Episode 1 - El Faro
Taylor: Hello and welcome to Beyond the Breakers. This is a podcast about shipwrecks, loss, and lessons learned at sea. My name is Taylor and I am the host and I guess to start off I’ll talk a little bit about myself. I’ve been interested in shipwrecks my entire life, grew up fishing and boating on the coast of North Carolina, and really being in that environment you can’t help but hear stories about shipwrecks and kind of all the stuff that goes along with it. To further cement this as something I was interested in, I was probably 6-7 years old when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot, and I don’t know, the images and all of that from it just kinda stuck in my head, and it’s just been something I’ve been interested in my entire life, and I’ve gotten to a point now where I figured it would be a good time to share some of that and do a podcast, cause why not, right? Currently, I do work in the transportation industry, although not in the maritime industry, so this is definitely something that’s more of a hobby. I’m not an expert, I don’t claim to be an expert, but uh, it’s just something I’m very passionate about and enjoy talking about. I figured that we would share it. For this podcast, I’m not going to be doing it on my own, I do have a co-host who will be joining me. His name is Tanner, and he can go ahead and tell a little bit about himself now.
Tanner: Alright, hey everyone, happy to be here. I’m very excited to be jumping into this. Taylor talked a little bit about his background, I’ll say a little bit about mine. My background is definitely not in shipwrecks, it’s something that I know a very, very small amount about. My background is mainly in language, linguistics, and teaching. I am an English teacher, I’m not…nothing involving the transportation industry. So I’m looking forward to getting involved with this podcast, where we talk about things like shipwrecks. I personally am absolutely mortified about the idea of being in a ship on the open ocean, so pretty much everything we talk about is going to be terrifying. So I’m ready to get started.
Taylor: Yeah, I’m excited to do this. I think it’ll be a good balance of factual information and true stories, mixed with some of your literary analysis and kinda the different things you can bring to the table, so I’m looking forward to doing this and getting into it. With that said, I think we’ll go ahead and talk about today’s topic, which is the El Faro . Do you remember anything about the El Faro, do you remember that happening? It happened I think in 2015, so it’s fairly fresh.
Tanner: The first time you mentioned it, that you wanted to do this for the first episode, I didn’t think that I remembered it, but as I read a little bit about it and watched a couple news stories, some older news video, I think that part of my brain does remember this happening, but it wasn’t something that stuck in my mind.
Taylor: Right, yeah. It’s weird that shipwrecks, they’re not sexy, in like the modern sense. It was definitely like on CNN and places like that when it happened, but it pretty quickly faded once Hurricane Joaquin was no longer a news topic. With that said, we’re gonna go ahead and jump into the story of the El Faro. So let’s do it!
Tanner: Alright.
Taylor: So, it begins in Jacksonville, FL. September 29th [2015], the El Faro leaves port. It’s destined for San Juan, Puerto Rico, and basically this is a really common route that they run. They run direct to San Juan, they kind of provide a link between Puerto Rico and mainland USA. Say you’re someone that moves to Puerto Rico, you have to get your car there somehow, this is how you do it. You put it on a boat and they take it over there. It also, it does a lot of produce, it does meat, that kind of thing. Anything that you need to get to the island in mass quantities, these boats are taking over there. So this isn’t something unique, this is something that happens everyday and we don’t even think about it. Because it carries commodities of all types, it’s a RoRo-type vessel, which is very common in maritime sailing nowadays. RoRo means roll-on/roll-off, so you’re rolling on trailers, you’re rolling on containers, cars, that kinda thing, and you roll ‘em directly off. You can think of it as like a big ferry, in a way, but also it has standardized containers and stuff like that. It’s mostly what you see when something isn’t an oil tanker nowadays, it’s generally a container ship. It was operated by TOTE Services, who is based out of Jacksonville, Florida. They’re a domestic shipper in the US, they don’t really do international shipping. Their main focus lanes are Puerto Rico and Alaska, which we’ll be hearing much more about Alaska a little bit later. One final note about the El Faro, it was a Ponce de León class ship, so of course every ship has a class, and that’s what this one was called.
Tanner: Okay.
Taylor: So the final point we’ll make on September 29th, let’s talk a little bit about Hurricane Joaquin. At the time of departure, Joaquin was just a tropical storm, however, it was projected to become a hurricane. It was expected to move southwest towards the Bahamas, and if you look at a map, you can basically see that this is moving towards the exact route that the El Faro would be taking if it took a direct course to Puerto Rico.
Tanner: I was actually a little bit surprised, because when you mentioned this and you mentioned it was Hurricane Joaquin, I did remember Hurricane Joaquin, but I didn’t remember this ship necessarily.
Taylor: Yeah, a lot of times nowadays it’s easier to remember the hurricane, because that’s what gets all the coverage. So on September 30th, around 6:24, the El Faro’s course is altered to the south. So they are receiving weather reports, the Captain is aware that there is a massive storm brewing, and that it is headed in his general vicinity. The weather system, or the weather application he’s reliant on is a system called BonVoyage and it basically emails reports to the Captain’s on-board email, and then he has to forward those reports to the bridge to be used. One of the drawbacks of this system, and I’m not sure why that is, it seems like the tropical storm and hurricane information is about 6 hours delayed from the current information. Six hours is a lot of time when you’re in the water on a boat and there’s a hurricane potentially bearing down on you. But the Captain really seemed to prefer this information, he always seemed to defer to the BonVoyage system and he didn’t necessarily use a lot of the other information available, even stuff as simple as The Weather Channel and phone applications, I mean this 2015, you’ve got a lot of access to weather, yet he tended to rely on this. Then later on that morning at 7:39, Joaquin is officially declared a hurricane. So now he is officially sailing into the path of a hurricane. That brings us to October 1st. At 1:20, the Second Mate listens to a satellite radio broadcast. At 2:00 in the morning, the Second Mate calls the Captain and she suggests that they alter the course further south. The Captain does not accept this suggestion and states to “run it”, which I think is something that’s kinda become a famous line in this whole story.
