As the U.S. Coast Guard continues to search for survivors, experts say the now-likely loss off the TOTE Maritime cargo ship could be the worst disaster involving a U.S. flag vessel in decades.
A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team is scheduled to arrive in Jacksonville, Fla. Tuesday to begin its investigation into the disappearance of the TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico vessel El Faro, which U.S. Coast Guard said Monday it believes sunk after getting caught in Hurricane Joaquin.
The Coast Guard continues to search for survivors from the ship, which was last heard from on Thursday morning when it was besieged by Hurricane Joaquin just east of the Bahamas while en route to Puerto Rico.
The sinking of the El Faro, whose name means “lighthouse,” could be the worst disaster involving a U.S. flag vessel in decades if survivors are not found.
“As far as I know for U.S. flag shipping this would be the biggest loss of life since the Marine Electric went down in 1983. I know of no other merchant vessel flying the U.S. flag that has been of this proportion,” said Robert Frump, author of Until the Sea Shall Free Them: Life, Death and Survival in the Merchant Marine, which details the sinking of the bulk carrier Marine Electric off the coast of Virginia and its aftermath. That incident claimed the lives of 31 of the ship’s 34 crew members.
The Coast Guard said last Thursday at around 7:30 a.m., watchstanders at its Atlantic Area command center in Portsmouth, Virginia, received an Inmarsat satellite notification stating the El Faro “was beset by Hurricane Joaquin, had lost propulsion and had a 15-degree list. The crew reported the ship had previously taken on water, but that all flooding had been contained.”
The Coast Guard also received a brief emergency position indicating radio beacon or “EPIRB” signal, but no sustained signal.
Coast Guard Captain Mark Fedor said in a news conference on Monday, “The worst spot for any ship to be in is when you are disabled and you have lost all propulsion, you have no means to move that vessel. You become very susceptible.”
“You fall beam to the wave so everything hitting you on the side. So you are looking at a 140 mile per hour wind, 50 foot seas, hitting you from the side. The vessel we know is carrying 391 containers, so it had a lot of topside height to it where the winds and waves can hit it and trailers and automobiles below deck. It was heavy, it was weighted down and we also know the vessel had a list to it because it had some water intrusion earlier. That just increases the danger of the situation they were in to be able to survive that situation,” added Fedor.
According to Frump, once it was underway, the El Faro should have been able to handle 20 to 30 foot waves, but if there was a motor failure and the ship had taken on water and “was listing at the same time then it’s too easy to imagine what happens, which is a roll, and the same thing that happened to the Marine Electric.”
During a press conference Monday evening, Philip Greene, Jr., president and chief executive officer of TOTE Services said, “What is regrettable is that the vessel became disabled in the path of the storm and that is what led ultimately to the tragedy.” Green is a retired Navy rear admiral and former superintendent of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point.
In addition to its normal crew of 28, five Polish nationals were working on the ship to prepare it for an upcoming visit to the Grand Bahama shipyard, where the El Faro was scheduled to have conversion work done on her in anticipation of migrating the vessel to the trade between Tacoma and Anchorage, Alaska.
Company officials said they did not know how long the ship had been without propulsion.
“We are looking forward for the opportunity to have the NTSB come in and work together collaboratively with the Coast Guard as well, to find out what happened,” said Anthony Chiarello, president and chief executive officer of TOTE Shipholdings. “We don’t have all the answers, and I’m sorry for that. We wish we did.”
“We put tremendous trust in our captains and our crews and all our employees whether on land or at sea, but in the end the responsibility comes to me,” added Chiarello.
The decision to sail the ship directly into Joaquin, which rapidly developed from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane as well as the age and condition of the El Faro are likely to be a prime area of focus for the NTSB investigation.
Built by Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, Pennsylvania, the El Faro was launched in 1974 as the Puerto Rico and delivered in early 1975 to the Puerto Rico Maritime Shipping Authority. It was sold to Totem Trailer Express in 1991, when it was renamed the Northern Lights, and lengthened with a new midbody in 1993 by Alabama Shipyard in Mobile. After operating in the Alaska trade, the ship was sold to Sea Star Line, which is now known as TOTE, in 2006 and renamed El Faro.
