dedication

To the families and friends of those

lost on El Faro.

No one should have to endure such sorrow.

Epigraph

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

—LORD JIM, JOSEPH CONRAD

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Cast of Characters

Chain of Command Aboard El Faro

El Faro Plans and Sections

A Note on the Text

Part I

Chapter 1: The Clock is Ticking

Chapter 2: Blount Island

Chapter 3: Tropical Storm Joaquin

Chapter 4: Third Mate Jeremie Riehm

Chapter 5: A Hurricane Is Not a Point on a Map

Chapter 6: Second Mate Danielle Randolph

Chapter 7: Collision Course

Chapter 8: Hull Number 670

Chapter 9: Afternoon

Chapter 10: Captain Michael Davidson

Chapter 11: Question Authority?

Chapter 12: The Jones Act

Chapter 13: Evening

Chapter 14: Night

Chapter 15: Necesitamos La Mercancía

Chapter 16: Dawn

Chapter 17: The Raging Sea

Chapter 18: We’re Gonna Make It

Part II

Chapter 19: We’ve Lost Communication

Chapter 20: Search and Rescue

Chapter 21: Flight to Jacksonville

Chapter 22: Ships Don’t Just Disappear

Chapter 23: Profit and Loss

Chapter 24: The Truth is out There

Chapter 25: How to Sink a Ship

Chapter 26: Admiral Greene Clears the Air

Chapter 27: Portrait of Incompetence

Chapter 28: Mission Number Two

Chapter 29: The Proof is in the Pudding

Chapter 30: Voices

Chapter 31: Twenty-Four Minutes

Chapter 32: Spirits

Epilogue

Crew List

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Cast of Characters

FEATURED EL FARO OFFICERS AND CREW

DECK DEPARTMENT

Michael Davidson, 53, Master

Steven Shultz, 54, Chief Mate, First Watch

Danielle Randolph, 34, Second Mate, Second Watch

Jeremie Riehm, 46, Third Mate, Third Watch

Frank Hamm, 49, Able Seaman, Helmsman for the First Watch

Jackie Jones, 38, Able Seaman, Helmsman for the Second Watch

Jack Jackson, 60, Able Seaman, Helmsman for the Third Watch

ENGINEERING

Richard Pusatere, 34, Chief Engineer, Dayworker

Michael Holland, 25, Third Assistant Engineer

LaShawn Rivera, 32, Chief Cook

James Porter, 40, Utility Person

Jeff Mathias, 42, off-duty Chief Engineer in charge of Polish workers aboard El Faro

EL FARO FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Laurie Bobillot, mother of Danielle Randolph

Jill Jackson-d’Entremont, sister of Jack Jackson

Robert Green, stepfather of LaShawn Rivera

Rochelle Hamm, wife of Frank Hamm

Glen Jackson, brother of Jack Jackson

Jenn Mathias, wife of Jeff Mathias

Marlena Porter, wife of James Porter

Frank Pusatere, father of Richard Pusatere

Deb Roberts, mother of Michael Holland

Korinn Scattoloni, friend of Danielle Randolph

OFF-DUTY EL FARO OFFICERS

Charlie Baird, off-duty Second Mate

Jim Robinson, off-duty Chief Engineer

OTHER TOTE SHIP’S OFFICERS

Ray Thompson, Isla Bella Master, former Chief Mate of El Faro

Earl Loftfield, El Yunque Master after the loss of El Faro

Kevin Stith, El Yunque Master during accident voyage

JACKSONVILLE PILOT

Eric Bryson, River Pilot with St. Johns Bar Pilot Association

RETIRED MARINERS

Eric Axelsson, retired TOTE Master, Davidson’s relief on El Faro until August 2015

Paul Haley, retired TOTE Chief Mate

Jack Hearn, retired TOTE Master

John Loftus, retired Horizon Shipping Master

Pete Villacampa, retired TOTE Master

Bill Weisenborn, retired TOTE Port Captain

SUN SHIPBUILDING AND DRY DOCK

John Glanfield, retired Shipbuilder

Eugene Schorsch, retired Naval Architect

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE

James Franklin, Director of the National Hurricane Center, Miami

US COAST GUARD DC HEADQUARTERS

Rear Admiral Paul Thomas, Assistant Commandant for Prevention Policy

Captain Jason Neubauer, Head of USCG El Faro investigation

Commander Michael Odom, USCG Traveling Ship Inspector, former Rescue Swimmer

Commander Charlotte Pittman, Deputy Chief, USCG Office of Public Affairs, former helicopter pilot

Keith Fawcett, Marine Board Investigator

US COAST GUARD SEARCH AND RESCUE

Captain Rich Lorenzen, Commanding Officer, Air Station Clearwater

Commander Scott Phy, Operations Officer, Air Station Clearwater

Lieutenant Dave McCarthy, MH-60T Pilot, Aircraft Commander for Minouche rescue

Aviation Survival Technician 1st Class Ben Cournia, Rescue Swimmer during Minouche rescue

Lieutenant John “Rick” Post, MH-60T Pilot, Co-Pilot for Minouche rescue

Aviation Maintenance Technician 2nd Class Joshua Andrews, Flight Mechanic during Minouche rescue

Lieutenant Commander Jeff Hustace, HC-130 pilot, Aircraft commander for El Faro search

Captain Todd Coggeshall, Chief of Incident Management, 7th Coast Guard District, Miami

Operations Specialist 2nd Class Matthew Chancery, Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator, 7th Coast Guard District Command Center, Miami

NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD

Tom Roth-Roffy, NTSB Chief Investigator

Eric Stolzenberg, NTSB Nautical Architecture Group

Doug Mansell, NTSB Technology Specialist

Mike Kucharski, NTSB Investigator

TOTE EXECUTIVES

Peter Keller, EVP, TOTE

Phil Greene, President, TOTE Services

Phil Morrell, VP Marine Operations, TOTE Maritime

Tim Nolan, President, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico

John Lawrence, Designated Person Ashore and Manager of Safety and Operations

Jim Fisker-Andersen, Port Engineer

Chain of Command Aboard El Faro

El Faro Plans and Sections

Ship illustration by Michael Chan

A Note on the Text

Six microphones installed in the ceiling of El Faro’s navigation bridge recorded twenty-six hours of conversation leading up to the sinking. This audio was captured on a microchip by an onboard Voyage Data Recorder—the ship’s black box. All the dialogue in this book aboard El Faro during her final voyage was taken from a transcription of this audio.

Part One

Chapter 1
The Clock is Ticking

The satellite call came into the emergency center at 7:08 on the morning of October 1, 2015.

OPERATOR: Okay, sir.

CALLER: Are you connecting me through to a QI [Qualified Individual]?

OPERATOR: That’s what I’m getting ready now. We’re seeing who is on call and I’m going to get you right to them. Give me one second, sir. I’m going to put you on a quick hold. So one moment, please. Okay, sir. I just need your name please.

CALLER: Yes, ma’am. My name is Michael Davidson. Michael C. Davidson.

OPERATOR: Your rank?

CALLER: Ship’s master.

OPERATOR: Okay. Thank you. Ship’s name?

CALLER: El Faro.

OPERATOR: Spell that E-L . . .

CALLER: Oh man, The Clock is Ticking. Can I please speak to a QI? El Faro: Echo, Lima, Space, Foxtrot, Alpha, Romeo, Oscar. El Faro.

OPERATOR: Okay, and in case I lose you, what is your phone number please?

CALLER: Phone number 870-773-206528.

OPERATOR: Got it. Again, I’m going to get you reached right now. One moment please.

CALLER: [Aside.] And Mate, what else to do you see down there? What else do you see?

OPERATOR: I’m going to connect you now okay.

OPERATOR 2: Hi, good morning. My name is Sherida. Just give me one moment. I’m going to try to connect you now. Okay, Mr. Davidson?

CALLER: Okay.

OPERATOR 2: Okay, one moment please. Thank you for waiting.

CALLER: Oh God.

OPERATOR 2: Just briefly what is your problem you’re having?

CALLER: I have a marine emergency and I would like to speak to a QI. We had a hull breach, a scuttle blew open during a storm. We have water down in three-hold with a heavy list. We’ve lost the main propulsion unit, the engineers cannot get it going. Can I speak to a QI please?

OPERATOR 2: Yes, thank you so much, one moment.

Thirty-three minutes later, the American government’s network of hydrophones in the Atlantic Ocean picked up an enormous thud just beyond Crooked Island in the Bahamas. It was a sound rarely heard out there in the deepest part of the sea where, for decades, the government had been recording an endless underwater symphony. Three miles down, they listened to the lonely cries of humpback whales, the eerie hum of earthquakes, and the whirr of submarine propellers. Just white noise, really. But that morning, something huge and audible hit the ocean floor with terrific force.

Based on the positions of the hydrophones, the people listening knew approximately where the object landed. They also knew the precise moment that it hit. But what was it?

That the Americans had been listening in on the ocean since the 1960s was no secret, at least not to mariners. Some older guys remembered laying down the cable decades ago to feed this equipment, which served as the country’s first line of defense against submarine invasion or other nefarious activity on the high seas.

