The Tribune

With no wind gauge and insufficient lashing to hold containers in place, an aged US freighter was no match for the full fury of Hurricane Joaquin. Using recordings from the ship’s recovered ‘black box’, Jason Dearen pieces together the final moments before all hands were lost in Bahamian waters in 2015 . . .

Danielle Randolph squinted through rain-splattered windows as the sea freighter lunged upward sharply, then fell into the trough of a 30-foot-tall wave. The skies were black. The second mate stood on the navigation bridge high above the El Faro’s main deck, which spread out before her like an aircraft carrier stacked high with red, white and blue cargo containers.

News blurted through the bridge’s radio speaker: forecasters had named the storm Hurricane Joaquin as it built into a Category 3, with winds of 130mph. “Oh my God,” she said to the helmsman standing nearby, bracing when the ship she called “the rust bucket” shuddered over another wave. “Can’t pound your way through them waves. Break the ship in half,” the helmsman said.

It was 1.15am on October 1, 2015, and the Atlantic was boiling over. The El Faro, sailing near San Salvador Island, was being knocked about by the strongest October storm to hit Bahamian waters since 1866. In the coming hours, the El Faro and its crew would fight desperately for survival.

Another wave slammed into them. “Oh (expletive),” said Randolph. “That was a bad one.” The alarm sounded. The ship was now pushed in another direction, off the captain’s chosen course. After a few tense seconds, the El Faro righted herself.

“She’s doin’ good. I’m impressed. Knock on wood,” said Randolph.

The El Faro was one of two ships owned by TOTE Maritime Inc that navigated in constant rotation between Jacksonville, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. It brought everything from milk to Mercedes Benz cars to the island. If the El Faro missed its run store shelves sat empty, an economy suffered and TOTE lost money.

This run was to be the El Faro’s last before a major retrofit. Inspectors had found parts of the vessel’s boilers that were “deteriorated severely” and service was scheduled in the next month. This came as no surprise: one Coast Guard inspector had identified a “disturbing” uptick in safety discrepancies during the El Faro’s inspections from 2013 to 2014. The Guard was in the process of adding the 40-year-old ship to its “target list” of US cargo vessels that needed a higher level of scrutiny.

To add to the danger, the El Faro was equipped with open-top lifeboats similar to those used on the Titanic or Lusitania. Modern ships carry the round, tent-like lifeboats with electronic beacons that dramatically increase survival chances in a shipwreck.

Once, Randolph texted pictures of the El Faro’s lifeboats to her mother. “Is that your lifeboat? It’s open,” her mother replied, aghast. A coastal Mainer, Laurie Bobillot knew open life boats to be a thing of the past. “Let’s hope you never get into some rough seas,” she wrote, “because you know kid, you’re screwed.”

“Yes, I know,” Randolph replied. “Mom, if I ever die at sea, that’s where I want to be.”

Dismissive attitude

Randolph had a cordial relationship with the captain of the El Faro. She respected him, but told her mother and friends she did not like his dismissive attitude. The storm had been growing, so Randolph suggested they consider taking a longer, slower route south through the Old Bahama Channel. But the captain had the final word on voyage planning, and he refused to deviate.

She had noticed the captain was sound asleep when she called. It rang a few times before he answered.

The ship was taking a beating, she had said, but was holding course. The captain asked about the latest weather reports. He would return to the bridge in a few hours. She hung up the phone as the ship took on another huge wave.

“He said to run it. Hooold on to your ass!” Randolph shouted.

“Figured the captain would be up here,” the helmsman said. Microphones on the bridge picked up their conversations, which were sent to a voyage data recorder, the ship’s “black box”.

“I thought so too. I’m surprised,” Randolph replied.

“Damn,” the helmsman said with disappointment. “He’ll play hero tomorrow,” he said laughing. The captain would be praised for the ship making it through Hurricane Joaquin to San Juan on time.

Even after a decade at sea, Randolph, 34, maintained a youthful air. Her round, freckled face was slightly weathered from the sun, and her dumb jokes endeared her to the 32 crewmates who relied on her skilful navigation. She stood only 5ft 3in but her mariner toughness was displayed in the large anchor tattoo on her chest, which peeked over the neckline of the vintage ‘50s dresses she liked to wear on shore.

Randolph was one of only two women on this cargo run. Raised in a military family whose motto was “suck it up”, she worked hard and asked few questions.

But now, she was helpless against the crushing waves, wind and rain. “It would help if I knew which direction the swell was coming from,” Randolph said to the helmsman. “I could alter course a little more. I can’t see.” They heard a massive thump from below, in the bowels of the ship. The El Faro carried heavy cargo in its interior holds: if that was a car or something else coming loose, it was a sailor-crushing danger.