Tanner: Yeah, definitely, that’s one that if you, just my quick sort of cursory first search about this, that’s a phrase that comes up a lot when people are talking or writing about this shipwreck, is that phrase “run it.” That’s gonna come back up in our discussion, I think.
Taylor: [laughs] yeah, definitely. And it, you know, it just shows you that there’s all these other sources, she’s literally listening to a satellite radio broadcast, and she’s able to determine, like “hey, this might be a problem.” So as they continue on their course, the conditions continued to deteriorate. At 3:40 in the morning, the Second Mate adjusts the course north to compensate for wind. The El Faro begins to lose speed, and then at 3:45, the Chief Mate begins his watch. The Second Mate informs him that the engineers are blowing tubes, which I realize is kind of a funny phrase…
[both laugh]
Tanner: Blowin’ tubes.
Taylor: So basically all that means is they’re using high-pressure steam to clean the boilers. They gotta keep the boilers clean so the ship continues to run. This generally does result in a small amount of speed reduction, because they’re taking some of the pressure off the engine system. The Chief Mate adjusts course to nearly due east, again, they’re fighting the wind, they’re trying to maintain their heading. At 4:09, the Captain arrives on the bridge and mentions that they need to correct a starboard list, so they are listing to the starboard side. They move water in the ramp tanks to the port side. So, the ramp takes are used when loading, to kinda compensate for different weight distributions and things to keep everything stable, but they can also be used to correct minor lists when they’re at sea. It’s normally only used to make small corrections. In this case, they were using it to try to fight a list that had become apparent, and you know, in the middle of a hurricane that’s a big problem.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: At 4:40, the Chief Mate informs the Captain that the list is causing an issue with the oil levels. We’ll kinda discuss that a little bit more in the Discussion section, but for now, the main point is that there’s a little bit of a problem beginning to form here. Not only is there a hurricane, but they’re beginning to have a list, there’s water in the boat, and there’s beginning to be a problem with the oil levels. At around 5:00, the Captain then downloads another BonVoyage file that was sent the night before. So it’s important to note that this is an old file, this is not current information. A few minutes after that, the Captain receives a National Hurricane Center update via satellite. The Captain is then heard on the recording stating that he’s receiving conflicting information, and he’s not really receiving conflicting information, he’s mixing old information with new information about the position of the hurricane. So it’s very apparent at this point that there’s a lot going on, people are distracted, and he’s not able to give everything his full attention.
Tanner: So when he complains that he’s receiving conflicting data, the only reason it’s conflicting is because he’s comparing a data set compared to the same data set 6 hours different.
Taylor: Correct, that’s the way that I understand it is that it’s not conflicting information necessarily, it’s just he’s mixing old and new information which, in a stressful environment like that, that’s where you begin to have those kinds of communication breakdowns.
Tanner: And one other additional question about that situation. So around 5:00, the Captain downloads a BVS file that had been sent the night before. This file had been sent the previous night, so when it was sent it was already 6 hours old, correct.
Taylor: Most likely, cause that’s what it seems like, is that the BVS data is old anyway. I don’t actually know, it doesn’t explicitly state it. But regardless, by the time he’s looking at it, it’s old information.
Tanner: So then additionally waiting until the next morning to download it, it’s going to be even older presumably. A lot of additional data management going on here.
Taylor: Correct. Right. So then at 5:43, the Captain receives a call from the engineers that there’s an issue in hold 3. So the hold is obviously the cargo hold, it’s where a lot of the cargo is stored. The Chief Mate is told to go and pump the hold. From this point on, in the remainder of the ship’s voyage, the hold is being continuously pumped. We’re kind of entering the definite point of no return in this story. At 5;44, the Captain is heard saying “we’ve got cars loose.”
Tanner: Oooh.
Taylor: It’s not explicitly stated what he means by that, but what he, in all likelihood what he means is that the cars that they are carrying down in the hold are now floating. And that is not a good situation to be in, you do not want loose cars floating around the bottom of your ship.
[both laugh]
Taylor: The crew found that a scuttle was open on the second level, and all that is, is basically think of it as ventilation. If you’re carrying a bunch of cars, they all have diesel and gas and stuff down there, you’ve gotta have vents that can vent that out, but also during heavy seas, you wanna be able to close those so you don’t take on water. So this kind of begins the process of all these problems converging together. They find that that scuttle’s been open, so they’re accumulating water in the bottom of the ship on the starboard side. So, water is now traveling from the second deck into the third level cargo hold. The waters pooling on the starboard side is causing an increasingly prominent list. So to correct this list and to figure out why the water won’t stop, why the pumping isn’t working, the Captain turns the ship to port and puts wind on the starboard side. So that begins to push the ship to port, so he’s creating a port list intentionally so they can move that water and they can investigate what’s going on, why they’re still getting water even though they’ve shut the scuttles.
Tanner: Hmm.