The precise locations within this network were considered classified, but one monitoring station, known as the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), occupies a piece of Andros Island in the Bahamas, just west of Nassau. The thud was notable enough that there was talk among a few members of the armed forces stationed there. That intel simmered among a handful of officers assigned to monitor maritime activity in the Caribbean.

When word got out that a large American container ship had vanished in Hurricane Joaquin somewhere east of the Bahamas, those stationed on Andros Island knew exactly what they’d heard. It was the sound of El Faro colliding with the ocean floor.

Chapter 2
Blount Island

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, 30.39°N -81.54°W

From above, Jacksonville looks like a battleground between land and water where water is winning. Rivers, streams, and inlets branch like veins folding in on themselves, following their own secret logic; roads curve here and there, searching for a path from one scrap of land to the next. A series of bridges stitches northern Florida’s tenuous coast together.

It was late in the afternoon on September 29, 2015, and Jacksonville’s wide open-for-business highways were choked with commuter traffic baking in the heat of another late September day. Down at the sprawling marine terminal on Blount Island, stevedores loaded El Faro, a 790-foot-long ship, with 25 million pounds of cargo: 391 containers, 238 refrigerated containers, 118 trailers, 149 cars, and enough fructose syrup to make more than one million two-liter bottles of soda.

In his comfortable home at Atlantic Beach, Eric Bryson waited for a call from his dispatcher. Eric was a river pilot with the St. Johns Bar Pilot Association. He made his living divining the secrets of Jacksonville’s waterways to safely deliver tankers, cargo ships, and car carriers up the St. Johns River to the Port of Jacksonville or back out to sea. Federal maritime law requires that every deep-draft vessel hire a local guide like Eric to navigate ships through these waterways so that they don’t collide with each other or the struts of bridges, or take one of the many tight turns too wide and ground on the shallow banks.

To earn his piloting job, Eric had to memorize the twists, hazards, and depths of the St. Johns River in exquisite detail—enough that he could draw a navigable map of it from memory. Though the pilot’s test was only open to seasoned ship captains like him, just the top scorer was considered for the position. When he took the exam in 1991, Eric blew away the other twenty-six applicants.

Since it requires such highly specialized knowledge, piloting is one of the most stable positions in the maritime industry. Getting the St. Johns job meant that Eric could give up the seaman’s life and settle down for the long haul with his wife, Mary. They could work together raising their two kids in the warmth of the Florida sun, and he’d never be more than seven miles out to sea. It was a radically different life from the typical mariner who spends at least ten weeks straight on a ship, often out of communication, far from home.

Eric thinks of his job as a craft. “Any idiot can color inside the lines,” he says of finessing a ship safely in and out of port. “The art of it is coloring outside the lines safely.” Sturdily built, just shy of six feet, bald and bearded, with a face like a benevolent bulldog, Eric is the embodiment of male competence. Ponderous by nature, he does not take anything lightly. Some mariners who’ve worked with him call Eric “the Priest.” All this, combined with his detached Yankee demeanor, puts ship captains at ease when Eric assumes command of their vessel.

The pilot dispatcher’s call for SS El Faro came at six o’clock. The container ship was just about ready to leave port, but she was running an hour late. She’d been delayed because she’d been incorrectly loaded—someone had accidentally transposed a few numbers in the ship’s loading software, causing the weight of the cargo to be unevenly distributed, which resulted in a noticeable list. The stevedores had had to scramble to shift cargo around to get her upright once again.

Eric knew El Faro and her two sister ships well—they’d been running twice weekly from Jacksonville to San Juan for nearly two decades, and he’d piloted them up and down St. Johns River dozens of times over the years. He knew many of the deck crew and officers, too, if not by name, at least by face. They were nearly all Americans. These days, that was notable. Most of the ships coming in and out of Jacksonville were registered in foreign countries and crewed by a mix of international laborers—predominantly Philippine.

By the time Eric got the call that hot Wednesday evening, his small travel bag was packed. He’d been following El Faro’s loading progress all day. He grabbed his navy-and-yellow pilot’s jacket and walked through the kitchen door to one of his company’s white Subarus, perpetually parked in the driveway.

As he drove to the terminal, a concrete expanse about the size of Central Park surrounded by a high chain-link fence, Eric cleared his head of the little things that might distract him. He needed intense focus to do his job right. Eric was acutely aware that in the world of big ships, complacency meant death. Now nearing sixty years old, he wanted to get out before his job killed him. Which it nearly did, twice.

To bring ships into Jacksonville, Eric had to board them at sea. He rode in his pilot boat seven miles out to the vessel, at first invisible on the horizon, just a blip on the radar, then looming large as he and his driver pull alongside. Riding up next to the massive, impermeable steel hulls never ceased to give Eric a thrill. If the winds and seas were high, the ship could trace out a big, lazy circle in the water to create a temporary lee for the small pilot boat.

Big ships rarely stop or drop anchor for pilots—they have so much momentum that they’d take miles to come to a halt, and even then, they’d drift with the winds and currents; instead, the pilot boat nestles up alongside like a pilot fish clinging to a whale shark, then tries to keep up with the ship, about 11 miles per hour. The two vessels aren’t ever tethered together.

The small boat is outfitted with an external set of stairs leading to a platform, like a kitchen ladder that someone screwed onto its deck. Moored at the pilot association’s office, the stepladder steps off into the void. But alongside a thousand-foot-long ship, it’s the only way a pilot has any chance of climbing aboard.

Once the boat is riding alongside the ship, a small door in the enormous hull opens, a friendly face pops out from the steel wall, and a hand drops down a rope ladder as the pilot boat’s driver tries to maintain the same speed and course as the ship. The pilot climbs his stepladder and then pauses, clinging to his platform, gauging the situation. The bottom rung of the huge ship’s rope ladder dangles a few feet away from the pilot’s shoes, but the two vessels are bobbing up and down at different rates. The pilot times his leap as the ship and pilot boat perform their version of synchronized swimming. He grabs hold of the rope ladder and scrambles up.

I once took a piloting trip with Eric. I thought I was mentally prepared for that moment when you had to take that leap of faith. But when confronted with all this—the flimsy rope ladder, the wall of black steel, the deep water rushing below with nothing to catch me if I missed—I panicked. Freud says that those who are afraid of heights don’t trust their bodies not to jump. If my hands decided to let go, I would plummet between the two vessels and drown.

“Grab on! Climb up,” Eric commanded. I reached out and gripped that rope ladder like my life depended on it, which it did. And then I scurried ten feet up the hull, ten steps straight up, holding my breath until I was safe on the deck, looking back down at Eric’s head as he followed me scaling the side of the ship.

Pilots have missed that ladder. They’ve slipped and fallen into the sea where they were crushed between their boat and the ship. In October 2016, a pilot with more than a decade’s worth of experience died this way on the river Thames.

Eric was once reaching for the ladder when his driver pulled away too soon, leaving him straddled between the two vessels. Eric was forced to make a split-second decision: jump for the ladder and risk missing it, or fall back into the pilot boat. He hurled himself toward the deck of his boat and saved his life but shattered his heel. He was out of work for months, and in immeasurable pain, but hated being on meds. His second accident was caused by his bag—caught on the pilot boat platform, it yanked him back, and when he fell onto the deck, he broke his back. He’s never fully recovered from that. But he’s alive.

Pilots board a berthed container ship like anyone else—up the gangway or loading ramp.

That’s how Eric got onto El Faro on the evening of September 29.

He parked his car at Blount Island Marine Terminal at 7:30 and walked across the expanse of tarmac by the fading light to the ramp. As he approached El Faro, Eric regarded her dark blue steel hull. Like all massive ships, El Faro was a paean to modern engineering—a floating island capable of moving the weight of the Eiffel Tower through the ocean at 25 miles per hour. She was as long as the Golden Gate Bridge is high; it would take more than four minutes for a person to walk from bow to stern. Designed in the late 1960s, she was built for speed at a time when fuel was cheap and fast shipping fetched premium pricing. To reduce drag, she had a narrow beam that tapered steeply and evenly to her sharp keel.

These days, the profit is in cargo. The more you take, the more money you make. So modern ships are bulkier and slower; megaships, like the 1,305-foot-long Benjamin Franklin, are fat all the way to their little nub of a keel and can carry up to eighteen thousand containers. (If you lined them up, they’d reach from Manhattan to Trenton, New Jersey.) These ships made El Faro look like a toy.

Just about loaded up, El Faro sat low in the water, but Eric could still see her load line marks etched into her hull indicating she was safe to sail. Thick lines kept her tied to the dock as trucks and cars sped up her wide loading ramp, located at midships, in a fog of gas and diesel exhaust.

Twelve stories above Eric, a crane operator labored in a glass-bottomed cab hanging from a track, hauling the final containers onto El Faro’s main deck.

A working crane is like a massive version of the classic claw game, and watching it load ships is mesmerizing. On the dock below the crane, a longshoreman steers a flatbed truck into position next to the ship, then releases the clamps holding the container to the truck’s chassis. A typical container is forty feet long and can be as heavy as thirteen cars. The crane operator uses cables and winches to lower the “spreader” over the steel box—a steel frame that aligns with the container’s top four corners—and locks it in place like a tight-fitting lid. The spreader grips the container as the operator artfully swings it above El Faro’s deck, accommodating for the box’s languid movement, and just as momentum begins to pull it backward, he lowers it into its designated spot, using gravity’s pull to level it into place. Stevedores lash each box to the ship’s deck with steel fittings, tightened with turnbuckles. Stacks of containers are locked to one another like Legos.