“It’s easy to speak in hindsight. But most ships are considered over age at age 20,” said Frump.
Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, for example, announced in March said it would sell or scrap 16 ships that it described as “old ladies,” including former flagship vessels such as the Heidelberg Express and Bonn Express that were built as recently as 1988. Those ships were sent to ship breakers in Turkey.
“On the basis of what I know, you’ve got to wonder why you are sending a 40-year-old ship into the path of a hurricane,” Frump added.
The U.S. merchant fleet has many older ships.
“There are 192 American flag ships today, most of them in the coastal trades or carrying government and Food for Peace cargoes,” Frump said in a recent blog post. “Of those 192, nearly half — 97 of them — are 20 years or older, the normal lifetime of a ship. Past this age, ships are insured as ‘overage.'” Of those 192 ships, 74 are 30 years or older, and 24 are 40 years or older, according to Frump.
“There are different theories about where it’s safer to ride out a hurricane, whether it’s in harbor and anchorage or whether it’s at sea. One thing’s for sure, if it were at anchorage in Jacksonville and the crew and the officers were in a motel, you would know where the crew and the officers were right now,” he added.
Ships were not ordered out of the port in Jacksonville last week, but when El Faro departed JAXPORT on Tuesday, Joaquin was still just classified as a tropical storm.
“Had the weather deteriorated rapidly she would almost certainly have proceeded to sea anyway, because the last place you want to be is in port if the weather is going to get extremely bad…you can do a lot of damage and the captain of the port may very well have ordered you to sea,” Peter Swift, a consultant and trustee for the Maritime Industry Foundation who sailed for 21 years, finishing as master before coming ashore and working for both P&O Group and Overseas Shipholding Group, told American Shipper.
“You need to get out to sea and have some sea room because ship’s anchors are not designed to hold ships in really extreme weather. They’re designed to hold ships under normal operating conditions…your object is to get out to sea and have plenty of sea room in which you can maneuver,” he said. “Obviously the master would instinctively look for the safest place…You had a very experienced American captain from Maine and American officers and crew. They’re fine seamen.”
“They are better off at sea than they are at port,” said Charles Cushing, one of the country’s leading naval architects. “Oftentimes ships will put to sea when a typhoon or a hurricane is pending.”
“Obviously 40 years is old, without a doubt,” added Swift “But you know age is sometimes over concentrated on because it really depends how much it’s been maintained. Sometimes you hear about modern ships having major accidents. But some of the older ships, they were built like battleships. I don’t think one should get over carried away by the age of ships.”
Cushing echoed those observations, saying, “I don’t think age per se is a criterion of seaworthiness. If you maintain the ship and that ship would have been scrutinized by ABS and the Coast Guard and TOTE is a first class company. So it’s not a bottom feeder, it’s an A-1 company and it was manned by experienced people. This is an American ship, not a third-world operation.”
Cushing said the ship would have gone through special surveys where the thickness of the hull and structure would have been scrutinized, “so that ship should be in really good condition and if anything gets corroded it gets replaced.”
Steamships like El Faro and others were granted an exemption from North American Emission Control requirements, which may have extended their operating lives.
The Coast Guard publishes information on the documentation, inspections and investigations of ships on a website called the Port State Information Exchange. The entry for El Faro shows no deficiencies since 2013, while the one for its sister ship El Yungue does note deficiencies from this year, some involving lifesaving equipment, but that those have been resolved.
The Coast Guard website does include this report on El Faro from 2011, which says, “FARO reported temporary loss of power when the generator breaker for the main buss tripped offline. Power and main propulsion was restored prior to crew conducting investigation into power loss. Engineers determined the cause was related to the terminal end of a wire within the exciter was severed. Repairs were made and tests conducted successfully.”
Greene said the ship was operating in its normal parameters and its speed would not have been a reason for losing propulsion. He said there was not a history of engine failure and the company did not know how the ship was without propulsion.
“We can speculate on why the main propulsion was disabled and that was in connection we believe with the fact that the ship had a 15 degree list on it as the captain said and the impact that may have had on some auxiliary equipment related to the main propulsion.”
The shipyard workers on the vessel were doing work in the engine room, but Green did not believe based on the work they were doing they would have had anything that would have affected propulsion.
