Polar explorer Pen Hadow warns the international waters at the top of
the world are 'about to be plundered by the few, very much to the
detriment of the global community'
Two yachts have become the first vessels in history to sail
into the Central Arctic Ocean without icebreaker support in a fresh sign
of how much sea ice has been lost.
Pen Hadow, a British polar explorer, Erik de Jong, a Dutch
sailor, and their crews sailed to within 600 miles of the North Pole,
reaching a latitude of more than 80 degrees north.
These explorers have already given up the attempt to reach the North Pole.
They stopped approximately 640 miles short of the north pole.
Scientists have warned that the Arctic will be almost completely free of sea ice by the late 2030s with the region experiencing greater warming than the global average.
The average winter temperature in the Arctic island of
Svalbard is now about a staggering 10 degrees warmer than just a few
decades ago.
They didn't even get north of 80 degrees north. What stopped them? Sea Ice.
Mr Hadow is the only person to have walked solo from Canada
to the North Pole without resupply by third parties and has also walked
to the South Pole, again without resupply.
The sea ice is so thin or has disappeared completely that it
is no longer possible to walk from Canada or Russia to the North Pole.
But it is on course to become a possible sea journey.
Speaking from his yacht, the Bagheera, Mr Hadow told The Independent: “I believe sooner rather than later a yacht will sail to 90 degrees north.
“We’ve hit the buffers now, we’ve hit the main body of the sea ice, but we have been sailing in open waters quite happily.
“The Central Arctic Ocean … is officially an unexplored ocean because it’s been inaccessible to vessels until very recently.
“If we can take two 50ft yachts, image what commercial shipping and commercial fishing can now do.”
Such exploitation could pose a danger to wildlife in the region, Mr Hadow said.
“The sea ice is going – that’s one stress for them – and now
there’s a very high risk of additional human threats coming in,” he
said.
The Central Arctic Ocean is an area about the same size as
the Mediterranean Sea that lies outside the territorial waters of the
surrounding countries, which extend 200 miles from their coasts.
Mr Hadow described being able to sail into the area so easily as a "bitter-sweet moment".
“I hope this project helps to make people realise that
there’s a whole resource up here which is about to be plundered by the
few, very much to the detriment of the global community, unless we do
something about it," he said.
“Every nation owns it, we all own it, everybody.”
He added that they planned to gather scientific information to help policymakers protect the unique habitat.
The news comes after a Russian tanker – ironically carrying a
cargo of fossil fuels that are driving global warming – was able to
sail from Norway to South Korea through the Arctic in just 19 days, a
trip that would have taken far longer if it had travelled via the Suez
Canal.
Cruise ships are also now sailing through the once famously impassable Northwest Passage along the coast of Canada.
According to the US National Snow & Ice Data Centre, the sea ice in the Arctic this year is tracking well below the average between 1981 and 2010.
The sea ice reaches its minimum extent in September before
starting to grow again as the temperatures cool with the approach of
winter.
In the Antarctic, the sea ice is also below average as it approaches its maximum extent towards the end of the southern winter.
It started as a dip of low pressure over the Atlantic that gathered a loose circle of sluggish wind.
Ruffled, the summer-warmed sea released more moisture as vapor and the pressure went down a bit further.
The wind picked up, driving big waves and unleashing more moisture and heat.
During the next few days, this chain reaction turned into an atmospheric buzz saw that spanned hundreds of miles: Hurricane Joaquin.
CNN's Martin Savidge details El Faro's journey as the doomed container ship ventured toward Hurricane Joaquin.
Sep. 29, 8:10 p.m.: Left Jacksonville Port. Three hours before El Faro departed, the National Hurricane Center's 5 p.m. advisory expected Joaquin to become a hurricane within 24 hours. Sep. 29, 11:06 p.m.: Three hours after El Faro departed, the NHC's 11 p.m. advisory said that Joaquin is expected to become a hurricane in the next 12 hours. Sep. 30, 6:16 a.m.: Begins to veer slightly south from usual course. Travelling at 20.0 knots, near its top speed. Sep. 30, 2:13 p.m.: Passing northern Bahamas, about 25 miles south of its usual course at 19.9 knots. Sep. 30, 9:09 p.m.: El Faro continues to veer south west from normal course, now very close to the Bahamas. Oct. 1, 2:09 a.m.: Slowing to 16.9 knots, the ship is about 90 miles south of its usual course. El Faro is now in the direct path of the storm. Oct. 1, 3:56 a.m.: Last known location logged. The ship is believed to have sunk after being caught in Joaquin's ferocious winds and high seas. Alternate route: In August, El Faro used another route which would have avoided Joaquin's path. It is unclear why the ship did not take the other route this time.
As the Category 4 storm bore down on the Bahamas with winds peaking at 140 miles an hour, people evacuated and vessels raced for safety.
But one ship did not.
On October 1, 2015, the SS El Faro — a cargo carrier whose veteran 33-member crew enjoyed modern navigation and weather technology — sailed into the raging heart of the storm.
Everyone aboard perished in what ranks as the worst U.S.
maritime disaster in three decades.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were left to grapple with a seemingly unanswerable question: Why?
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board released undersea footage showing the wreck of the cargo ship El Faro, which sank during Hurricane Joaquin in early October, 2015. Video documentation of the El Faro wreckage and associated debris field from the CURV-21 remotely operated vehicle.
