The Truth About The El Faro Shipwreck

on

 INTO THE RAGING SEA

Thirty-Three Mariners, One Mega-Storm, and the Sinking of El Faro


Back in 2015, when I saw the news about El Faro sinking in a hurricane somewhere between Florida and Puerto Rico, I recall at the time wondering, "How the hell does a big cargo ship steam into a hurricane and sink... especially in this high-tech day and age?"  Like a lot of old sailors who are interested in nautical news, I read several articles and shook my head.  At the time I was busy doing dishes, laundry, commuting, working my ass off for the almighty dollar bill.  But in my spare moments here and there, I wondered what went wrong aboard that ship.  Maybe I was taking a dump, or waiting for the train into Portland--one of those not-so-busy moments back in late 2015--I remember wondering:  "How, with all the weather tracking satellites, GPS, sat-phones, navigation technology, did that ship, the El Faro, go down?"  It just didn't make any sense.   Now it's 2020, and I can still remember, back in 2015 (maybe I was pushing my grocery cart along the household cleaning products aisle), wondering:  "Why didn't that ship steer out of the way of the storm?  Why didn't they turn back to Florida?  Why didn't someone pick up a phone and call the El Faro's captain and say, 'Hey Buddy, there's a hurricane coming right at you.  Get the fuck out of the way!"  As for me, for the past 5 years I've been busy cooking and grocery shopping and I didn't have time to answer those questions.  But deep down in my grey matter, and in my sailor's heart, I've been wondering what happened to El Faro.  Lucky for me and all of us who care about ships and sailors, Rachel Slade has been wondering about El Faro too.




This lady, Rachel Slade, is a very curious and very thorough person.  She went back to the old timers who laid El Faro's keel in a Pennsylvania shipyard and started asking lots of questions.  She went all over Florida, Connecticut and Maine and got personal with many of the loved ones of the crew who drowned aboard El Faro.  And she didn't stop there.  She listened to dozens of hours of recorded testimony captured during the NTSB and Coast Guard inquiry into the sinking of El Faro--and she took lots of notes.  And, she listened to hours of recordings of the captain and crew of El Faro on the bridge in the hours and minutes leading up to the final abandon ship.  Impressively, Rachel Slade dug into the financial records and the upper management organization chart of Tote Services, the company that owned and operated El Faro.  Rachel Slade did her homework and more.



As impressive as the research is, it's only part of what you find between the covers of this great sea story.  What you find is, and the thing I like the most about this book is that it's a genuine SEA STORY.  It's all there, all of it.  The history, the raging sea, the technology, the bad people, the good people, the salty old son of a bitch who got sick of being politically correct, the harrowing rescue attempt (of another ship's crew, not the El Faro's crew), the tragedy, the adventure, the flawed captain, the sordid details, the heartbreak, the greedy owners.  All the elements of an excellent sea story are in this book.  Plus the book includes a map, plans and cross sectional drawings of the ship, a chart showing El Faro's chain of command and a quote from Joseph Conrad.  And most of all, what Rachel Slade has (and she has it in spades) is the ability to spin a yarn, the ability to tell a story, the ability to write well.  What Rachel Slade has done is she has told a great SEA STORY.  Thank you, Rachel.  From this old sailor, thank you very much.  Thank you for taking the time to answer the questions many of us old sailors were wondering:  How the hell did that happen?  Why didn't El Faro turn away from the storm?  How did all the technology fail?  How did the ocean get away with taking another hearty 33 souls down to the salty depths?

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