Taylor: We’ll get into it in a little bit with the oil pressure and stuff like that, but this creates a new problem of lube oil pressure, and basically the engines are no longer able to get oil and he’s going to be losing his engines, which is about the worst case scenario in a hurricane. So at this point they’re clearly taking water, they have a bad list, and now they’ve lost their engines. They have no more propulsion. Around 6am, the Second Mate reports that she can hear alarms in the engine room. The Captain follows this up with a statement saying he “does not like this list.” The vessel’s continuing to lose what little speed it has, and at 6:13, the Captain can be heard stating that he thinks the ship has lost propulsion. So now you are absolutely at the mercy of the hurricane and the wind. You can no longer make positive headway, and you’re absolutely in a bad spot at this point. This is about the worst case scenario as a mariner that you can be in. At 6:16, the Captain can be heard talking to the engine room. He asks if there’s any chance of getting the engines back online. Unfortunately, we’re not able to know what the response to that was, we can’t hear the other side of that conversation, regardless, it’s pretty apparent that he’s asking a question that doesn’t have a great answer, because in their current state it’s probably not possible to get those back online.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: At 6:31, the Captain wants to get everybody up and by that he means he wants to sound the general alarm, and he tells the Second Mate to compose an emergency message. So at 6:31 in the morning, it’s very apparent that this is a bad situation, this is a dangerous situation and they’re gonna be taking some pretty drastic measures. At 6:44, the Captain mentions that there was significant flooding in hold 3. He states that there’s no need to sound the general alarm yet, but he still contacts everybody to let them know that this is going to be something that happens soon. At 6:59, the Captain contacts the designated person ashore and, that's just a company person who is basically assigned to be the point of contact on shore. At 7:12, he orders the Second Mate to send the message that she has composed and the Chief Mate informs the Captain that something has hit the fire main in hold 3. So now they’ve discovered the problem, basically. The reason that they can’t fight the flooding is because something has hit the fire main, and that fire main basically draws water from the ocean to fit an onboard fire. So, they can’t contain that at this point.
Tanner: So is it safe to say that the “something” that hit that fire main in hold 3, is that presumably one of these cars that has come loose?
Taylor: In all likelihood, yes. You generally, I mean, you’ve got 3 and 4 thousand pound cars floating around, running into things. It’s pretty safe to assume that it was a car that probably hit that fire main. And again, this is where you see all of your problems merging together, there isn’t just one problem anymore. So at 7:27, the Captain rings the general alarm. At 7:29, he gives the order to abandon ship. At 7:31, he orders life rafts tossed into the water, and at 7:39, the recording ends. So that is the point where the ship goes under. The last 10 to 12 minutes of that recording, it’s literally a conversation between the Captain and the Helmsman. The Helmsman’s panicking, the list is too bad, and he can’t get off of the bridge, and the Captain’s trying to encourage him to get off of the bridge, abandon ship, and leave. At 7:39, the recording ends with those 2 still talking. To the Captain’s credit, he doesn’t leave this guy behind, and quite literally goes down with the ship trying to assist another sailor. Definitely sort of the old-time mariner tradition at the end. That’s a brief synopsis of what we’ll be talking about, that is the story of the El Faro.
Tanner: If I can just add on at the end here, we’ll obviously be talking about the transcript a lot as we discuss this, but especially just that last 5-10 minutes of the transcript as you read it, this exchange between the Captain and this officer on the bridge.
Taylor: It was the helmsman, yeah, it wasn’t an officer.
Tanner: The helmsman. It’s a very eerie read, hearing just the way that they’re talking and what they’re talking about, and what the Captain’s trying to do. It’s a very eerie read, reading that transcript.
Taylor: It definitely is. I can’t imagine actually listening to it, it reads like something from a movie, honestly. But um, yeah, with the story out of the way, let’s move over to the Discussion portion here, and let’s talk about this thing. Let’s see what’s going on with it, and kinda the interesting parts of this thing.
Tanner: Cool, cool. As I kind of did some reading about this, like I mentioned I watched some news clips and videos about it, a lot of it didn’t make sense to me on first read, a lot of it still doesn’t.
Taylor: There’s a lot of technical stuff going on in this one, and they’re not all gonna be like this, we just happen to have an incredible amount of data on this shipwreck.
Tanner: Yeah, we kinda wanna discuss why did this happen? You mentioned as you were telling the story of this that you’ve got these multiple problems sort of converging, you know, one sort of leads to the other and then they just become one big insurmountable problem…
Taylor: …right.
Tanner: …and that’s sorta the technical aspect of it, but I was kind of thinking as I read about this, a lot of the more human elements jumped out at me from this story. The tech stuff kinda goes over my head, but the human stuff I thought was really interesting, and so I was thinking about this traditional role of the sea Captain, this idea of someone who is in control of his vessel. You know, what he says goes, and I’m using “he” purely because I’m talking about a traditional sea Captain. Just that sort of, authority that we think of, just kind of on a cultural level, we think of a sea Captain being in control of his vessel, and making those final decisions. And so I was kinda curious as to how that plays a role in modern shipping. You know, we think about Captain Ahab and his authoritarianism, but like, obviously shipping and sailing vessels have changed since then, but does that level of authority still come into play? Cause as you read this transcript, you see that the Captain still wields a lot of that final overriding power.
Taylor: Right. And I think it definitely still, the Captain is still the person in charge on the ship, and at the end of the day, his word is final. He still maintains control. You still report to him, he at the end of the day is responsible for everyone on that boat, but I would say that it’s probably changed since the more traditional views of the 1900s and 1800s and stuff like that, you’re no longer a god-like figure. I think the crew is more empowered to speak up and say something, I mean, in the simplest way of, in theory, you could pick up your cell phone nowadays and call corporate headquarters and complain. That wasn’t an option in the 1800s on a whaling ship to complain to the HR department. I mean, in theory you could do that now. But Captains are still in charge, at the end of the day it’s still a very traditional job, and there’s still a lot of deferential treatment given to authority figures.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: You see it play out here that there’s times on the transcript where people say “I'm not gonna second guess him, he’s been through a lot, he knows what he’s doing.” And that’s good, you wanna have faith in leadership in a situation like this because you are in dangerous situations and you wanna trust that the person in charge knows what they’re doing. I would say that it’s definitely not to the level that it was in the Golden Age of Sail or anything like that, like, Captains aren’t arresting people and stuff like that the way that they had the authority to do back then. So it’s a little different, but it’s still a very para-military organization, it’s one of the most authoritarian jobs you can have that isn’t the military, you know? Where I work, I’m a manager, I’m not a Captain, I can’t actually order anybody to do anything. I can suggest it…
Tanner: …make a strong suggestion that you do this.