The NTSB launched one of the most comprehensive inquiries in its 50-year history, interviewing dozens of experts and colleagues, friends, and family members of the crew.
Then, last August, came the crucial discovery: A robot submersible retrieved El Faro’s voyage data recorder from the three-mile-deep seabed.
The black box contained everything that was said on the ship’s bridge, right up to its final moments afloat.
The transcript reveals a narrative that unfolds in almost cinematic detail, with foreshadowing, tension, courage, and hubris.
Like most tragedies, no one factor brought on the disaster — but human error was chief among the problems.
This is the answer to the riddle of El Faro’s baffling final path, in the words of the crew members themselves.
SEPTEMBER 30, 5:36 AM
As the recording begins, El Faro — Spanish for “the lighthouse” — is 150 nautical miles southeast of Jacksonville, Florida, steaming toward San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The sea is calm.
In the predawn darkness, the ship’s captain, 53-year-old Michael Davidson, pores over navigational charts with 51-year-old chief mate Steve Shultz.
El Faro shuttles the weeklong route back and forth between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico roughly four times a month, as regular as a commuter train, carrying cars and containers filled with groceries, clothing, electronics, and other consumer goods.
Today, though, there’s a hiccup.
Tropical Storm Joaquin, which has just been upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane.
The ship can expect 45-mile-an-hour winds and 12 to 15-foot swells — a rough ride even for the 790-foot El Faro.
Hurricane Joaquin is 200 miles northeast of the Bahamas and currently on a course straight for the islands — and El Faro’s track line — but the forecast predicts the storm will soon curve to the northwest.
If they angle their course slightly south, Davidson reasons, they’ll scoot through a gap between the islands and the storm.
This would be only a 10-mile diversion, a distance that means the trip will take just 30 minutes longer and burn a negligible amount of extra fuel.
Still, the decision doesn’t seem to sit well with Davidson.
A 20-year veteran of the U.S.
Merchant Marine, he had applied for a transfer to a newer ship with TOTE Maritime, El Faro’s shipping company.
He may have thought that even a minute amount of extra expense wouldn’t help his cause.
“We’re not that much off course,” Davidson says, as if to reassure himself.
“It’s a good little diversion.
Are you feelin’ comfortable with that, Chief Mate?”
“Yes, sir,” Shultz says and adds, “The other option is drastic.”
That option is a more southerly route called the Old Bahama Channel, which would require the ship to turn 90 degrees to the right, sail 200 miles south, then turn east, and sail along the northern coast of Cuba, sheltered by the islands of the Bahamas.
The ride would be much smoother, but the trip to San Juan would be 160 miles longer — six hours’ sailing time and about $5,000 in extra fuel.
“It doesn’t warrant it,” Davidson says.
“Can’t run from every weather pattern.”
“Not for a 40-knot wind.”
“Now, that would be the action for some guy that’s never been anywhere else.”
The captain mimics a panicky voice: “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Davidson had endured plenty of rough water, including a decade running oil tankers from the legendarily stormy Gulf of Alaska to the West Coast.
He noted one particular voyage across the Atlantic in the transcript: “We had a gust registered at 102 knots.
It was the roughest storm I had ever been in — ever.”
“It should be fine,” Davidson says, then corrects himself.
“We are gonna be fine, not should be.
We are gonna be fine.”
To the east, the sky is growing bright.
“Oh, look at that red sky over there.
‘Red in the morning, sailors take warning,’ ” Davidson says, quoting the old seafarers’ saw.
“That isbright.”
11:45 AM
The morning opens into a fine tropical day, blue skies with temperatures in the high 80s.
But the swell has started to build with the energy of Joaquin, still some 300 miles away.
At noon, 34-year-old second mate Danielle Randolph begins her shift on the bridge.
Randolph is a popular member of the crew, an extrovert with a passion for pumpkin-spice coffee and a penchant for singing along with the radio.
By now the ship is approaching the first of the Bahamian islands, Little Abaco.
Third mate Jeremie Riehm tells Randolph about the slightly altered course that Davidson has laid out.
As second mate, Randolph is responsible for the ship’s navigation.
She makes clear that she doesn’t think the captain is taking Joaquin seriously enough.
“He’s telling everybody down there, ‘Oh, it’s not a bad storm — it’s not even that windy out.
I’ve seen worse,’ ” she tells Riehm.
Even the amended route El Faro is on exposes it to the risk of getting trapped between the storm and the shallow waters of the Bahamas.
“It’s nothing — it’s nothing!” Randolph says, quoting Davidson.
“I think he’s trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way.
Saving face.”
Minutes later, Davidson returns to the bridge, complaining that the engine room isn’t giving him as much speed as he’d like.
“Oh yeah?” Randolph asks.
“I think now it’s not a matter of speed.
When we get there, we get there — as long as we arrive in one piece.”
3:45 PM
By the time chief mate Shultz returns for his 4 PM to 8 PM shift, the ocean swell has increased to eight feet, the crests whipped into whitecaps by the stiffening wind.
The deck crew has tightened the lashings that hold El Faro’s 391 containers in place on the deck and scoured the ship to make sure everything has been secured.