The frenzied choreography works most of the time but occasionally things happen—a container slips from the spreader’s grip and crashes back on the flatbed, or it lands misaligned and crushes a longshoreman’s hand as he’s leveling it into place, or a stevedore gets hit by one of the huge trailers being driven off the ship in a great rush.

The huge loading cranes themselves also pose danger. They glide on two tracks that run parallel to the dock along its entire length, allowing the cranes to move from bow to stern and from ship to ship, stacking boxes. In 2008, a squall sent one 950-ton Jacksonville crane careening down the length of two football fields into the next, causing the steel constructs to twist and crumple into a heap of junk. It looked like spaghetti. It’s a rare event—the cranes come equipped with multiple brakes—but shows the kind of power packed in gale-force winds.

Out of the din, Eric saw Jack Jackson coming down the ramp to greet him. Jack was the helmsman on the 8:00 to midnight watch that night; he’d stand at the ship’s wheel on the navigation bridge and take steering commands from Eric. When they reached the sea buoy, Eric would disembark, leaving the captain in charge.

Sixty years old, sun-bleached yellow hair fading to white, ruddy face with a devilish grin, Jack had a wry sense of humor that could catch you off guard. He was the middle brother in a family of self-ascribed air force brats, mostly raised in New Orleans. Dad would show the kids pamphlets of the places they were moving next. Delaware! Beaches! Jack’s older sister, Jill, moved frequently; she was a restless soul. Younger brother, Glen, with his ginger hair and blue eyes, could’ve been Jack’s twin, but he was more a traveler of the mind.

When Jack and Glen were boys in New Orleans in the 1960s, there were four major shipping companies keeping the port busy. They used to ride out to the big bend in the river to watch the ships. Two sunburned boys dreaming on the banks of the Mississippi. The boats were always going somewhere, just like their family, always moving. That’s where the fascination began, Glen says.

Jack signed up with the merchant marine during the 1970s to explore the world, make some money, live free. He enjoyed the easy sea life delivering grain to Africa or going back and forth to Europe. In those days, ships would spend days or weeks in a port loading and unloading so he could get off and poke around. Just one big adventure.

Jack had a magical aura about him; people were drawn to him. He once owned a motorcycle—a Norton. One day when Jack was stopped at a red light, a girl jumped on. She said she liked Nortons. They lived together for a year. That’s how life was back then.

Jack was easygoing. He never pursued an officer’s license or tried to hustle up the ranks; he preferred to avoid the messy politics aboard. He saw how cutthroat officers were; getting ahead wasn’t worth the increase in pay and the hassle. Guys with higher ranks would sit in union halls for days waiting for work but as a general able-bodied seaman, called an AB, Jack could always get work whenever the spirit moved him. Sailing, living free.

Decades later, Jack was still shipping out, and in a way, so was Eric. But Jack had fully embraced the seaman’s life; he lived alone in Jacksonville and had never married. During shore leave, he carved sculpture out of wood and painted dreamy Edward Hopper–like scenes. He once told Eric that when he retired, he planned on throwing an oar over his shoulder and walking west until someone asked him what it was.

Eric was pleased to see his fellow traveler on duty that night. Guys like Jack made the heavy workload on these short, busy runs down to San Juan go a little smoother.

Working ships are an obstacle course of cargo, safety equipment, and machinery and as Jack led Eric from the ramp to the ship’s house, he casually pointed out anything—raised thresholds, low headers—that Eric might trip over or bang his head on.

Though El Faro had an elevator, the captain on duty didn’t want the crew using it. Someone could get stuck in there. The machinery was old and cranky, and he worried that it might stop working entirely because the shipping company had stopped paying to have it inspected. If it did quit with someone inside, the ship’s engineers would have to spend their time fixing the lift instead of tending to the ship’s ancient steam plant.

So Jack and Eric climbed seven flights of industrial stairs bathed in fluorescent light to get to the navigation bridge. Each floor in the ship’s house served a function. Ascending, they passed the galley, the crews’ quarters, engineers’ quarters, deck officers’ quarters—each door clearly labeled—to the final set of stairs, through the door to the bridge where the captain and the third mate were waiting for them.

Nearly ten stories above the waterline, the navigation bridge was a single room atop the house with seven windows framing the evening sky as the sun set over Jacksonville. It smelled like old solder and aging wiring, an olfactory blast from the 1970s, a reminder that the ship was forty years old—built before the internet, laptops, and cellphones—and nearly double the age of the average ship docked in America’s ports.

Against the windows sat a file-cabinet-gray metal console as wide as the bridge, strewn with instruments. In the middle of the console, waist-high, was a small black steering wheel, like something you’d find on a Honda Civic. It was hard to believe that such an inconsequential thing controlled the massive rudder below. A couple of solid wood grab bars were attached to the console; even on this giant vessel, things could get rough. Tucked in the corner was the chartroom; a blackout curtain took the place of a door.

Captain Michael Davidson greeted Eric. Davidson was a Yankee like the pilot. He had signed on with the shipping company—TOTE—two years ago, and the pair had met here on the bridge a few times. Davidson stood a few inches shorter than Eric and wore his white-and-gray hair close cropped, military style. He had an athletic build, sharp nose, and Scottish eyes that sloped down in a friendly, generous way when he smiled, complementing his cleft chin. A slightly imperious manner betrayed his station as master of the ship. He shook Eric’s hand firmly, calling him “Mr. Pilot.”

“Hello, Cap’n,” Eric said.

Eric opened the door to the bridge wing and stepped into the warm evening air, high above the river. Below him, a pair of pelicans flew over the stacks of containers. Eric had a portable GPS system that came with an antenna that worked best out here; he positioned it carefully on the small deck, sheltered from the wind. The antenna sent his precise location back inside to his iPad, which was loaded with a detailed chart of the St. Johns River, its depths, and live traffic information. The keel of El Faro cut a wake three stories below the waterline, a comfortable depth for the river’s forty-foot dredged channel, but at various locations, tolerances were tight.

Eric’s handheld software was more sophisticated than El Faro’s onboard technology. El Faro didn’t have an electronic chart system, soon to be required of all international deep-draft vessels. Instead, her officers relied on their paper nautical charts published by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and a crude alphanumerical GPS interface.

Eric always steered ships with his eyes first, technology second. He knew the river like he knew the streets of his own neighborhood, but he regularly referred to his iPad to check his work.

Jack Jackson handed the pilot a cup of coffee and took the wheel at eight o’clock as two tugs below slowly spun El Faro 180 degrees to point her bow toward the Atlantic Ocean, 10.6 miles down the winding river. When she was in position, the tugs pulled their lines and El Faro glided silently forward under her own power. They were underway.

Eric stood in the dusk at the windows of El Faro’s bridge sipping his brew, watching the waterway bend before him. Lights from the houses along the shore revealed the river’s edge, but Eric closely monitored his iPad tracking the ship’s speed and position and the river’s depth. Stretched out before him was a field of red and blue cargo containers, loaded with every necessity for life in Puerto Rico, graying to black in the fading light.

At this time of night, there wasn’t much traffic on the river. The navigation bridge was quiet, illuminated only by the glow of the ship’s instruments as Jack stood at the steering wheel, watching for shrimp boats, pleasure boats, anything the huge ship could crush as it slowly made its way downriver.

In his resonant baritone, perfect for late-night jazz radio, Eric would occasionally call out a command, anticipating current changes ahead to keep the vessel on course. “Left 10.”

“Left 10,” Jack Jackson repeated from behind the wheel and turned accordingly, causing the ship’s massive rudder far below to swing ten degrees to port. The heavily loaded El Faro heeled over slightly with each turn. She was tender, sensitive, slow to right herself, but not unpleasant. That’s how this class of ship moved.

As usual, there was very little chatter among the people on the bridge, just another trip on a calm autumn evening down the coast of Florida. Mariners are comfortable standing in silence for hours at a time, staring out at the sea. It’s part of the job. Jack and Davidson talked a little about the weather with Eric. Something was brewing out there, but El Faro was a fast ship. Davidson said that the storm would cut north and they would shoot down under it.

Eric could hear Second Mate Danielle Randolph on the two-way radio overseeing the men securing the deck and organizing lines at the stern of the ship. She’d spent the whole afternoon directing stevedores and checking cargo. Soon she’d head back to her room to catch a few more hours of sleep before coming up on the bridge for her midnight watch.

“Dead slow ahead,” Eric said as they approached land’s end. When they reached St. Johns Point, just past Mayport Naval base, the coastline peeled back as El Faro moved into open waters. So far above it all, Eric could feel the thrum of the twenty-five-foot propeller turned by the ship’s steam turbine whenever they put on the rudder. By the time the ship reached the mouth of the river, stars were out. The vessel and her cargo were a black silhouette against the dusky sea and sky.