Taylor: …yeah, I could write someone up I guess, but that’s different than giving an order that has to be followed. That’s much more of what’s going on here.
Tanner: A term that comes up if you read the NTSB report on this, I guess it’s like a media report that they would distribute to people, still very detailed, but they make a lot of use of the terms BRM and CRM. So that’s Bridge Resource Management and is that Crew Resource Management?
Taylor: Yeah, Crew Resource Management. So Crew Resource Management is kind of the original concept, it comes from the airline industry. Basically, what they noticed listening back to transcripts and debriefing people after accidents was there were times when there was too much deference to authority, or straight up the Captain of a plane would just ignore the First Officer or the Flight Engineer, and that contributed to accidents where you’re not valuing the input of everyone involved because obviously everyone involved is highly qualified. They may see something you don’t, or they may know how to do something you don’t, and in that instance you need to listen. And that’s sort of what you see here playing out in a different, much slower way, but still you see it where the Second Mate is saying, you know, she’s saying “hey, I can plot us a new course and I wanna plot a new course” and he says “run it.” That’s a good example of bad Bridge Resource Management or Crew Resource Management. You’re not taking that input into consideration. If he had at least deliberated on that point and showed that he considered it, I think it would be a little different. I mean he’s still making the wrong decision, but it seems like he pretty much dismisses this out of hand.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: This is a concept that you can apply to almost anywhere nowadays, where you talk about empowering people beneath you to make decisions or give input or valuing input. It’s basically just saying that you wanna consider all of the options and take into account things you may not see but other people may be able to bring to the table.
Tanner: Yeah, it’s interesting. I guess, not to throw gender discourse into this discussion too much cause I don’t feel qualified to discuss it that much, but I would have to wonder in this situation, because it is I think somewhat out of the ordinary that the Second Mate is a woman, part of my brain has to wonder how much did that play into this? Did that play into this? The fact that this advice is coming from a female crew member. I don’t know, that’s pure conjecture, but…
Taylor: …yeah, it is interesting. She seems to be the person who’s the most vocal as far as saying “this doesn’t seem like a good thing.” There were other people that had reservations, but she definitely is the most forward with it.
Tanner: Yeah.
Taylor: And without hearing the context of what’s said, it’s really hard to know. It does seem like she’s respected by everyone she talks to, just by reading everything. Like, I don’t think there’s anyone second guessing her or like anything like that, but again we’re only reading the transcripts that were released and we have no context necessarily for how things are being said. It’s hard to know, but it’s definitely a question that you’d have to wonder about since women in this industry…it’s a fairly unique thing.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. So on kind of a tie-in to what we’ve just been discussing with the Captain’s authority and that sort of traditional reliance on him having the final say, I’m interested in this plot point here that runs through the whole narrative of this shipwreck, of this accident, is this BVS data. The BonVoyage System that we talked about when you were telling the story. This data that is always going to be 6 hours old, at least, when you download the file, and this is what the Captain relies on. Obviously my first question is why is he so reliant on this? But I don't think we can really answer that question, and then my next question is really the tie-in here. It’s not just his reliance on it, but it’s his unwillingness to ditch it, his unwillingness to discard that data and look at the new data, or take into account this new data. I mean, is this tied-in to that idea? That you know, if he decided to change what data he’s working with, does that undercut his authority as the Captain? Is he second guessing himself?
Taylor: Yeah, I don’t know, it is weird that he kinda clings to the BVS data, and like you said, we don’t have any way of really knowing why. Maybe it is that he just doesn’t wanna change his mind, and you know, he’s done this 20 times before and it’s been fine and you ride out the storm and you get to where you’re supposed to go. Maybe a part of it is just not wanting to look at those other sources because he’s distracted. If you have all these problems converging of, you know, you’re dealing with a list, and you’re dealing with problems with the oil levels, he may just not want to consider another resource because he kinda becomes blind to it, and he latches on to “well I’ve been using BVS, I’m gonna keep using that.”
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And that comes into the Crew Resource and Bridge Resource Management, of allowing other people and delegating tasks and saying “hey, I need you to keep me informed about the weather. So when something changes, you tell me, and that’s what we’re going off of.”
Tanner: Right.
Taylor: So, you know, by not doing that, he puts himself…he’s trying to do too many things, basically. Like you said though, we don’t have a great answer as to why he never consults other resources.
Tanner: And like you mentioned, once they lose propulsion on the morning of the 1st, at that point, it doesn’t matter what data you’re looking at. I mean, it…
Taylor: …right, yeah you’re past the point of return at that point, like you’re dead in the water in a ship that is taking on water, you’re basically hoping that you can abandon ship at that point. And, I mean, that’s a factor that we’ll look at in the Lessons and Findings section–they continued to wait. They don’t abandon ship probably as quickly as they should.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. And I’ll just point out here, so in that NTSB report, the kinda short one, on page 10 there’s a picture, a weather satellite picture, of Hurricane Joaquin, and it has the exact position of the El Faro superimposed onto it. This is a picture from 8 in the morning, so this is about 20 minutes after the recording has ended and presumably the ship has gone down, and without looking at the picture it’s hard to describe what this looks like, where this is, in position to the hurricane. If you had tried to steer this ship into a worse position, you could not have done it. It is…
Taylor: …yeah, they are quite literally sailing to the eye of this hurricane.
Tanner: …it is directly at the eye-wall of this hurricane, right in its path. And, like we said, with no propulsion, no way of even maneuvering at this point. It’s well past the point of really being able to do anything.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Let’s see, back to my discussion questions. Let’s talk about Alaska. I have questions…
Taylor: …yeah, Alaska. You looked this up in the transcript, how many times is Alaska mentioned?