El Faro’s sister ship, El Yunque, is 33 miles abeam, heading in the opposite direction toward Jacksonville.
Shultz calls on the radio for a chat.
El Yunque’s chief mate tells him that they put on speed to outrace Joaquin but still got beat up pretty bad.
At one point, they recorded gusts of more than 100 miles an hour.
“You are going the wrong way,” the chief mate says.
When Davidson returns to the bridge, Shultz does not pass along this warning.
“There could be a chance that we could turn around?” asks the helmsman on duty, 49-year-old Frank Hamm.
“Oh, no, no, no,” says Davidson.
“We’re not gonna turn around.”
6:51 PM
As twilight settles, Davidson comes up from his office to find Shultz standing watch.
“I just sent you the latest weather,” Davidson tells him.
Four times a day, the captain receives a forecast from a private meteorological service he subscribes to called Bon Voyage System (BVS).
Its colorful graphics, with areas of severe weather in yellow and dangerous weather in red, are easy to understand, and Davidson relies on the reports exclusively, ignoring the hurricane alerts and National Weather Service (NWS) updates that are printed out and posted on the bridge, and are the standards most captains use.
What Davidson doesn’t know is that the BVS forecasts are up to 21 hours out-of-date, and their estimate of Joaquin’s location is off by as much as 500 miles.
The free NWS reports are timelier and more accurate.
But by now, even the BVS forecast has grown ominous.
It shows the storm continuing on its southern course toward the Bahamas and El Faro.
Davidson plots a new course that will take them around San Salvador Island, which, according to the BVS chart, will provide shelter and limit the size of the swells.
However, the three officers have been watching more accurate forecasts and have a much clearer idea of what’s in store.
All three tell Davidson they’re concerned about the ship’s course, but the captain is unfazed.
Davidson leaves the bridge at 8 PM, just after third mate Riehm relieves Shultz.
“I will definitely be up for the better part of your watch,” Davidson tells Riehm.
“So if you see anything you don’t like, don’t hesitate to give me a shout.”
He heads to his stateroom for the night.
As he leaves, the National Hurricane Center upgrades Joaquin to a Category 2, with winds of 105 miles an hour.
10:30 PM
As the night drags on, the weather gets progressively worse.
Bands of heavy rain and gale-force winds lash the ship as El Faro enters the main body of the storm system, an area of rainfall the size of South Carolina.
In the control room, Randolph continues to worry about their predicament.
If they were in the open ocean and the storm grew dangerous, they could turn tail and run, but as it is, their options are limited, with the ship hemmed in by the islands and reefs to the southwest.
“We don’t have much space,” she tells her helmsman, Larry Davis.
“Not much wiggle room, you know, ’cause it’s so shallow everywhere.”
“I don’t like our chances,” the helmsman says.
At 12:26 AM, the satcom printer, which provides the latest updates from the NWS, chatters to life and spits out a new report.
Randolph tears it off and reads.
Joaquin hasn’t turned, as all the forecasts predicted.
In fact, it’s grown stronger, and they’re heading right into it.
“I may have a solution,” Randolph says.
She shows the helmsman the chart.
Around 2 AM, they’ll pass Rum Cay.
At that point, they can turn south and head for Crooked Island Passage.
They’ll avoid hurricane-force winds, and once through the passage, they’ll be sheltered from the swell by the islands.
“From there we connect with the Old Bahama Channel,” Randolph says.
A weather report comes on the radio: Joaquin has been upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane, with winds of more than 111 miles an hour.
As if on cue, three minutes later, the ship lurches violently to the left, nearly knocking Randolph and the helmsman off their feet.
“Whoa!” the helmsman shouts.
“Biggest one since I’ve been up here.
This is fixing to get interesting.”
“Mistaaake,” Randolph drawls.
Joaquin 1st Oct, 2017 satellite view
courtesy of Weather
OCTOBER 1, 1:20 AM
El Faro approaches Rum Cay.
If Randolph is going to make a turn to the south, she’ll have to do it soon.
“I’m going to give the captain a call,” she says.
When Davidson finally picks up, it’s clear he’s been asleep.
“It isn’t looking good,” Randolph tells him, then explains her idea.
Davidson isn’t convinced.
He tells her the worst of the storm will soon be behind them, so she should stay on course.
She hangs up and turns to the helmsman.
“He said to run it.”
At this point, Randolph has a choice.
Her captain has given her an order that she knows could have a terrible outcome.
She can follow it, putting her crew mates in certain danger, or she can take matters into her own hands and turn the ship toward a hope of safety.
Going rogue, though, is not an option for Danielle Randolph.
To defy Davidson’s order is the kind of insubordination that would get her fired upon arrival in San Juan.
The chain of command has ruled life at sea for centuries, and for good reason: A crew’s safety is dependent on discipline, with no room for dissension.
A captain’s unquestioned authority is something a mariner accepts with the job.
So, instead of turning south, Randolph instructs the helmsman to continue east.
Directly into the storm.
1:55 AM
A particularly large wave slams into the ship.
“That was a good one,” Randolph says.
“Definitely lost some speed.
Although we’re not doing the max RPMs.”
The ship’s engine burns oil to generate steam, which drives the turbine that turns the propeller.
It’s technology that was familiar to sailors during Titanic’s era.