About seven miles out, just before ten o’clock, Eric retrieved his GPS antenna from the bridge wing, packed his bag, and shook the captain’s hand. Chief Mate Steve Shultz walked him down to the main deck. Eric looked over the side and saw his pilot boat pulling up alongside. He gingerly climbed down the rope ladder, made it safely to his ride, gripped the handrail of his boat and looked up. From the top of the ladder, Shultz smiled and waved. The pilot boat pulled away from El Faro and headed back toward the lights of Jacksonville.

Chapter 3
Tropical Storm Joaquin

29.07°N -79.16°W

El Faro steamed south throughout the night hugging Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Two hours before dawn on September 30, Captain Davidson and Chief Mate Shultz met on the ship’s bridge. Since leaving Jacksonville the night before they’d traveled 147 nautical miles, putting them eighty miles east of Daytona Beach. Now they needed to make a decision: continue on their direct route to Puerto Rico or take a southerly detour along the west side of the Bahamas.

Above them, the night sky was clear. A handful of Tropical Cyclone Advisories had come in from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) overnight. Each time they did, a dot-matrix printer above the satellite-fed computer would automatically type out the message. The latest was advisory number 10:

TROPICAL STORM JOAQUIN FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 10: 0900 UTC [5:00 a.m.] WED SEP 30 2015: TROPICAL STORM CENTER LOCATED NEAR 25.4N 72.5W AT 30/0900Z. PRESENT MOVEMENT TOWARD THE WEST-SOUTHWEST AT 5 KT. MAX SUSTAINED WINDS 60 KT WITH GUSTS TO 75 KT.

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 east 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’s course 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
Third Mate Jeremie Riehm

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.

Joaquin had moved farther west and south, which meant that if they’d continued on their original course, they’d run straight into it, Shultz said. “I mean, our timing was perfect to reach the eye. Now worse comes to worse, we can duck in behind the islands.”

“We’re gonna get slammed tonight, though,” Jeremie said grimly, studying the chart in front of him. A slight heading change wouldn’t buy them much, he thought, and sixty miles from the eye was at least forty miles too close.

Jeremie looked up to nod at Jack Jackson, his helmsman on the 8:00 to noon watch, who’d just come up from breakfast. Jack stood by while the chief mate and third mate discussed the new plan. “It’s been too quiet this season,” Jack observed.

“Been that way last year and the year before,” agreed Jeremie. Very quiet hurricane seasons. Good weather could breed complacency.

“Out in the Pacific, it’s been one typhoon after the other, a daisy chain of ’em,” Jack said. “One in Taiwan hit 180 miles per hour.” He shook his head thinking about that kind of wind. It was enough to give an old mariner like himself a good scare.

Davidson came back up to the bridge to check in on his third mate. “So we got a little weather coming in,” he told him. “I’m sure you heard,” he continued. “Joaquin morphed its ugly head between the time we left and the morning when we woke up. Tough to plan when you don’t know but we made a little diversion here. We’re gonna be further south of the eye. We’ll be about sixty miles south of the eye. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine—not should be—we are gonna be fine.”

The captain looked at his third mate intently, confirming that the officer understood the plan. Satisfied, he left the bridge to Jeremie and Jack who together watched the rising sun cook the already hot Caribbean waters into a soupy haze.

Jeremie was known for speaking his mind. Unlike the other officers aboard El Faro, he’d come up through the hawsepipe, meaning he hadn’t graduated from one of the country’s seven maritime academies. Instead, he’d signed on to the merchant marine as general crew when he was eighteen years old and worked his way up. During his downtime aboard the vessel, he’d studied the ship’s books and manuals and often surprised his fellow officers with the depth of his knowledge. Most of them were older and had little interest in exploring all the bells and whistles offered by advancing technology. They could run a ship with or without it. But Jeremie liked figuring things out.

Once he had enough proficiency and experience, Jeremie screwed up his courage and took the third mate’s test. The exam is a brutal, three-day trial of knowledge and nerves. It was especially hard for Jeremie, who got anxious at the thought of taking tests. After passing, he didn’t want to go through that again, so he remained working as a third mate for the next decade. Sailing as a second mate would have meant more money and more authority on the bridge, but for him, it wasn’t worth the stress. He lived modestly on shore, focused on family. He was married to an African American woman who ran a day-care center on the remote Florida island where they lived with their two teenage children. When he was off duty, he helped her with the business and kept to himself.

A few years back, Jeremie joined his fellow ship’s officers Captain Pete Villacampa, Chief Mate Paul Haley, and Second Mate Charlie Baird at their union’s ultra-advanced simulation center in Miami. He was a generation younger than the other officers. For four days, they worked together on a computer-generated bridge, which rocked and rolled like a real ship, enough to make a person seasick, as the program generated complex maritime situations for them to work their way out of. Jeremie’s understanding of the weather systems, radar, and loading software—things he’d taught himself—proved invaluable. The team earned one of the highest scores the instructor had ever recorded.

Three months after that simulation test, Villacampa and Haley were fired by the shipping company, along with two other seasoned officers, Captain Jack Hearn and Chief Mate Jimmy Armstrong. The official line was that they’d lost their jobs because illegal drugs had been found on one of TOTE’s ships.

In July 2012, US customs agents in Jacksonville saw a suspicious shipping container coming off El Faro’s sister ship, El Morro. The box looked like it had been tampered with, maybe pried open after it had been sealed. Sure enough, a couple of the unlicensed crew—an ever-changing cast of characters hired through the union by the shipping company’s crewing manager—had stashed forty-seven kilos of cocaine inside it, a $3.5 million haul bound for the US market. After the seamen were busted in Jacksonville, the ship’s steward—a Puerto Rican named Danny, and another family member—were gunned down by a member of the drug cartel in a San Juan restaurant while Danny’s vessel was docked nearby.

That shipping containers had been used to transport contraband surprised absolutely no one. Roberto Saviano’s book on the Italian mafia, Gomorrah, offers a shocking example of the disturbing things people stuff in these nondescript steel boxes. In his book’s opening scene, a crate being loaded onto a ship in Naples accidentally opens midair and dozens of human corpses pour out of it and onto the ship’s deck. The dead immigrants had paid a lifetime’s worth of wages to the Mafia to have their remains repatriated to China; they were unceremoniously scooped back in and shipped according to plan.

No port authority has the resources to monitor what’s inside the hundreds of thousands of shipping containers crossing the oceans at any one time. Worldwide, approximately 1 percent of the boxes are actually opened and inspected. Drug dealers and arms brokers count on this fact to move their illicit wares around the globe; they build rare losses into their business plan. Because occasionally, someone gets caught.

Jack Hearn was captain of El Morro when the drugs were found, but how could he have known about them? Jacksonville Port was known as a major gateway for drugs traveling from South America to the US, especially since Puerto Rico’s economic collapse created a jobless, desperate population on the island. Of course TOTE’s ships occasionally carried contraband.

Hearn’s job was to deliver cargo and keep the vessel and crew safe. He’d done just that for more than thirty years. In that time, he’d watched the profession go from sextant to satellite. And in that time, the role of the captain evolved from running the ship to pushing paper. Hearn spent countless hours in his stateroom logging records, time charts, and data, managing the milk run back and forth to Puerto Rico. It was load and roll. Everyone was hustling. There wasn’t time for him to inspect every box that went on his ship and quiz every deckhand. Following the arrests, TOTE hired security guards to search crew as they came aboard.

TOTE’s firing of the four officers came as a shock to those working on the vessels. Haley wasn’t even on duty when the drugs were found. Two respected captains and two chief mates, all elders of the trade, were gone. With them, decades of knowledge and experience had been tossed out like yesterday’s garbage. The message was clear: no one’s job—on land or at sea—was safe.

TOTE became ruthless, driven to squeeze as much profit as possible out of an operationally expensive industry. Some mariners who worked for TOTE say that the company was making a significant profit at that time. The ships cost several million dollars, the labor, the berthing, the fuel, the endless maintenance, plus the insurance (El Faro’s hull and machinery were covered for $24 million)—all these big-ticket necessities cut into their bottom lines.

And lately, cargo prices had plummeted; worldwide, there was too much capacity, an abundance of ships, and not enough customers. Hanjin, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, filed for bankruptcy in 2016, leaving seventy-eight of its laden ships wandering the oceans in search of ports that would unload their goods without guaranteed pay.

Piracy also plagued the industry. Notorious waterways like the Malacca Strait (between Malaysia and Sumatra), the South China Sea, the Gulf of Aden (the entrance to the Red Sea), and both coasts of Africa teem with pirates looking for valuable cargo or, even better, officers to ransom. In late October 2017, six crew from a German container ship approaching a Nigerian port were reported kidnapped. In 2013, the World Bank estimated that the annual cost of piracy off the coast of Somalia ran somewhere around $18 billion.

Cyberattack posed another threat. Shipping is heavily dependent on computers for tracking vessels and complex logistics. Maersk, a global shipping giant based in Denmark, found its data held for a $300 bitcoin ransom (about $1 million at the time) by malware in June 2017. The attack cost the company approximately $300 million in lost revenue.

Compounding TOTE’s plight: Puerto Rico, the company’s cash cow, was collapsing. Islanders were fleeing the bankrupt territory, reducing demand for goods from the mainland. TOTE’s direct competitor in the Puerto Rican trade, Horizon Shipping, went bankrupt in early 2015.