Tanner: Yeah, so in the transcript, this transcript we’ve been talking about. This is about 500 pages long, this transcript. So I did a lot of searching, I did kind of scroll through the whole thing, but I did a lot of word-searching for specific terms and things that kept coming up, and I looked up Alaska. Alaska is mentioned, I believe, 20 times in this transcript, which again is over the course of a couple of days. That really caught my attention because as you read through this, as you see the crew’s discussions, as this weather is getting continuously worse and this situation is really deteriorating, you hear so many references to Alaska. And it’s always mentioned…
Taylor: …it should be noted, too, that this was their last trip to Puerto Rico. After this they would be taking the ship to Washington to retrofit for the Alaska lanes. So they were going to Alaska after this.
Tanner: Right, so everything is kind of put into the context of Alaska, and I have a couple selected quotes here where I felt it was the most relevant to what happened in this situation. There’s a lot of comparison to this sort of potential, or this idealized worst-case-scenario that they’re going to face, or that they might face in Alaska. For example, pretty early in the transcript, I think this is even on…this may be on the 29th even, possibly the 30th, the Third Mate says “we’re long overdue for a good *expletive*.” We don’t know what this is, but we know he’s talking about some sort of serious weather. The Second Mate agrees, she says “yeah, definitely.” Third Mate comments “this is a good warm-up for Alaska.” So even right now we’re sort of setting the stage here for comparing everything to this sort of hypothetical worst-case-scenario. Like, things can be worse, so what we have right now is not that bad.
Taylor: Yeah, and like we’ve all seen like, Deadliest Catch or something, I mean that’s what they’re talking about, like it’s dark, it’s cold, it’s windy, there’s ice, and there’s rough seas, so like, Alaska is no picnic, it’s nasty. But you’re right, we’re setting this up to basically be the worst-case-scenario, and “what we’re doing now can’t possibly be worse than that, so let’s just do it.”
Tanner: At…what is it, 2pm? I’m trying to read this military time here…at 2pm on I believe the 30th of September, Captain says “Gonna be far enough south, not gonna hit the thing, watch. Gonna get a little rougher. These ships can take it.” Maybe some famous last words there.
Taylor: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that’s a little bit of self-talk almost.
Tanner: Yeah.
Taylor: I mean, how much of that’s for the crew and how much of that’s for yourself at that point?
Tanner: And the Second Mate responds directly to that, saying “yeah, they’re built for Alaska. So again, we have this comparison saying “it always could be worse.”
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: Next thing we see here, and this is I think the most interesting of these transcript portions here, this is about halfway through the transcript, and this is the… I believe it’s the Third Mate who is talking…and it’s not clear who he’s talking about, if he’s talking about the Captain himself, or the Chief Mate. He says “I don’t know. I’m not gonna second guess somebody. The guy’s been through a lot worse than this, he’s been sailing for a long, long time. He did it up in Alaska.”
Taylor: That’s a very telling quote.
Tanner: It is, and of course, experience is a good thing, you want to sail under someone with experience, but that quote, I put it in bold in my notes here, “I’m not gonna second guess somebody.”
Taylor: That is quite literally the opposite of good Crew Resource Management, and that people should feel empowered to speak up when they feel that something’s wrong, like you should have a system to second-guess, like, through the proper channels, not insubordinately, but like, you should have a process to be like “hey, I have reservations about this, can we discuss this?”
Tanner: I think that’s an interesting discussion point, is that it’s, you know, we can read through this transcript, and we can say “well, why didn’t this person do that, why didn’t this person say this more forcefully” and I think it’s an interesting phenomenon that happens in probably any work place, not even one with such high stakes as this. You know, I’ve worked at grocery stores where new hires were reluctant to ask me questions about “how high should I stack these cans of corn” and it’s like, this happens everywhere, this level of saying “I don’t wanna ask too many questions, I don’t want to inject myself too much into whatever else the supervisor is doing. So it’s really interesting to see how this happens at all levels, but when it happens in this situation, this obviously leads to disaster.
Taylor: Yeah, and I think that’s the whole idea of where Resource Management comes from. These things are too important to not ask questions, or these things are too important to speak up, like, you need to bring it to the forefront when you see something that’s potentially dangerous.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. So the next quote I extracted here from the transcript is the first time we kind of see a really hard flip, a very clear, direct expression of concern. It’s from the Second Mate, and this is at about 3 in the morning and this is on October 1st…
Taylor: …so you’re 4 and a half hours, essentially, away from the ship going down at this point.
Tanner: …right, and this is when the Second Mate says “this ship can’t handle this hurricane. Suuure as hell won’t be able to handle Alaska.” So this is the first expression of real doubt about the situation that comes up, you know, saying…
Taylor: …and I think it should be noted that she has been the most outspoken that this is a bad idea, and a bad thing that they’re doing…
Tanner: …mm-hmm.
Taylor: …so I’m not surprised to see that she is one of the first to really verbalize that.
Tanner: Yeah, throughout the transcript you can read that she is pretty routinely expressing her concerns, and sometimes it is couched as kind of a more low-key…just saying like “this sounds great” like kind of sarcastic, but you can tell that the whole time she’s very concerned about the situation the ship’s gonna be in.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Last one I have here, and, man this last one is from 4:10 on October 1st, so this is only, what, a little under 3 hours…
Taylor: …3 hours.
Tanner: …about 3 hours before the ship actually sinks. So yeah, at this point they’re really in quite a mess, and the Captain is talking to Able Seaman 1, he says “well, this is everyday in Alaska, this is what it’s like.” And I think that’s the last reference to it on the transcript. Even that late, as we’ve gone through the story of how things progressed, even as late as that, they’re still latched on to this idea that things could be worse. Like, this is not an emergency, this is not a worst-case-scenario, because things could be worse.