“Whoooo!” Randolph exclaimed.

“Yeah, it’s startin’ to get a little bit more active around here,” the helmsman replied. The swelling seas shoved the El Faro around like a cork.

Randolph could not know exactly how hard the wind was blowing. The El Faro’s anemometer, or wind gauge, had been broken for years. To adapt, the sailors usually stepped out on deck to gauge wind speed the old-fashioned way, by checking the flap of the boat’s flags. That was impossible in the dark. Randolph scanned the radar for a fellow vessel in the area, but every other ship had diverted to avoid the storm. The El Faro was alone.

“Hello, Joaquin,” Randolph said to the storm. “It’s just getting bigger - our path is going right through it.”

At 3.34am the captain emerged from his stateroom. Randolph greeted him, grateful for the chance to go down to her room for a quick rest. She had found time to fire off a quick email to her mother. “We are heading straight into it, Category 3, last we checked. Winds are super bad. Love to everyone.”

Later that day, reading the email in Denmark, Wisconsin, Randolph’s mother knew something was wrong. Randolph never signed her emails, “Love to everyone”. Her mother understood that her daughter was sending a coded message: I may never see you again.

Tilted precariously

With his square chin, salt-and-pepper hair and thick Mainer’s brogue, the El Faro’s captain was a meticulous master who struck a commanding presence. Yet Michael Davidson’s detached, hands-off style led Randolph and some others to describe the 53-year-old master as a “stateroom captain”. Stateroom captains did not get their hands dirty and were not seen a lot on deck. They did not share smokes and chit chat with the crew.

On the bridge, he greeted Randolph’s replacement, chief mate Steve Shultz, and a new helmsman, Frank Hamm. He set out to calm their nerves. “There’s nothing bad about this ride,” the captain announced, despite the hurricane raging outside. “I was sleepin’ like a baby. This is every day in Alaska,” the captain continued. No one could see out of the windows, except for when brief sparks of lightning illuminated the rain. “A typical winter day in Alaska.”

Earlier in his career Davidson had navigated freighters in the Alaska trade, known in the industry as one of the most bruising theatres of sailing. But his leadership had been questioned by TOTE’s upper management, and after initially leaning toward offering Davidson the job heading one of its new ships the company decided to go in a different direction. Now favoured were younger captains who could drive the new high-tech freighters.

Before leaving port in Jacksonville, Davidson expressed disappointment to colleagues that he had not been chosen to command the modern, liquefied natural gas-fuelled ship that was to replace the El Faro. The captain had been disappointed by the news, but he was a professional. Perhaps he thought he could show them that they had made a mistake by making the El Faro’s cargo run on time, even with a major storm system in his way. Davidson knew what could happen to masters who raised safety concerns that were not considered serious enough by the company. He had been fired by a prior employer after an incident with another ship. The steering was bad on that one, and he had refused an order to take it to port, requiring the company to hire tugboats to drag it there instead.

The course alarm, which blared every time the ship deviated from its programmed route, was now ringing every few seconds as the seas flung the vessel around. The captain ordered it turned off, along with the auto-piloting system, nicknamed the “Iron Mike”. They would have to steer the ship manually, to use their human senses to feel the swell and winds, as they piloted blindly into the waves.

Containers the size of a Mack trucks were breaking free from their chain lashings. They had left port not expecting the heavy weather and did not ask the longshoremen for extra storm lashes, the ship’s third mate had said ruefully earlier in the day, as the storm worsened. Now, thrown off balance, the El Faro tilted precariously to the right, or starboard, as it plunged into the pounding waves.

Unsure why his boat was listing, the captain searched for a solution. The steep angling of the ship was making it hard to stand up straight. If he knew the hurricane-force wind’s direction - difficult to detect at night in a hurricane with a broken wind gauge - the helmsman could position the freighter so that the wind hit its left, port side, correcting the vessel’s pitch. Flooding in the cavern-like interior holds could be battled with pumps to redirect the water into other areas for balance. If the ship lost some of its 20-ton containers, he could use the pumps to help compensate for that, too.

None of that mattered without power, though. The captain called down to the engine room to check that the ship’s boilers, its only source of power, were still operational. Without propulsion in a Category 3 storm, the El Faro would be lost.

“How you guys doing down there?” he asked. The engineer replied that they were “blowin’ tubes”, or trying to remove obstructions from the engine as it chugged. There was another problem: the intake tube that sucked oil like a straw from a large tank into the engines was starting to lose contact with the oil due to the ship’s tilt. Without oil, the engines would stop running altogether.

TOMORROW: El Faro loses propulsion, spelling the end for the vessel, its captain and terrified crew

• Jason Dearen is a Florida-based reporter with the Associated Press