Further, new environmental regulations were about to render TOTE’s old steamships obsolete.

In 2011, TOTE engaged a consultant to figure out how to run the company leaner. He immediately replaced long-standing managers and staff. Other positions were deemed unnecessary and eliminated. It appeared to those who worked on the ships that TOTE wanted younger officers and the cocaine bust seemed like an excuse to clear house.

TOTE may have had an ulterior motive for firing Captain Hearn: the old shipmaster had become a troublemaker. A few years before the drug bust, TOTE replaced El Faro with a new class of vessel in Alaska to meet environmental regulations. The old steamship was tied up in a Baltimore slip. Hearn had mastered El Faro in the icy Pacific Northwest for seventeen years, then was transferred to helm her sister ship El Morro in the warm waters between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico.

In his estimation, El Morro was an inferior ship, a rust bucket, seriously neglected while working herself to death in the corrosive Caribbean run. The hot, humid climate relentlessly gnawed away at her steel, leaving rusty tears streaming down her ancient hull.

Both El Faro and El Morro were nearly forty years old but to Hearn, El Faro was an old friend, superior to his current clunker. It ate at Hearn knowing that she’d been left to rot away in a Baltimore slip.

Hearn’s fondness for his ship wasn’t rare in the maritime world. Many people who work closely with boats think of them as living beings, complete with their own personalities and peccadilloes. Even something as unwieldy as a cargo ship can have ardent admirers.

In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck wrote eloquently in 1951 of the intense bond we instinctively form with boats: “How deep this thing must be. The giver and receiver again; the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream. And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest.”

Hearn felt that clench in his heart each time he thought about El Faro. He alerted TOTE to the fact that El Morro desperately needed major maintenance. He considered the ship unsafe. When he wasn’t satisfied with TOTE’s unresponsiveness, he informed the coast guard.

Shortly thereafter, because of the drug incident, he was out of a job.

Retribution against seamen for lodging safety complaints violated maritime law but that didn’t mean it never happened. And sometimes mariners fought back. A few years before Hearn’s firing, Captain John Loftus, a shipmaster with forty years of experience, was fired for calling out safety concerns aboard a vessel owned by TOTE’s competitor, Horizon Shipping. In 2014, Loftus won a million-dollar whistleblower case against the company. The federal judge assigned to the case agreed that Loftus’s concerns were warranted.

Shortly after TOTE fired Hearn, the coast guard inspected El Morro and concurred with the captain’s assessment: Much of the ship’s deck steel was wasted, which made her structurally unsound. Instead of paying for the expensive repairs required by the coast guard, TOTE scrapped her.

While Hearn was lobbying against El Morro, TOTE was building a case against the other officers to hold them accountable for the aging ship’s deterioration. The three seamen had spent decades overseeing the company’s aging vessels’ eternal battle against the sea: scraping, painting, and epoxying, washing down decks, cleaning out pumps, compiling repair lists, and hunting down parts no longer in production. Instead of a bonus, they received warning letters from TOTE claiming that they weren’t doing enough to maintain the ships. By the time the drugs were found on El Morro, TOTE had a paper trail pinning the ship’s condition on its senior officers. Termination letters followed.

Subsequent arbitration led to undisclosed settlements in favor of the mariners but that was scant comfort for those who had given so much of their lives to the sea.

TOTE put El Faro back into service on the Puerto Rican run, tag-teaming with her sister ship El Yunque. It was a temporary fix. TOTE had just ordered two new liquid natural gas–powered (LNG) ships to replace its two remaining elderly steamships. It would take several years before those new vessels were operational, so the old steamships continued chugging back and forth from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico, patched, painted, and duct-taped together.

El Faro and El Yunque were not only aging, they were taking on more cargo since the bankruptcy of competing shipping line Horizon, especially reefers—refrigerated containers that required constant tending to prevent the food inside from spoiling. It was pricey cargo, so it made money, but it strained the already thin crew.

As the ship’s air conditioning struggled against the day’s stultifying heat, Third Mate Jeremie let loose his frustration with the increasing workload. One of the reefers hadn’t gotten plugged in during loading the night before, he told Jack. Now a whole trailer full of food was spoiled.

A port mate once helped with loading in Jacksonville, he said, but that position hadn’t been filled since early September.

Jeremie was sick of the constant scrambling and lack of support. “You know what’s changed?” he said to Jack. “I could not fucking keep up with the loading. I had a goodie helping me”—a GUDE, general utility, deck, and engine unlicensed seaman trained in all areas of the ship—“He couldn't keep up. I was helping him plug in and I didn’t have time to get all the temps down.”

All the reefers got loaded on just before the ship left the dock, creating a shitstorm of problems. They had to scramble to get everything plugged in and secured to leave on time.

“We used to have a port mate and now we don’t. We had a longshoreman, now we don’t. Then we also lost our electrician. We used to have that system of checks where a guy would come down and make sure that every reefer was good. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

It was true. Lately, positions on the ships and onshore were being cut, and the remaining crew had to pick up the slack. Setting high standards was tough when the cast of characters was constantly changing.

“Your average union electrician wouldn’t even come on a ship like this,” Jack said. “It’s too much work for them. They’re not gonna work their way through jungles of lashing chains and dirt to get to a plug somewhere.”

“It’s insane down there in the holds,” agreed Jeremie. He guessed that the ship was carrying more than three dozen reefers, each one demanding someone’s time and attention during the short docking period between voyages. Second Mate Charlie Baird would lay out all the electrical cords neatly when the empty ship was heading back to Jacksonville, but his relief, Second Mate Danielle, didn’t do that.

“There’s just extension cords everywhere. It’s a mess down there. Everything is falling apart. I’m doing what I’ve always done, but it’s just not enough anymore.”

Jack nodded his head.

“I don’t think I could ever be captain here,” Jeremie said. “I’d lose my shit.”

Actually, Jack said, it’s good to be captain. “The captain and chief mate go down to their rooms and play video games,” he said.

“Right,” Jeremie said. “These guys got it all figured out.”

El Faro was poorly run, they agreed, but the unlicensed crew was okay, Jack said. He would know since he was unlicensed, too.

On the ships, officers and crew rarely talked to each other. The gulf between the two classes of mariners could be as stark as black and white. They had separate unions, separate sleeping quarters, separate mess halls, and separate lives. The officers on El Faro lived in New England or southern Florida. As members of the American Maritime Officers union, they could call their hall to get work instead of showing up in person and they usually signed long-term employment contracts.

The unlicensed crew on El Faro mostly came from tough Jacksonville neighborhoods where a seafaring job could save kids from a life in and out of prison, if they could resist becoming drug mules. Guys like LaShawn Rivera, thirty-two, who was working as a cook in the galley on El Faro on her final voyage.

Shipping had been the young man’s salvation. He’d been raised in Atlanta by his mother and stepfather, Robert Green, a bank manager who later joined the ministry. When Shawn was a teen, the family uprooted to Jacksonville. Away from his cousins and hometown, the boy got teased at school for being different, and he withdrew to the streets. Soon he started dealing drugs and spent time in juvie. Then he had a baby girl.

For a young troubled kid in Jacksonville, few job prospects lay ahead, but he was determined to take care of his child.

One day, an elder of the neighborhood told him about the merchant marine. It sounded like the way out—one of the few good jobs available to folks without a college degree. Shawn drove over to the Seafarers International Union hall and studied the job board. All those ships heading to exotic places around the world called to him. He spent all day every day at the hall until he landed a spot on a ship.

The first time he sailed abroad, he called his stepdad from London. “I’m never coming back,” he told him. Back, Pastor Green says, meant the Jacksonville streets.

In search of a specialty, Shawn took cooking courses through his union and eventually was certified to prepare food for the thirty-three men and women on El Faro, his dreadlocks loosely tied back. Working on the ships gave him a sense of pride and purpose, but it would never make him rich. He had a fiancée and then another little girl to support on his $80,000 a year salary. In his spare time, he consumed popular business and self-help books, trying to find a better way to care for his family. When he shipped out on El Faro in late September, Shawn left behind his older daughter, plus a one-year-old baby girl, his fiancée—pregnant with their second daughter—and a stack of books promising him a better future.

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.

Mariners live and die by weather. Naturally, they are obsessed with forecasts, signs, and augurs. Long after a seaman has turned his back on the ocean, he follows the weather. He might live in landlocked New Mexico, four hundred miles from the nearest boat, but he’ll still be able to tell you all about the system forming off the coast of the Bahamas.

At home in Portland, Maine, on September 29, 2015, El Faro’s off-duty Second Mate Charlie Baird couldn’t pull himself away from the Weather Channel. He’d just stepped off El Faro a week before, relieved by Second Mate Danielle Randolph. The pair had been tag-teaming the job for a couple of years, seventy days on, seventy days off. Now he was on his sofa, still in his robe at ten o’clock in the morning. He didn’t like what he was seeing, this storm developing in the Atlantic. He was off the clock, but he couldn’t help himself.

He picked up his phone and texted El Faro’s captain, Michael Davidson: “Storm forming north of the bahamas!!”

Growing up in Portland, Charlie loved the water, loved sailing, loved the sea. In high school, he was a state-champion swimmer, breaking record after record, and got recruited to swim at Niagara College. At sixty-six, he’s still remarkably fit, and still competing in triathlons. A handful of medals hang from the chandelier in his dining room.