Taylor: Yeah, and I think a lot of that is self-talk, a lot of it is wanting to not look scared in the face of something that you know is bad. And kind of the thing I compare it to is if you’re driving in the snow, I mean we both live in the Midwest, we’ve lived in the Upper Midwest, and a lot of time…the last time it snowed here, I remember driving home and sliding a little bit, especially on the highway it’s a little scary, but you tell yourself “I’ve driven in worse, I’ve driven in freezing rain and 8 inches of snow in Wisconsin” and that may be true, that you’ve driven in worse conditions, but the event that you’re in is not that prior event, so it’s really irrelevant that you may have been in something worse, it is, what am I dealing with right now?
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: And that seems to be kind of what this is, is it’s a lot of self-reassurance that like, “we’ve been through worse, so we can get through this.”
Tanner: I think that’s a good comparison, in a way to sort of personalize it and sort of scale it down to an individual level, because again, like I just said, it’s easy to read the transcript and see what happened at the end and say “well, of course the Captain should’ve changed course. Of course he should have done these things.” But yeah, I’d say just think about how many times you have driven through just really hard, driving rain and just pushed through it because you didn’t want to feel silly for wasting a half hour waiting for this rain to stop. How many times have you driven through snow by saying “oh, it’s not that bad, I’ve driven in worse.”
Taylor: Right. It’s exactly the same thing scaled up.
Tanner: Disregarding the fact that it doesn’t matter if you’ve driven through a harder snowstorm if you hit a patch of black ice and you slide off the road. That previous experience doesn’t matter at all in your current situation. So I think seeing it that way, it’s easier to understand the idea of well, maybe the Captain did not want to divert this ship because he just did not think that this was as serious as it was.
Taylor: Right, that’s 100 percent what it is. Are there any other discussion points, or anything like that that you wanted to address. Any other questions that you had?
Tanner: That’s my main thing, I don't know if you want to talk about this here or somewhere else, I just want to clarify my understanding of the oil situation.
Taylor: Okay, yeah let’s go ahead and do that now cause that is a little complicated and it’s very technical and I would definitely suggest looking at that media report that the NTSB put out. They have some charts. But yeah, we can definitely talk about that now. Basically, the way that the oil works, that’s like supplied to the engines to make everything run, it feeds through a tube, and there’s a reservoir. So when everything is flat and level, the tube goes straight down into the reservoir and sucks up the oil. When the ship was listing to starboard, that pipe that comes down is on the starboard side of that tank, so it is still able to get oil. When they turn the ship to port to try to fight the leaks and the water that was coming in on the starboard side, they created a port list. So when that port list happened, they lost the suction of oil, so the engines are no longer getting oil. All that’s gonna happen is emergency power is gonna be supplied, there’s not gonna be any power supplied to the engines, and that’s the point where they lose propulsion.
Tanner: Okay.
Taylor: But, if everything was properly maintained, there would be enough oil in that reservoir that even with a port list, you would still be able to suck oil. So they didn’t operate it illegally, they were still within like specs on it, but they weren’t within like, the best-practices specs, and you can see that that became another contributing factor in this. So now not only do you have a fire main that’s flooding your hold, you’re about to lose propulsion. Now you can’t even turn the ship to try to correct the list again to launch lifeboats, to throw life rafts in the water. You’re basically dead in the water and at the mercy of the wind.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. The first time I read through the oil thing, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. It's a weird-looking diagram when you see the design of this system where yeah, it does matter which side the ship is listing to. If the oil is not sufficiently full, so I just thought that was an interesting design, I just needed another run-through of how that worked there.
Taylor: Yeah, I would definitely suggest anyone that’s interested to look at that diagram, because it’s really hard to conceptualize without seeing it, and it definitely took me a few read-throughs to get that. Basically, the important thing to note is that it was just another problem as all these problems converged. When they tried to fix one problem, they created another one for themselves.
Tanner: Exactly.
Taylor: So I think that’s a pretty good discussion of what’s going on here. I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the findings and lessons that we’ve learned from this. We’ll start with the thing we’ve already kinda talked about, which is the Bridge Resource Management slash Crew Resource Management. All that is is having procedures for environments where human error can cause extremely dangerous situations. So, you know, being a pilot, being a ship captain, you even see this in the military, where if you’re in the field, you have to take input from everybody, cause someone might see something you don’t. And it just gives crew and leadership tools to effectively communicate in stressful situations, because under stress people shut down, people get angry, people don’t effectively communicate. You have to give people tools to use. So basically you’re creating open and honest communication between all levels of leadership [and crew]. Did you have any more thoughts on that? I think we’ve hammered that one home pretty good.
Tanner: It’s one of those concepts, of course, that it makes sense in the abstract but then on the ground, or on the ship, if you will, actually applying it to any situation is always more complicated than it seems where everyone sort of has responsibilities. If you are a crew member or an employee in a different situation you have the responsibility to speak up if you see something, if you notice something that a higher-up doesn't. You have that responsibility, and of course, the higher-up, the Captain in this case, has the responsibility to not necessarily listen to what you’re saying in terms of like, doing it, but take that data into account and make a decision based on it.
Taylor: Right, exactly.
Tanner: And those first 2 steps are easy. And then after that is where it gets muddy. If the Captain has decided to discard this, at what point do I as the Second Mate try again? And how hard do I try again? Saying “I really, really think that you should take this into account.”
Taylor: Yeah, there’s different schools of thought, there’s different ways of doing Crew Resource Management and the ways that it’s taught, and some of the more extreme measures come in where if you’re being ignored by leadership and it’s dangerous, you refuse to do something. And that takes a lot to do. I mean, in a situation like this, and I don’t even know if that was a practical option in this scenario, to refuse to do something or to change course without authorization, but even if…let’s say that they had done that and the ship doesn’t sink and it gets to Puerto Rico a day late, they’re gonna face disciplinary actions. You might get fired, and you can’t prove a negative, you can’t prove that you saved the ship from sinking.