If the boiler can’t generate enough heat, the propeller’s revolutions per minute will fall and the ship will slow.
The 40-year-old El Faro had reportedly suffered loss of propulsion at sea before, and its boilers were scheduled to be repaired later that fall.
A little-known quirk of the powerplant design was that if the ship listed, or leaned over, more than 15 degrees — an unlikely possibility — the lubricating oil would run to one side and the engine would stop.
It’s a problem that is less likely to occur on modern ships.
“Damn sure don’t want to lose the plant,” the helmsman says, referring to El Faro’s engine.
That’s because a ship is designed to plunge through heavy weather bow first.
But with insufficient power, wind and swell will cause it to list sideways, exposing a vulnerable flank.
Soon the ship could take on and fill with water, then capsize.
El Faro ship
2:44 AM
Over the next hour, Joaquin batters the ship with increasing intensity.
Waves break over the bow, sending torrents of water surging over the deck.
Explosions of spray splatter the windows of the bridge.
Unseen clankings reverberate over the howling of the wind as the storm wrenches away loose fittings.
“Figured the captain would be up here,” says the helmsman.
“I thought so, too,” says Randolph.
“He’ll play hero tomorrow,” the helmsman says.
A few minutes later, a massive wave hits.
“That was a doozy,” Randolph says, nervously laughing.
“We won’t be able to take more of those.”
Minutes later another wave hits, and this one nearly knocks Randolph off her feet.
An electronic alarm sounds, warning that the ship’s autopilot has been shoved off course by the force of waves that have grown too big for it to handle.
4:09 AM
Shultz arrives on the bridge and relieves Randolph, who goes below deck and staggers to her cabin.
There she writes an email to her mother: “We are heading straight for the hurricane. Give my love to everyone.”
On the bridge, Davidson returns after an eight-hour absence.
The winds raking the ship are 100-plus miles per hour, but Davidson feigns nonchalance.
“There’s nothing bad about this ride,” he says.
When Shultz asks if he’s managed to get any sleep, he says he’s been “sleeping like a baby.”
“Not me,” Shultz says.
“What? Who’s not sleepin’ good? How come?”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Well, this is every day in Alaska,” Davidson retorts.
Shultz points out that the ship is listing to the right.
The wind is hitting El Faro’s exposed left f lank, pushing it even further to the right side.
“Yeah,” the captain says.
“The only way to do a counter on this is to fill the portside ramp tank up.”
In other words, they can pump stored water from the right side to the left side of the ship, to help steady it against the wind.
If they don’t, the list will continue and the powerplant could fail.
While Davidson goes to get breakfast, the chief engineer phones to tell Shultz that the engine lubricating oil is acting up.
Evidently, shifting the water hasn’t worked.
It’s time for plan B: Turn El Faro into the wind.
Davidson rushes back to the bridge.
“Going to steer right up into it,” he declares.
“Let’s put it in hand-steering.”
To prevent a more drastic list, they need to point the bow directly into the hurricane-force wind.
But that’s no easy feat.
El Faro is now in the eye wall of a hurricane that is strengthening from Category 3 to Category 4.
Thirty-foot waves, their crests whipped to foam by 115-mile-an-hour winds, hammer the ship every 10 seconds.
The wind howling against the bridge sounds like a jet engine on takeoff.
courtesy of Reuters
5:43 AM
“We got a prrroooblem,” Davidson says.
Engineering has called with more bad news.
A type of hatch called a scuttle, located between cargo decks, has flown open, allowing water to flood the hull of the ship.
A lot of water sloshing in an open hold makes a ship incredibly unstable and prone to capsizing.
Efforts to seal the hatch fail, so Davidson orders the crew to run water pumps to remove the seawater.
He tells Shultz to go check it out.
The chief engineer calls in soon after.
“OK,” Davidson tells him, “I’m going to turn the ship and get the wind on the starboard side.
Give us a port list.” Davidson hopes that with the ship leaning in the other direction, the water will drain away and they can secure the hatch.
Sensing that the ship is in trouble, Randolph returns to the bridge in her off-duty clothes.
Davidson greets her with a friendly “Hi!” and tells her about the hatch.
A few minutes later, Randolph notices that the engine power is falling and asks, “Did we come down on the RPM, or did they do that?” referring to the engine room.
Davidson says he didn’t ask them to reduce power.
It’s more than worrying.
A loud thump comes from outside.
“There goes the lawn furniture,” says Randolph, likely seeing objects on the deck start to come untethered.
“I’m not liking this list,” Davidson says.
A few seconds later, the engine RPMs drop.
He turns to Randolph: “I think we just lost the plant.”
6:55 AM
By now the goal is no longer to get to San Juan but to simply keep the ship afloat.
With each swell, El Faro lurches further onto its right side.
“How long we supposed to be in this storm?” Hamm asks.
“Should get better all the time,” Davidson says.
“We’re on the back side of it.”
Davidson makes a satellite phone call to Capt.
John Lawrence, the head of TOTE’s emergency response team and the man responsible for coordinating rescue efforts.
Instead of abandoning El Faro, Davidson tells him, “No one’s panicking.
Everybody’s been made aware.
Our safest bet is to stay with the ship.
The weather is ferocious out here.”
After he hangs up, Davidson tells Randolph to send a satellite distress signal.