Charlie joined the merchant marine in the early ’80s. He’s been shipping so long that, like many mariners, he’s missed a lot of life while at sea. Like someone who’s spent a few years in a coma, he’s kind of disconnected. A lot of casual conversation doesn’t make sense to him—movies, music, and events have simply passed him by. He would make a terrible Trivial Pursuit partner.

Charlie lets this all wash over him as he swigs another glass of red wine on ice.

He knew not to mess with hurricanes. First, there are the winds. At low speeds, the wind’s force on a large ship is minimal. That is, up to about 35 miles per hour. Wind speed and force have an exponential relationship, meaning that as the wind notches up, its force doubles, then triples, and then quadruples, and so on. It’s based on a simple formula: wind pressure per square foot = 0.00256 x (wind speed)². Put another way, between 1 mile per hour and 35 miles per hour, the wind’s force against the boat runs roughly six to nine times its velocity. That’s the kind of incremental change that the human brain can handle. But over the next 35 miles per hour, its force rapidly grows to eighteen times its velocity. At 112 miles per hour, the wind’s force is thirty times its velocity—you can’t stand upright in that kind of wind no matter how far you lean; first you’ll slide across the ground, then you’ll get thrown backward into an uncontrollable somersault.

This power makes a big difference when you’ve got a crosswind across a large surface area, say, like the side of a container ship piled with boxes. At midspeeds, the wind’s force would be equivalent to twenty-one tons pushing up against that ship. You’ll heel a bit, and might want to shift your ballast to try to correct. Ratchet up the wind’s velocity to 110 miles per hour, and you’ve got about 375 tons trying to push the ship over. That’s the cumulative force of three of the world’s largest locomotives. If you’ve got vulnerabilities, like a low deck with lots of openings, that kind of force can be catastrophic.

And then there are the waves. At first, the cyclone’s high winds cause whitecaps to form on the water’s surface. As the hours pass, the waves grow. Start with a completely calm sea at noon on Monday; a 28-mile-per-hour wind starts to blow and by 11 p.m. on Tuesday, you’ll have thirteen-foot waves. A rough guide for wind to wave height is two to one—60-mile-per-hour winds (52 knots) stir up thirty-plus-foot waves, depending on fetch, or the length of open water over which the wind blows.

Of course, most mariners hope they’re never caught in seas like that, especially in a small boat.

How big can ocean waves get? For millennia, sailors spun stories about extreme waves a hundred feet high that came out of nowhere and smashed apart boats with just one hit. These were dismissed as salty tales, like mermaids and sea monsters. Even in the modern era, scientists considered freak waves a physical impossibility, in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary. During World War II, a rogue wave nearly sunk the Queen Mary ocean liner. The thousand-foot-long luxury passenger ship had been stripped down to carry American troops to Europe, and in December 1942, it was loaded with more than sixteen thousand American soldiers when a ninety-foot-high wave smacked her broadside, causing the ship to roll 52 degrees. There were plenty of witnesses to vouch for that one.

It wasn’t until modern equipment began recording rogue waves that scientists finally acknowledged their existence. On January 1, 1995, a laser aboard an oil rig in the North Sea recorded an eighty-four-foot-high wave. Since then sea buoys, satellites, mariners, and passengers have recorded these waves, confirming that indeed, they’re no myth.

Twenty-two minutes after Charlie texted him about Joaquin, Davidson texted back: “yup . . . thx for the heads up.”

Charlie sat on that sofa all day, watching the weather.

Monitoring the storm was the second mate’s job.

Danielle should’ve been obsessing about it just like him.

Charlie knew she wasn’t. He was fond of his fellow Mainer, a perky, freckled redhead half his age. He’d taken her under his wing like a little sister a decade ago when she joined the company while a cadet at Maine Maritime Academy. Back then, she was all energy, but ten years of shipping was wearing her down. Danielle recently found out she’d been passed over for a promotion to the new LNG ships. That killed what was left of her enthusiasm for her shipping career, and now he thought she was clocking in, clocking out.

Basic tasks seemed to elude her, like correctly plotting the ship’s location during her watch. She didn’t actively seek extra work to keep things running smoothly on the decrepit ship. Why bother? TOTE had kicked her to the curb after she’d sacrificed so much of her life to this career. Danielle started taking over-the-counter meds to fall asleep during her breaks and slamming caffeine to stay awake during her watch. These days, she went unusually quiet when her closest friends in Maine asked her about her life at sea.

And there was more. As Charlie was preparing to leave the ship to go home this last time, Danielle pulled him into her cabin and told him something about Captain Davidson he didn’t want to hear.

There was no way she was thinking about weather.

But Charlie was.

He couldn’t take it anymore. At 6:31 p.m., he texted Davidson again: “Whats your plan?”

“we’ll steam our normal direct route to SJP,” Davidson texted back a few minutes before 7:00. “no real weather to speak of until the evening of the 30th. all forecasted information indicates Joaquin will remain north of us and by the morning of the 01st we will be on the backside of her. we schedule to depart the dock at 20:00 tonight so everything is shaping up in our favor.”

“Cool if u have to we have routes thru mauagiez crooked isle or ne prov chnl,” Charlie reminded him. This was shorthand for the channels between the islands along the way deep enough that El Faro could use them as escape routes to the lee side if anything should brew up out there.

“Watchin sox presently up 1-0 over ny,” he wrote.

“2-0 sox,” Charlie added a few minutes later.

“go sox . . .” Davidson replied.

Chapter 6
Second Mate Danielle Randolph

27.37°N -77.43°W

Just before noon, Second Mate Danielle took over Jeremie’s watch on the bridge. She’d worked from midnight to four o’clock a.m., gone to bed, showered, eaten, and was back up reporting for duty. Jeremie walked her through the new course Davidson had plotted. He showed her the hurricane’s position on the chart and warned her that it was moving southwest at a very lazy, very unusual five knots.

Danielle knew that getting close to any storm was plain stupid. Up on the bridge rolling in high seas, you were bound to get seasick sooner or later, regardless of how experienced a mariner you were. Danielle didn’t like her captain’s glibness, either, considering the seriousness of their situation. “He’s telling everybody down there, Oh, it’s not a bad storm. It’s not so bad. It’s not even that windy out. I’ve seen worse,” she told Jeremie.

He rolled his eyes and kept quiet. What else could he do? He was only third mate. He walked out to get lunch and unwind before his evening shift.

Danielle turned to her helmsman, Jackie Jones, a Jacksonville man in his late thirties with five children below age twenty, and continued her rant: “He’s saying, It’s nothing. It’s nothing! And here we are going way off course. If it’s nothing, then why the hell are we going on a different track line? I think he’s just trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way. He’s saving face.”

Davidson showed up a few minutes later, disappointed that they weren’t moving as fast as he’d hoped. They were steaming at a healthy 18.9 knots. “Damn, we’re getting killed with this speed,” he said inexplicably.

“I think now it’s not a matter of speed,” Danielle warned him. “When we get there, we get there, as long as we arrive in one piece,” she added.

The prospect of sailing into a hurricane filled her with dread, which she tried her best to laugh off once she and Jackie were alone. Humor was Danielle’s way of dealing with things beyond her control. She turned on Sirius XM radio and sang along to contemporary hits, then switched over to Dr. Laura on Fox News.

“Two of the Polish guys were standing there when he said that,” she told Jackie, referring to the five extra hands hired to install heating coils on El Faro’s ramps and decks so that trailers wouldn’t slip and slide on the ice when the vessel returned to the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t unusual to have extra workers fixing things while El Faro was at sea. A ship in port is a ship losing money. “I wanted to make sure they knew the word hurricane. One of them smiled and said, Hurricane! Yes!”

Danielle laughed. “They’re all excited about it. Ah, if they only knew. I remember going through a couple of storms on the El Morro. Shit was flying everywhere.”

At 12:24, Danielle saw a thick black line on the horizon—the bar of the storm. “There’s our weather,” she said ominously. “The storm gets really big on the third or the fifth of October,” she added, studying the forecast. “Warning in red for this weekend for rain—severe flooding and rain. They never mentioned Maine, though. They didn’t say, Two more days and then it’ll cover the entire state of Maine. Yeah, you know, some people live up there.”

Like Davidson, Danielle had grown up on the coast of Maine. Her parents were retired navy; her mother worked as a hairdresser, her dad as a handyman. Danielle’s grandmother and great-aunt had emigrated from France after World War II. The older women used to converse rapidly and loudly in French. Danielle understood what they were saying, but she never got the hang of speaking the language.

Danielle spent her childhood in Rockland, a small town on Penobscot Bay, but life wasn’t easy for her as a girl. She wanted to belong, wanted to feel a part of something, but her world felt fragmented. Her family’s foreignness added to Danielle’s feelings of isolation. Danielle lived in a tiny second-floor apartment with her grandmother, separated from the rest of her family—mom, dad, and brother—who lived in an apartment below. Danielle’s best friend says it was strange, this little girl and older woman sharing a closet-size room, just big enough for a bed and a radio.