Since the ship went missing, Frump said he has been contacted by other seafarers who have
worked on the El Faro and that one of
them expressed concerns about the design of vents on the vessel,
saying, “If they weren’t secured properly she would have shipped water
fast with a bad list.”
Meanwhile, the sinking of a U.S. flag ship could fuel criticism of the Jones Act, which restricts the shipment goods between points within the U.S., including Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Alaska to ships that are built in U.S. shipyards, registered in the U.S., and crewed by Americans.
Critics of the Jones Act, particularly the requirement that vessels be built in the United States, say it vastly increases the cost of replacement vessels.
A March 2013 resolution by the Hawaii House of Representatives stated, “U.S. deep-draft ship construction is typically three or more times the cost in Japan and South Korea and U.S. ship production is very limited” and asked the U.S. Congress to exempt the noncontiguous trades domestic trades of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico from the requirement to build Jones Act ships in the United States.
A Congressional Research Service study last year said, “Domestically built tankers are about four times the price of foreign-built tankers, and there is limited capacity in U.S. shipyards to build them.”
In September, a report released by the Working Group for the Fiscal and Economic Recovery of Puerto Rico established by the commonwealth’s Governor Alejandro García Padilla said exempting Puerto Rico from the Jones Act, would “reduce transportation costs and increase competitiveness.”
The Jones Act, or its “build America” requirement, has been targeted by group such as the Hawaii Shippers Council, Heritage Foundation, and politicians such as the Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Because U.S.-built and U.S.-crewed ships are far more expensive than those that are built in overseas shipyards and crewed by foreign nationals, the Jones Act fleet contains many older vessels.
The 2013 Hawaii resolution said “the average age of the Jones Act containerships employed in the coastwise noncontiguous domestic trades is 28 years compared to the international average of 12 years for containerships, and international maritime insurance data clearly shows that ship accident rates correlate to the age of ships spiking after twenty years.”
But that has changed dramatically in recent years as large numbers of tankers have been built for the booming U.S. oil industry and major operators to Puerto Rico and Hawaii have built or have new ships under construction:
- In May, Pasha Hawaii put into service a new container and roll-on/roll-off ship Marjorie C between the West Coast and Hawaii.
- This spring and summer National Steel and Shipbuilding Co. in San Diego launched two containerships it is building for TOTE that will replace the El Faro and its sister ship El Yunque and is finishing work on the two ships. The first, Isla Bella, will enter service in the fourth quarter of this year and the second, Perla Del Caribe, is scheduled to enter service in the first quarter of 2016. The ships will use liquefied natural gas (LNG) as fuel and will be pure containerships, unlike the combination container/ro-ro ships TOTE employs today. TOTE is also planning to repower its two trailer ships in the Tacoma-Anchorage trade so that they operate using LNG.
- Crowley likewise has two LNG-fueld combination container/ro-ro ships under construction at the V.T. Halter yard in Pascagoula, Miss. that will serve the trade between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico. On Sept. 22, the company reported the first ship is 25 percent compete.
- On October 1 the Aker Philadelphia Shipyard began construction on the first of two containership it is building for Matson’s service between the West Coast and Hawaii. The same shipyard built four containership for Matson between 2001 and 2006 and has built 17 tankers.
In remarks to a conference on the Jones Act last month Maritime Administrator Paul “Chip” Jaenichen gave a spirited defense of the law, saying it “is not responsible for the cost of gasoline; the price of groceries in Hawaii; the debt crisis in Puerto Rico; or New Jersey’s snowy roads. These are all tall tales, embellishments, and outright falsehoods or misrepresentations.
“Every time the Jones Act is smeared — every time the Jones Act is demonized — every time the Jones Act becomes a scapegoat for another problem it threatens our national defense, it threatens our economy, it threatens our way of life,” said Jaenichen.
The Puerto Rico trade has also been the target of U.S antitrust investigators in recent years. Sea Star Line, TOTE Maritime Puerto Rico’s predecessor, pleaded guilty and paid a $14.2 million criminal fine for a conspiracy to fix prices in the U.S. mainland-Puerto Rico trade. Horizon Lines and Crowley also pleaded guilty and paid fines, and Sea Star’s former president Frank Peake was found guilty of participating in the conspiracy in 2013.