“Roger.” The satellite terminal chirps: Message sent.
The time is 7:13 AM.
“All hell’s gonna break loose,” Davidson says.
Somewhere, alarm bells are ringing and rescue teams are saddling up.
“Wake everybody up!” Davidson shouts.
“Wake ’em up!” He adds: “We’re going to be good.
We’re going to make it.”
Shultz hurries back to the bridge.
“I think that water level’s rising, Captain.”
But he can’t determine where the water is f looding in.
“I saw cars bobbing around.”
“All right, we’re going to ring the general alarm here and wake everybody up,” Davidson says.
“We’re definitely not in good shape right now.”
Davidson tells Shultz to “muster all the mates,” then calls the engine room: “Captain here.
Just want to let you know I am going to ring the general alarm .
We’re not going to abandon ship or anything just yet.
All right? We’re gonna stay with it.”
Davidson hangs up, turns to the crew on the bridge, and shouts, “Ring it!”
A series of high-pitch tones blare throughout the ship.
7:28 AM
Shultz calls in on a walkie-talkie to report that everybody has mustered on the starboard side.
“Captain, you getting ready to abandon ship?”
“Yeah, what I’d like to make sure is everybody has their immersion suits, and get a good head count.”
A minute later, Randolph lets out a yell.
“I got containers in the water!”
Ravaged by the 115-mile-an-hour wind and bashed by crashing waves, stacks of containers on the deck have started to plunge into the ocean.
The ship is coming apart.
“Ring the abandon ship,” Davidson orders.
A high-frequency bell tone rings in seven short pulses, followed by a long pulse.
“Tell them we’re going in,” says Davidson loudly.
Randolph asks if she can get her life vest.
Davidson says yes and asks her to bring his and one for helmsman Hamm.
“I need them, too!” Hamm yells.
“Please!”
“OK, buddy, relax,” Davidson says.
“Go ahead, Second Mate.”
Randolph leaves, and the captain and the helmsman are alone on the bridge.
The ship is taking on water fast.
The morning light is strong enough now that, through the rain and spray, Davidson can see the front of the ship slip beneath the roiling surface.
“Bow is down,” Davidson says.
“Bow is down!”
He calls Shultz on the radio: “Chief Mate, Chief Mate.”
“Hey, Captain!” Shultz shouts over the freight-train roar of the storm.
“Get into your rafts!” the captain yells.
“Throw all your rafts into the water.”
“Throw the rafts in the water.
Roger.”
“Everybody get off!” Davidson shouts.
“Get off the ship.
Stay together!”
On the bridge, Hamm has slipped on the now steeply pitched deck and is having trouble climbing up.
Each time the ship lurches, the slope gets steeper.
“Cap ... Cap,” he’s saying.
“What? Come on, Hamm. Gotta move. You gotta get up. You gotta snap out of it.”
“OK,” Hamm says.
“Help me.”
“You gotta get to safety, Hamm,” Davidson pleads.
Hamm is becoming increasingly panicked.
“You’re going to leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you! Let’s go!”
Hamm lets out a primal scream.
“I need somebody to help me! You don’t want to help me?”
“I’m the only one here, Hamm.”
“I can’t!” Hamm yells.
“I’m a goner.”
“No, you’re not!” Davidson shouts.
Hamm screams as the deck lurches ever steeper.
The voices cut out.
7:39 AM
Thousands of tons of water crash onto El Faro’s exposed left flank.
Destabilized by flooding below decks, the ship eases past the critical angle.
The deck rises up to vertical, then past it, and like a toppled seven-story building, it breaks apart.
Containers stacked on the fore and aft decks scatter like Jenga blocks as seawater surges into the shattered hull.
The crew members mustered below are unable to launch the lifeboats.
Even if they could, the open-top boats would likely capsize almost immediately.
The life jackets and immersion suits are likewise useless.
Simply put, trying to abandon El Faro in the teeth of a Category 4 hurricane is suicide, and the crew doubtless knew it.
A hundred feet beneath the roiling waves, where the morning light fades into perpetual black, the sea is calm.
Torn-off sections of the ship ride downward toward it, streaming bubbles, followed by a torrent of man-made objects: containers, cars, air conditioners.
They fall three miles down, into the quiet.
Courtesy NBCMiami / NTSB
The Aftermath
The Coast Guard in Portsmouth, Virginia, picks up El Faro’s emergency signal.
They spend a day trying to radio the ship.
Days later, once the storm has subsided, they send an HC-130 reconnaissance plane from Clearwater, Florida.
It spots nothing.
When Danielle Randolph’s mother, Laurie Bobillot, opens the last email that her daughter sent her, she immediately fears the worst.
The sign-off — “Give my love to everyone” — sounds like a farewell.
Three days after the sinking, a Coast Guard helicopter sees a body floating in an immersion suit but is unable to retrieve it.
No other remains are ever found.
The immediate reaction was to question the judgment of Michael Davidson.
“I don’t think he believed he was going to get into 100-knot winds, even though the data was right there in front of him,” says Seattle-based ship captain George Collazo, who has done research on the causes of maritime disasters.
“You do something so many times and it always comes out right — you start to get a feeling of invulnerability.”
However, Collazo adds, in the shipping industry, a captain’s job is defined not simply by getting from point A to point B, but by how well he leads and listens to his crew.