During summer breaks, Danielle worked on the docks of Port Clyde, and at the O’Hara Corporation—a fishing consortium and marina in Rockland. That’s where she discovered her love of boats and the ocean. She’d jump in a skiff and paddle around while her great-aunt watched from the shore.

Danielle was drawn to the sea at a very early age and in high school, informed her mom that she planned to go to Maine Maritime Academy (MMA), one of five American maritime academies established by the federal government to train ship’s officers and engineers for the merchant marine. Getting into Maine Maritime focused Danielle, gave her purpose.

Maine Maritime was based in the tiny town of Castine, twenty miles northeast of Rockland as the crow flies. If it weren’t for the islands in Penobscot Bay, Danielle would be able to see straight across to the school from her house.

Castine once held a strategic spot at the mouth of the Penobscot River—the main thoroughfare for the fur and timber trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The town was first settled by the French in 1613 as a trading post. In less than a year, the British seized it, then the Dutch came in, then the British reclaimed it, and finally, the Americans incorporated the town in 1796, though it was contested ground again during the War of 1812.

Now the only people fighting over it are real estate agents. Come summer, wealthy folks “from away” arrive to air out their cottages and put their sailboats in the water. The two kinds of people—full-time Mainers and those “from away”—rub shoulders at T & C Grocery, Dennett’s Wharf Restaurant, and Eaton’s Boatyard. Mainers keep to themselves. Summer people pay taxes on their pricey properties. It’s a practical arrangement that works all the way up the coast.

In winter, when frigid winds whip across Penobscot Bay up the steep streets of the tiny town, Castine’s white clapboard houses huddle together against the cold; along the waterfront, small nineteenth-century brick warehouses hint at the town’s historic commercial past. This was the only place Danielle wanted to be. Students at MMA could study deck operations and serve on a ship’s bridge, or study engineering and serve in the engine room. Danielle wanted to join the ranks of the former. She applied to MMA as a senior in high school and refused to consider any backup schools. For Danielle, it was Maine Maritime or bust.

Danielle’s first year at academy was stressful; her hair fell out in clumps. Laurie Bobillot, her mother, remembers seeing bald patches in her daughter’s wavy locks. Still, five-foot-nothing Danielle wouldn’t quit.

Being a small woman in a man’s field had inherent dangers, but her mostly male academy classmates were supportive. As a cadet, however, Danielle had to confront the reality of shipping out with men. During one of her first tours on one of TOTE’s vessels, the chief mate called her into his stateroom. He said that he wanted to show her something. She knocked on his door; he opened it and dropped his towel. She fled, told her friends, and word got up to the captain. The chief mate was unpopular with the other officers and was quickly fired for sexual harassment. When the second and third mates moved up to take his place, Danielle was given the third mate position aboard that vessel.

After that, she was branded as the girl who got her job because she claimed some chief mate harassed her. Which wasn’t quite fair. At the time, she was very young and very green. She did what she was told. She didn’t ask for this, she didn’t want it. She’d worked hard to be a deck officer in the merchant marine. She wanted to be taken seriously.

Academically, things didn’t always come easily to Danielle. She sometimes transposed numbers and dreaded taking azimuths at sea. At two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon as they headed to Puerto Rico during the final voyage, she sent a weather report to the National Weather Service—a voluntary spot-report requested of all commercial vessels at sea—and ended up sending erroneous coordinates that positioned El Faro squarely atop mainland Cuba. Because of that mistake, her data was chucked.

One former ship’s officer told me that he’d tell her to do something and then she’d walk away and forget it entirely. “Write stuff down,” he admonished her. He liked her a lot, everyone liked her, but she was often distracted. It took her a few times to pass her second mate’s exam.

Danielle loved life, though, and onshore, she was a regular Martha Stewart—cooking, decorating, planning parties. She had a passion for the past, especially vintage clothes. She would order ’50s dresses off the web whenever the ship had internet service and came bouncing down the gangway to dozens of boxes of things she’d bought for herself and friends; it was like Christmas every seventy days.

She adored holidays and planning parties, too. One fall, she decorated a backyard path that led out to a table under a tree with homemade lanterns—mason jar lanterns with votive candles, which she also hung from the tree’s branches—and she decked out each setting with decorative cloth placemats and a carved pumpkin with a candle in it. She went all out.

When she was ashore, Danielle was tireless. “She exhausted me,” her friend says with a smile. “She had lots of energy, so by the time the ten weeks were over on this end, we needed a break. She would run us ragged because she’d have so much that she wanted to squeeze in.”

Danielle’s brutal work schedule on the ship, along with a steady diet of cafeteria food and lack of sleep, was beginning to show. She worried a lot about her weight; it didn’t help that the other officers sometimes teased her for putting on the pounds. During shore leave, she became a workout fanatic, and built a strong friendship with her fitness instructor, Korinn Scattoloni. Danielle was memorable because she pushed herself hard, enough that Korinn sometimes worried about her. “I watched that red face to make sure it didn’t turn purple,” she says. At first, Korinn didn’t understand why the high-energy woman in the back of the class with the hot pink workout clothes would vanish for months at a time. Eventually, Danielle told her instructor that she was in the merchant marine, a career path Korinn understood well.

There was a time when Korinn herself had answered the call of the sea. She was a successful dancer in New York City when, one day, she went down to see the tall ships at South Street Seaport. As soon as she saw the elegant historic sailing vessels moored to the dock, she knew that was where she was meant to be. Korinn quit her job and signed up to work on the HMS Rose, a replica of a twenty-gun Royal Navy ship built in 1757. As a hired hand aboard the three-masted frigate, she was expected to haul and furl the sails, keep the decks and sails clean and mended, and help in the galley.

Late one afternoon, she and another member of the crew were ordered to climb seventy feet up the mast to furl a sail. They’d been working all day and were exhausted, but as the only woman aboard, she wouldn’t complain. At the time, they didn’t tie-in, trying to be as authentic as possible. Leaning over the yardarm, Korinn began pulling up the yards of canvas, her feet supported only by a slack horizontal rope. When her partner accidentally kicked the rope out from under her, she fell. She would have died if it hadn’t been for the chief mate, Robin Walbridge, who violently shoved her into the water right before she hit the deck. She made out with a few cracked ribs and a broken wrist.

Robin later became known as the captain who took the replica of the HMS Bounty out to sea during Hurricane Sandy and died with the ship when she was swamped by the storm.

Shipping out all the time made it difficult for Danielle to keep up relationships, which she valued more than anything. She was gone half the year and began to realize how much she was missing. “She was at a point in her life where she was ready to move on,” her friend says. Danielle wanted to come ashore for good; the ten-week rotation was dragging her down.

“Yeah, she was missing things,” her friend says. “She wanted to be home. She struggled with scheduling, you know? We’d get the calendar out and say, What Christmas are you gonna be here? What Easter are you gonna be here? What summer are you gonna be here? That sort of thing, I think that part was tiring.”

Danielle was home throughout the summer of 2015. She threw parties at night, built bonfires and make s’mores with giant marshmallows. She lazed about in hammocks with her friends and used an app to look at the stars, picking out constellations. Danielle had spent her entire life laughing off things that bothered her. That summer, she laughed a lot.

Still, the specter of another voyage loomed. She refused to talk about life on the ship, but occasionally let her closest friends know how frustrated she was with how much El Faro was being neglected. The four men who’d been fired a few years ago, officers who’d trained and supported Danielle, had taken great pride in keeping the old vessel looking her best. Now no one seemed to care.

But like many mariners, Danielle had developed an addiction to shipping. You’re addicted to the sea, or you’re addicted to the money, or you’re addicted to both. You leave your family for months to drive the huge ships on the open ocean. It’s intense work and the money’s good. You can’t find that kind of rush in an office cubicle. You tell them onshore, I’m quitting in a year. I’m quitting in five years. I’ll find a job on land. But you get into a rhythm, the rhythm of the sea, and you keep going.

Danielle dreamed of coming home for good but starting a new career would cost a lot of money that she didn’t have. Everything she wanted to try required more schooling, which she couldn’t afford. The pay aboard the ships was too good to walk away from; she wasn’t in a position to start from scratch. She had to keep shipping.

Adding to her frustration that summer was the fact that she was about to lose her home. For years, she’d been living with her two cats in her mother’s Rockland house. But now her mother, who’d moved to Wisconsin with her boyfriend, told Danielle that she was selling it. The whole situation upset Danielle. Her grandmother and great-aunt had passed away; her mother was halfway across the country pursuing a new life. Her home, her only anchor, was slipping away.

Late in the summer, Danielle learned that she hadn’t been assigned to the new LNG ships. Instead, she was slated to ship out to Alaska with the decrepit El Faro. And Captain Davidson.

There was something else bothering her that summer. During her previous tour of duty, in the spring of 2015, it happened again.

Davidson, a man she never liked, came onto her. He caught up with her when she was alone, cornered her, and said, Will you be my special friend?

Many guys had hit on her during her career. She was a tough girl, her friends say. She could handle it. But when the ship’s captain wants sleep with you, how do you deal with it? How do you delicately push him away without damaging his ego? How do you escape his advances trapped on a ship at sea? What if you pissed him off so much that he got you fired and ruined your professional reputation? It could happen.