Tanner: Right.
Taylor: So it’s a difficult position to be in, and at a certain point if the Captain decides he’s going to do this thing, he’s going to do this thing.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: I think we’ve pretty much established that there was not an effective use of Resource Management in this scenario. The Captain made his decisions and he endangered the crew and ultimately that caused the loss of the ship. Next, we have the use of noncurrent weather information. We’ve talked about that with the BonVoyage system. We don’t know why he relied on it, we don’t know why he stuck with it. Was he distracted? Did he not wanna look like he was wishy-washy and changing his mind? But quite literally, people were pulling up stuff on laptops and cellphones and they were able to get better information than what the BVS system was able to give. Not necessarily better, but more timely, I guess you would say, information.
Tanner: That’s something that reading this, I had to continuously remind myself of. Of when this was happening. This was happening in 2015.
Taylor: Yeah, this isn’t 1970. This is 2015.
Tanner: You know, like you just said, crew members are pulling things up just literally on the internet, The Weather Channel, and you have this data at your fingertips and just not taking advantage of it, and that to me is the most inexcusable part of all of this. Obviously there are bigger issues, there’s safety-regulation issues, there’s small technical issues like securing the uh…I forget what they’re called. The ventilation parts. Securing those things on the small level. But then there’s this, there’s what seems like just willful-ignorance of all of the data that you have at your disposal. To me it’s the most baffling and… I don’t know. I have no way to conceptualize the mind-set of that.
Taylor: Yeah, and that’s what’s important to remember in all of this, and in any of these incidents, be it an airline crash, be it a shipwreck, there’s never 1 thing that goes wrong, it’s always multiple steps, and despite all the other things of cars not being properly secured, of ventilation being left open, if we hadn’t sailed into the hurricane, those things probably don’t matter. The bad lifeboats don’t matter, the way that the oil feeds into the system doesn’t matter.
Tanner: Yeah, big picture lesson here.
Taylor: There’s always multiple steps.
Tanner: Big picture lesson here: sailing literally directly into a hurricane…this will probably happen.
Taylor: Yeah, you’re allowing the circumstances of this to happen.
Tanner: And, yeah, to me that just comes down to the lack of awareness of the environmental conditions, when knowledge of that was available.
Taylor: That kinda brings me to the final lesson slash findings that I wanna talk about for this one. It’s the lifeboats. In the NTSB report, it talks about waiting too long to abandon ship, and it does go on to further say that although they waited too long to abandon ship, it’s probably inconsequential to survival because of the lifeboats. These lifeboats are almost quite literally the same things that were on the Titanic. They are just open-topped, metal lifeboats. They provide no shelter, they have no power, they have no nothing. You’re gonna be tossed around in a hurricane in a little metal boat, that’s not a recipe for survival.
Tanner: Yeah, when I read that part I didn’t really understand the difference between a traditional lifeboat and what modern lifeboats on these ships look like. I had to double-check and cross-reference things when I read this report because at the end of the report it mentions that “a reconnaissance aircraft estimated a 10-second average surface wind speed of 117 knots near the El Faro’s last known position.”
Taylor: That’s not survivable, I don’t think, in a lifeboat like that.
Tanner: According to my conversion here, 117 knots is 134 miles per hour wind speed on the surface. In an open lifeboat. It’s inconceivable that that would be adequate for this situation. Yeah, it’s just mind-blowing.
Taylor: It really is. To think that, even if they had abandoned ship an hour sooner, that’s what they would have been in. In all likelihood, these lifeboats weren’t even accessible by the time they tried to abandon ship due to the list.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: If you look, there’s a diagram I saw somewhere, where basically they would have been hanging out over the water, and you would’ve been at a 20-degree list in a driving rain and a-hundred-and-some-mile winds. You’re not getting in those lifeboats, it’s impossible, and even if you had gotten in them it probably doesn’t matter.
Tanner: How do modern lifeboats…cause that was one of the criticisms here, was that the lifeboats were outdated, there was no modern lifeboat system on this boat. How do modern lifeboats in a ship like this differ from that?
Taylor: I’m not entirely sure about access and everything, I’m assuming that there's a little bit better access to them, but basically it’s an enclosed system, so you’re getting in it, and it’s covered, there’s food, there’s water, you’re protected from the elements. It’s basically a big bobber in the water, like you’re floating and you’re just enclosed in a very buoyant little boat, so you might get tossed around, i’m sure it’s uncomfortable and it’s scary, but you’re at least protected from the uh…I think actually, strangely enough, if you wanna get a good look at what that’s like, in the movie Captain Phillips…is that what the movie’s called? Is that the name of the Tom Hanks movie?
Tanner: I think that’s what it’s called, Captain Phillips.
Taylor: A lot of that movie takes place in one of those, because that’s where the pirates take him before SEAL Team Six shoots them. So if you wanna get an idea of what that might look like, that is what it looks like. It’s just a very tight and confined little space that you get in and you’re safe. I think with that, you probably had a chance in these elements, that’s why they make them that way, but in an open lifeboat, it didn’t matter. I don’t think that it would have made that much of a difference. Those are kind of the main points I wanted to talk about. There’s more, if you look in the report, there’s a lot more technical stuff that I don’t think is necessarily pertinent to what we’re talking about today, but um, I just wanna conclude by reading a portion of the NTSB report, just a little summation. This is directly from the NTSB report:
“The probable cause of the sinking of the El Faro and the subsequent loss of life, was the Captain’s insufficient action to avoid Hurricane Joaquin. His failure to use the most current weather information, and his late decision to muster the crew. Contributing to the sinking was ineffective Bridge Resource Management onboard El Faro, which included the Captain’s failure to adequately consider Officer suggestions. Also contributing to the sinking was the inadequacy of both TOTE’s oversight, and its Safety Management System. Further contributing factors were flooding in the cargo hold from an unprotected open watertight scuttle, and damage to seawater piping. Loss of propulsion due to lube oil pressure to the main engine, resulting from a sustained list and subsequent down flooding through unsecured ventilation closures in the cargo holds. Also contributing was a lack of an approved damage-control plan. Contributing to the loss of life was a lack of appropriate survival craft for the conditions.”