By spring 2017, all of El Faro crew’s next of kin had settled claims against TOTE for $500,000 each in pain and suffering and undisclosed amounts for financial loss.
Insurers paid TOTE $36 million for the ship’s loss.
Last May, those insurers launched a lawsuit against StormGeo, the company that owns Bon Voyage System, claiming that its outdated reports were to blame for the disaster.
Apart from settling accounts, anger remains.
“The laws need to be changed,” says Kurt Bruer, a seaman who had worked on El Faro.
“The industry is more interested in protecting the Jones Act [the law that requires that only U.S. ships sail to and from U.S. ports] than they are about safety.
They don’t care about us mariners — we’re just replaceable bodies.”
NTSB releases additional video documentation on last year's efforts to locate and recover the El Faro voyage data recorder.
The NTSB, still working on its investigation, does not expect to issue a final report until this fall.
(Both TOTE and StormGeo, citing the unfinished investigation, declined comment for this story.) Even if the NTSB proposes new regulations, there will be powerful industry resistance to any money-spending measures.
Mandating closed lifeboats for older ships, for instance, would be opposed strongly by ship owners as being overly expensive, says Robert Markle, a marine safety consultant for the Coast Guard.
“This whole tragedy has opened my eyes so much,” says Bobillot.
She reels off a litany of safety shortcomings aboard El Faro, from a shortage of emergency locator beacons to the lack of closed lifeboats.
“Had I known half of what I know now, I would have totally discouraged Danielle from shipping out,” she says.
Then she laughs ruefully.
“I don’t know if she would have listened to her mother.”
Since June, Coast Guard vessels patrolling the US's southern approaches have stopped seven low-profile smuggling vessels — stealthy ships that ride low in the water to spirit illicit cargos from South America to Mexico and the US.
US authorities sit on a "narco-submarine" found off the coast of El Salvador, July 18, 2015. US Customs and Border Patrol
Akin to self-propelled semi-submersibles used by smugglers for the same purpose, low-profile vessels are boats designed to run near or at surface level to present the smallest possible radar signature.
Low-profile vessels usually have a sharp bow to cut through the water and an elongated body to transport cargo — typically high-value drugs like cocaine.
Some only have masts or conning towers that stick out above water, and they are often outfitted with multiple outboard engines and painted to blend in with the water.
The Coast Guard said the last time a low-profile vessel was stopped prior to the current fiscal year was in late May 2016.
Six narco subs were caught during that fiscal year (and one was intercepted in September, the first month of fiscal year 2017).
The seven interdictions since June occurred in drug-transit areas in the eastern Pacific, off the coasts of South and Central America.
US Coast Guardsmen sit atop a narco sub stopped in the Pacific Ocean in early September 2016.
US Coast Guard
In mid-August, Coast Guard cutter Steadfast intercepted a suspected low-profile vessel several hundred miles off the coast of Central America, seizing more than 6,000 pounds of cocaine and arresting four suspected traffickers.
Another low-profile vessel — six feet wide and 54 feet long — was stopped by Coast Guard cutter Waesche off the Central American coast in early June, after the cutter tracked the vessel for almost 100 miles. The Waesche's crew arrested four suspected smugglers and seized 2.79 tons of cocaine.
The US and partner forces have stepped up their activity in the eastern Pacific, and cocaine production has risen considerably in Colombia, the world's biggest producer of the drug.
The result has been "a significant increase in narcotics removal" in drug-transit areas off South and Central America, the Coast Guard said.
During fiscal year 2016, the Coast Guard set a record by seizing more than 443,000 pounds of cocaine bound for the US.
The service says it is on pace for another record-setting amount of seizures this fiscal year, though officials have warned that it doesn't have the resources to fully address the trafficking activity it detects.
Take a look inside what Colombian drug smugglers use to carry tons of cocaine across the sea.
And how arm forces hunts them down.
The ocean area from Colombia to the Galapagos and up to the Mexican and US coasts is about the size of the continental US, Vice Adm. Charles Ray, the Coast Guard's deputy commandant for operations, said at a hearing earlier this month.
"On any given day we'll have between six to 10 Coast Guard cutters down here," Ray added.
"If you imagine placing that on [an area the size of] the United States ... it's a capacity challenge."
US officials believe about 90% of the cocaine shipped to the US traverses the sea at some point, typically arriving somewhere in Central America or Mexico and being smuggled over the US-Mexico land border.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says about 93% of the cocaine sent to the US comes through the Mexico/Central America corridor.
US anti-narcotics officials also think they intercept about one of every four tons of cocaine headed for the US, with about 69% of it stopped in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Narco subs — a category that includes fully submersible vessels, semi-submersible vessels, or towed containers — appeared in the 1990s, as Colombian smugglers sought to stay ahead of law-enforcement's detection abilities.
Fully submersible and semi-submersible vessels are hard to detect and expensive to build (though their cargos are valuable enough that a single trip can cover the price), so interceptions of them are not that common.
A Coast Guard cutter Stratton boarding team investigates a
self-propelled semi-submersible off the coast of Central America, July
19, 2015.
US Coast Guard/Petty Officer 2nd Class LaNola Stone
Low-profile vessels, which are not technically semi-submersible, are the majority of seized drug-smuggling vessels, according to a 2014 report.