She knew exactly how things played out when a woman reported sexual harassment on a ship. Yeah, she could handle it. But behind her back, the guys would wonder what she’d done to lead on the captain. In cases like these, the woman never escapes unscathed.

Chapter 7
Collision Course

27.29°N -77.36°W

At noon, Danielle and helmsman Jackie Jones watched the sky turn a blinding blue. It was a tease. The hot Caribbean waters simmered in the sunlight but beyond, a storm was lingering, festering as Davidson had put it, intensifying off their port bow. It was out there.

The NHC weather report came in around 12:30, sending the printer on the bridge into a temporary frenzy. No change. Joaquin was still lumbering south-southwest, gaining force, with maximum sustained winds now predicted to reach 80 knots by midnight. The storm would be worse than originally thought.

Engineer Jeff Mathias came up to the bridge to check in. He’d been working all morning with the five Polish contractors hired to get the ship ready for the cold Alaskan waters.

Jeff had served as a chief engineer on other ships for several years after graduating from Massachusetts Maritime Academy, but with three young kids at home, he preferred to work on land. In lieu of that, this short, temporary, and lucrative job managing the Polish riding gang on El Faro fit the bill.

“Look at you,” Jeff said to Danielle, gently teasing his fellow New Englander. “All freshened up, huh?”

She laughed and offered him coffee.

For Jeff Mathias, there was nothing like being at sea and the good income that came with it. But since the birth of his first born, he struggled to balance his passion for shipping with his home life. Overseeing the Polish workers was a good compromise because Jeff could do short stints at sea. He’d worked out his shipping schedule earlier that month so that he could be home for his daughter’s first day of school and was scheduled to fly home from San Juan that weekend.

Jeff’s ultimate goal was to turn his family’s struggling cranberry farm into a destination. In the fall during harvest time, elementary school groups visited, usually guided by Jeff’s mom, to learn more about the ancient craft of growing the fruit, first introduced to Massachusetts’s English settlers in the 1600s by the Algonquins. Loaded with vitamin C, cranberries played a critical role in early colonial shipping, consumed by New England’s whalers and sailors to stave off scurvy during long voyages.

Jeff had spent much of his shore time building an elaborate play castle and maze to attract more visitors to the farm’s cranberry bogs. He hoped this would generate additional income to help fight off encroaching real estate development. Just beyond the playhouse and maze, behind a copse of pines, a cul-de-sac of new homes had sprung seemingly overnight. The houses were nearly done but the dirt between the Mathiases’ land and the development was still stripped and raw.

Danielle respected Jeff and his opinions and was relieved to have someone knowledgeable aboard who wasn’t part of the official El Faro command chain. He could speak more freely and could either reassure her that they would be okay or maybe confront the captain if he thought they were in trouble.

In her usual light and girlish tone, she gestured to the BVS graphic: “Do you wanna see the pretty pictures with the pretty-pretty colors?”

When he saw the deep scarlets, intense blues, and bright saffrons on a normally pastel-hued map, Jeff swallowed hard. “Wow, look at that.”

“That’s us,” she said, pointing to their current location. “And that’s the storm,” she said. “This is tomorrow.” She clicked forward in time. The ship and the hurricane were destined to collide.

“Where are we right now?” Jeff asked.

She pointed to a spot forty miles northeast of Grand Bahama island.

“Really?” Jeff said, incredulous that they were heading straight for a storm system.

“Tentative,” she said. “We are taking a track line a little bit further south, down here, so this is where we’re gonna be in the morning,” she said, confirming the direct hit.

Jeff spent some time studying the chart for possible escape routes. He saw a few deepwater channels that would get them out of the way. “Can you duck down between the islands here?”

Danielle knew Davidson. He didn’t have any interest in changing the plan and she told Jeff as much, silently gauging his reaction. Full steam ahead to San Juan.

“Is the captain gonna grab Old Bahama Channel back?” Jeff asked, thinking about how much ocean Joaquin would churn up by Friday night.

“Yeah,” Danielle said. Joaquin was forecast to intensify in a few days, so Davidson wanted to play it safe and sail on the lee of the islands, then skirt the Florida coast all the way back up to Jacksonville. “I think the El Yunque will be taking that route coming back up, too,” she said.

In fact, Davidson had exchanged emails with the captain of El Yunque earlier that day and learned that his ship was sprinting back to Florida along their usual route. As they passed Joaquin, the captain informed him, they experienced gusts in excess of 100 knots. That on-site observation wasn’t consistent with the NHC reports. Computer models and satellite imaging were already failing to accurately capture the rapidly intensifying storm.

What El Faro’s officers needed was a working anemometer, but the one onboard hadn’t worked for some months. Several people had mentioned the problem to TOTE, but a repair or replacement was slow in coming. The ship’s anemometer was so dodgy that Danielle joked to Jeff, “We’ll just stick Jackie Jones out there. We’ll use the Jackie Gauge. If he gets blown off the bridge, we’ll say, Oh, it was about 190 miles per hour.”

Understanding true windspeed and direction can be difficult when you’re moving because you’re creating your own wind. (Think of riding a bicycle on a calm day. Go fast and you’ll feel a breeze. It’s not the wind; it’s you.) An anemometer uses vectors to make the calculation, taking into account the ship’s heading and speed. For example, if an 18-knot wind is at your back and you’re traveling at 18 knots, the apparent wind—the wind you perceive—would be zero, because you’re both moving at the same rate in the same heading. Your vectors cancel each other out.

The anemometer is a critical piece of equipment because true wind direction can tell an experienced mariner where he or she is relative to a major weather system. A quick way to do this can be found in Nathaniel Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator—a thick navy blue book found aboard nearly every floating vessel. Continuously published since 1802, it’s considered the mariner’s bible. Bowditch describes Buys Ballot’s law, a handy rule of thumb invented by a Dutch meteorologist in 1857 that’s based on the unassailable fact that in the Northern Hemisphere, hurricane winds blow in a counterclockwise direction. The rule says this: When your back is to the wind, stick out your arms, making a T. Your left hand will point to the low, your right to the high. The low, of course, is the hurricane’s center. According to that rule, as long as winds were slamming El Faro’s port side, the crew could safely assume that the hurricane was dead ahead.

In the dark in a hurricane, however, it’s all but impossible to determine true wind direction without an anemometer because the frenzied waves and winds create a chaotic condition, like being inside a Dyson vacuum. From the outside, the larger system makes sense. But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s impossible to organize the powerful forces into a clear, coherent picture.

Jeff considered their situation, but as an extra hand aboard the ship, he couldn’t do much about it. Instead, he worried about how the weather would affect his weekend plans. He was rushing to finish his maze in time for the Halloween rush, and Joaquin could put a kink in his progress.

“The hurricane is going to shoot north after this?” Jeff asked.

“They’re predicting that it will hit New York this Saturday,” Danielle answered. That meant it would probably begin dumping rain on coastal Massachusetts by Saturday night. Jeff might get in a day of work.

Jackie Jones brought their attention back to the ship. He reminded Jeff that the Polish contractors needed to tie up their equipment.

“Absolutely,” Jeff said. “The bottles are secured, pipes are all lashed down. So yeah, that should be all right.”

“Lash down your workers?” Danielle joked.

“They’re all excited,” he answered.

“I don’t think they realize what they’re getting into,” she said with a nervous giggle.

“See what color their heads are tomorrow,” Jackie cracked, and the three had a good laugh. They knew they’d all be green tomorrow, too, if the weather turned as foul as expected.

At 2:30, Davidson came up to the bridge to remind Danielle that he was thinking about taking the Old Bahama Channel on the northbound run back to Jacksonville. Joaquin was forecasted to intensify in a few days, so Davidson wanted to play it safe and sail in the lee of the islands, then hug the Florida coast all the way back up to Jacksonville. He was obsessing about this proposed route change and was anxious to get TOTE’s response to his request. Maybe he thought they’d thank him for being so proactive and conscientious. He was working hard to please the shoreside folks.

“I have to wait for confirmation from the office, but I put it out there,” he said about the rerouting. “And I’ll let you know.”

“Does the company want to give permission now?” Danielle asked, half surprised, half exasperated. “Because it used to be just, We’re doing it. You people are sitting in your office behind a desk and we’re out here. We’re doing it. Hell yeah.”

“Well, I’m extending that professional courtesy because it does add 160 nautical miles to the distance,” said Davidson defensively.

“Yeah, but rerouting also saves stress on the ship,” she said.

Why was she giving him a hard time? “That’s why I just said, ‘Hey, I would like to take this going northbound. I’ll wait for your reply.’ I don’t think they’ll say no. I gave them a good reason why, because if you follow this hurricane track down, then look what it does on October third, fourth, and fifth. And that’s right where we’re going.”

“Yeah, and lightly loaded, it gets even worse,” said Danielle. After unloading in San Juan, El Faro took on mostly empty containers. Without cargo weight, she sat higher in the water and would bounce around in the wind and waves.

“So I just put it out there and we’ll see what happens.”

Davidson didn’t like his second mate’s nervous energy. It rubbed him the wrong way. He had to put this whole thing to rest. “We’re gonna be far enough south that we’re not gonna hit the damn thing,” he declared. “Watch. Gonna get a little rougher, but these ships can take it.”

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.

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