Taylor: So that’s very wordy, it’s very long, but it’s basically what we’ve talked about here, is that there was not 1 factor in this, that all of these things came together to cause this tragedy to happen, but at the end of the day, the best way to avoid this would’ve been for the Captain to simply not sail into the hurricane.
Tanner: Yeah.
Taylor: That mitigates all the other factors. Kinda the final point I wanna have, I know you’ve got a little bit of a summary as well with your thoughts, I just wanna say that this accident is unique. Not everything we’re gonna be talking about will have this much detail, or be this technical, it’s pretty rare to watch a shipwreck unfold in real time, and that’s literally what we got to do here. We know minute by minute what happened, we know what people were thinking, we know what they were saying. It’s a really unique opportunity, it’s kind of why I wanted to start with this one because they won’t all be like this, there’s a lot of guesswork and conjecture that goes into these, but this almost reads like an airline crash and not a shipwreck, it’s a very unique thing and I thought it was worth sharing. Yeah, those are kind of my thoughts, I know you have a few things you wanted to say as well.
Tanner: Yeah, so when you asked me if I wanted to guest host on a show about shipwrecks, I said of course. And then I started to do a lot of reading about shipwrecks, just kinda going through ones that I had heard of, ones that I knew, you know, famous ones, and then getting into some other ones that I’d never heard of before. I was just thinking, what is it about shipwrecks that really captures the imagination? Obviously it’s not a point of interest for everyone, but it’s such a common thing among a certain subset of interests. Shipwrecks. There’s this tragic, romanticism about shipwrecks that other things just don’t have, you know other transportation disasters, other engineering disasters, what have you. They just don’t have the same sort of gravity that shipwrecks have, and I got to thinking about why. Why is that? Why do we…why are there so many songs about shipwrecks. We don’t write songs, really, about those other things, but there are tons of songs about shipwrecks. They really have this romantic place in the human psyche, and I was thinking about that, and I was just thinking about how we, as a species, humans, have such a long history with ships and therefore with shipwrecks. Ships are really the first time that we as humans, we really go out of our way to challenge this overwhelming force of nature: the ocean. Or, you know, any big body of water really.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: It’s the first time that we really just shake our fist at the natural world and say, “no, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna sail from here to here.” Through this storm, or through these waves, or what have you. We’ve been doing that for so long, we’ve been building ships and dying in shipwrecks for thousands of years, so I just feel like there’s this interesting sort of cultural memory that gives shipwrecks and shipwreck stories a little extra weight. They’re always a little bit more tragic, they seem a little bit more sad for some reason, and a little bit more heroic. You know, we talked about the Captain going down with his ship. There’s a certain element there that I think just captures something different…
Taylor: …mm-hmm.
Tanner: …that just isn’t there with other accidents, and other things like this. I don’t know, it’s something that I want to explore more and sort of flesh out a little bit more, but that really caught my attention. Why is it that shipwrecks are so tragic? Even when the body count per se, is not quite as high as other things, you don’t have hundreds of people dying on the El Faro or the Edmund Fitzgerald, you’ve got 20s and 30s here, but there’s just something tragically heroic about going down with a ship.
Taylor: Yeah, and I think even the NTSB reports that the Captain basically takes all the blame on this, but at the end of the day, he’s a hero because he doesn’t leave the Helmsman at the helm and try to save himself.
Tanner: There’s that narrative, that good sort of bow on the end of it. Not to cheapen what’s happened here, but this is the same thing you see in fiction where someone makes mistakes and they do bad things, and then at the end of the day they come back and they do something really heroic. He did, he made mistakes, he got them in this situation, but at the end of the day, the last thing we hear from the transcript is him on the bridge trying to keep the Helmsman calm, saying “I’m not leaving you, I’m not going anywhere. We need to get off this.” So it’s him living up to the expectations of his position at the end of the day, he sort of has that… I don’t know, I don’t know if “heroic” is the best word for it, but that conclusion, that satisfying conclusion that you want from that character, if we’re putting this in the perspective of a narrative.
Taylor: Yeah, for sure. And I think it’s a good reminder that despite all the technical stuff we talk about, and all of that, that at the end of the day it’s a human story, and that’s what all of these are. They’re all stories of human error, and of humans being heroic and doing the things they need to do in that moment. I guess that’s kinda how I want to end it, is that all of our stories are going to be about shipwrecks and nautical things, but at the end of the day, we’re telling stories about humans and human survival, and you know, human triumph and tragedy. That’s what we aim to do here, we’re gonna have fun while we do it at times, and at times it’s gonna be a little sad, but I’m looking forward to continuing to explore these things and I’m looking forward to kinda getting your thoughts on it as we go. I definitely appreciate anyone who has checked this out. Give us a little feedback, and we’ll kinda get some social media out there as we go. I do have an email set up right now, it’s beyondthebreakerspod@gmail.com. If you have any feedback, if you have requests, I’m all about hearing what people wanna hear about in this, and yeah, we’ll kinda go from there. We’re feeling this out as we go, and hope to get better as we go along, and I look forward to growing this and exploring a lot of different topics. With that, yeah, I appreciate everybody listening and we will be talking to you soon.