Low-profile vessels can come in various forms, often balancing speed and stealth in different ways.
A more recent variation appears to be what naval expert HI Sutton called "very slender vessels" — elongated vessels that go through waves rather than over them.
In April, Guatemalan forces found an abandoned vessel that appeared to be a VSV, as did the crew of the Waesche in June.
VSVs sacrifice cargo size for stealthiness and speed, and their appearance suggests a maturation in the designs of Colombian traffickers — in particular Los Urabeños, the country's most powerful criminal group — Sutton notes.
A abandoned low-profile vessel found by the Guatemalan coast guard on April 22, 2017.
Guatemalan army/US Southern Command
Narco subs are typically constructed near Colombia's Pacific coast, assembled under cover of jungle canopy.
They're moved through rivers and mangroves to the coast once completed, and their smuggling routes typically take them out into the Pacific — sometimes around the Galapagos Islands — before turning north.
"In recent years, 'narco-sub' vessels (mostly LPVs) have been built with upper lead shielding which helps to minimize their heat signature and hence they can evade infrared sensors," according to a 2014 paper in Small Wars Journal.
"Some of the newer models have piping along the bottom to allow the water to cool the exhaust as the ship moves, making it even less susceptible to infrared detection."
In addition to the Coast Guard air and sea assets deployed to stop traffickers, US Customs and Border Patrol have eight P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft converted into Long Range Trackers.
The former Navy aircraft have been upgraded with radars originally designed for the F-16 fighter jet, as well as optical sensors.
Until a few years ago, no serious consideration had been made of the many and varied representations of monsters found on world maps from the 10th century through to medieval and Renaissance times.
Yet they made so many appearances for a reason.
These monsters of the deep had caused concern – indeed struck fear into – sailors around the globe.
Although some of the images seem fantastic to the modern world, most of the creatures had some basis on true encounters, and their depiction on maps are a great example of how mythology and folklore can evolve from real events.
Like many cartographers of the era, Matthaeus Merian filled his maps' blank spaces with frightening creatures, like this sinister seamonster.
During the Age of Exploration, sailors provided natural philosophers and cartographers with firsthand accounts of the unfamiliar animals and people beyond the horizon.
Their experiences in this “New World” were informed by folk tales, biblical lore, and racial and cultural biases (not to mention the anxiety of sailing into unknown waters), and as a result, many of the creatures they encountered were interpreted as terrifying monsters.
Merian took this theme a step further, and surrounded his title cartouche with ominous skulls and bones to underscore the mysteries and dangers he and Europeans of his time associated with the New World and its surrounding oceans.
His message can be loosely interpreted as, “Beware, explorers and sailors, or these skulls might be yours!”
In 2013, the British Library released a book which took the study of these creatures seriously and offered a full and detailed account of the menacing artwork appearing on these maps.
Chet Van Duzer's " Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps" (British Library, 2013) catalogues a variety of examples of ‘sea monsters’ which cartographers had seen fit to include in previously unchartered areas of the world, issuing possible warnings of the creatures that had been or might be encountered in certain ocean territories.
Although it has been thought that the inclusion of these mythical creatures were simply the results of illustrators’ over-zealous artistic license and overactive imagination, many of the ocean’s creatures, such as whales, sharks, walruses and squid would have rarely been seen, and would have been viewed as monsters in medieval and Renaissance times.
Taken from the vignettes on Olaus Magnus's Carta marina, Basel c.1544 (Public Domain)
"The creatures look purely fantastic.
They all look like they were just made up," Van Duzer, a map historian at the Library of Congress, said in an interview concerning his book.
"But, in fact, a lot of them come from what were considered, at the time, scientific sources." For example, it was quite usual for the encyclopedias of the time to contain reference to strange looking terrestrial-aquatic-hybrid animals and mapmakers just took some poetic license in depicting them.
In his book, Van Duzer, who was a 2012 Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress, charts the origins of sea monsters from "mappa mundi," medieval European maps of the world; nautical maps; and Ptolemy's Geography, a treatise by the Greco-Roman mathematician and scientist Claudius Ptolemy, which contained an atlas of the known world during the second century.
The Kraken is but one example of a real sea creature being transformed into a beast of legend.
It is first mentioned in the Örvar-Oddr, a 13th century Icelandic saga.
In Scandinavian mythology, this gigantic sea creature was said to be 1 mile long.
It was depicted as great beast that would attack ships and was so huge that its body could be mistaken for an island.
St.Brendan's ship on the back of a whale.
From by Chet Van Duzer and published by the British Library:
'Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps' (CC BY 2.0)
The Kraken was also made it into the first edition of Systema Naturae [1735], a taxonomic classification of living organisms by the Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist Carolus Linnaeus.
Here the Kraken was classified as a cephalopod, designating the scientific name Microcosmus marinus.
The myth of the Kraken is believed by historians and scientists to relate to the real world giant squid, which can reach 18 meters in length and has been rarely seen due to its normal habitat being deep in the ocean.
Iceland is burning and attacked by sea monsters. Map by Abraham Ortelius Flemmish Cartographer (Public Domain)
By tracing the depictions of sea monsters throughout the centuries, Van Duzer presented an evolution from a world full of dangers lurking in distant oceans where gigantic octopuses and whales drag ships and sailors into the sea, to 17 th century maps showing ships exerting dominion over the beasts of the ocean.
Eventually, the beasts disappeared from maps altogether.
The take away from Van Duzer’s fascinating depiction of sea monsters is that mythological stories and legends of the past, however fanciful they seem, often stem from real life events or experiences.
Many of the stories from our ancient ancestors evolved from real events that were portrayed according to the understanding and knowledge of the time.
They may have become exaggerated and stray far from reality (any creature 1 mile long is stretching it) but the origin often hails from a seed of truth.
The Italian harbor city of Venice is famous for its many canals and
bridges.
Built along the shores of the Adriatic Sea, the canals were
used for protection, sheltering the city from the mainland, and
transportation within the city.
For the first time, research by the
Italian Institute for Marine Research (Ismar-Cnr) and the Italian Navy
has revealed what lies beneath the water's surface.
Venezia in the GeoGarage platform (Navimap/IIM nautical chart)
The depth of the canals was measured in high details using echolocation technology.
Using the time needed by the signals to be reflected from the ground,
not only can the depth be calculated, but also the density and type of
encountered substrates.
The light pink polygon depicts the area surveyed by the Istituto Idrografico della Marina (IIM) (Italian Hydrographic Institute), whereas the coloured ones the CNR-ISMAR weekly covered areas. Pseudo-true-colour LANDSAT 8 OLI imagery as background.
The scans show areas of sediment accumulation
and sediment erosion, which is especially important for the maintenance
of the canals.
Yellow and red colors in the published data show shallow
water - in some cases just three feet deep.
Green and blue colors are
deep water, thirty to sixty feet deep at least.
The maximum depth found
in the Venetian Lagoon is 164 feet below sea level.
Bathymetry of the main channel to the seaport of Venice (eastern part).
Source and Credit: Ismar-Cnr/Google Earth.
Main channel (western part) and seaport of Venice,
note the large cruise ships anchored along the piers in the port.
Source and Credit: Ismar-Cnr/Google Earth.
The artificial channels significantly changed the currents in the
lagoon of Venice.
Marine lifeforms living here have to deal with strong
seasonal variations of salinity and oxygen, as the exchange of water
with the open sea is limited.
Tides transport sediments into the lagoon.
Because the Venetian Lagoon is now separated from the open sea by dams,
the sediments tend to accumulate and fill the canals and the lagoon.
The scans also revealed another type of anthropogenic impact.
In some
pictures strange round features are recognizable on the ground of the
canals, disposed tires and other trash.
Tires, parts of
smaller boats and possibly house utensils disposed in one of the many
smaller canals. Maximum depth in this image is twenty feet.
‘People say, How did you first become interested in animals?,
and I say: Was there a time when you were not interested in animals?’ "All we have to do is keep declaring the facts as we see the facts, and producing the evidence whenever we can"
His sequel to The Blue Planet will focus not only on the marvels of sea life but also the threats to it. The naturalist explains why plastic pollution, climate change and overpopulation are problems too urgent to be left to ecologists
David Attenborough vividly remembers, nearly 80 years on, his first encounter with one of the worst scourges of the planet.
He was a schoolboy.
“I remember my headmaster, who was also my science master, saying: ‘Boys, we’ve entered a new era! We’ve entered, we’ll be proud to say, the plastic era.
And what is so wonderful about this is we’ve used all our scientific ingenuity to make sure that it’s virtually indestructible.
It doesn’t decay, you know, it’s wonderful.’”
Plastics are the latest in a long line of concerns for the 91-year-old naturalist.
They are a key theme of his latest work for television, the new series of The Blue Planet, which he will return to writing after our interview.
Premiering at the BFI Imax in London this Wednesday – with Prince William as a special guest – the series will focus not only on the marvels of ocean life, but the threats to it, of which plastic is one of the worst.
It will also deal with what people can do to help.
Plastic Oceans
The arc by which plastics started off as a wonder of technology and ended up as a calamity is familiar to the veteran conservationist.
It seems to be repeated endlessly: CFC aerosols and refrigerants destroying the ozone layer; pesticides killing wildlife; the fossil energies that fuelled a career based around television and exotic international travel resulting in climate change; the advances in medicine prolonging life and bringing good health, but giving us a population explosion that Attenborough fears will endanger further species, including our own.
For Attenborough, however, there must always be a message of optimism running above and beyond any warnings of doom.
While he admits to sadness at the disappearances he has witnessed – “Overall, without any question, the world is not going to be as varied and as rich as it was a hundred years ago” – he insists on practical solutions.
“It’s within our power, because most of the problems are created by us, and we can solve them or should be able to solve them,” he says, slapping his knee emphatically.
“There are solutions, and there is cause for hope, and there’s cause for encouragement, and it isn’t all disasters.”
Take plastics.
That problem could be solved “if we got together, within a decade, if not less”.
It could be dealt with technically, through potential breakthroughs such as degradable plastic.
“And disposing of it could be dealt with technically,” he adds.
This could involve ways to collect and filter plastics from the sea, and to absorb or break down the plastics that are already there.
And “stop putting plastic in the sea”.
A career spanning seven decades has earned him a loyal following of tens if not hundreds of millions of viewers, who are entranced by his delight in the beauties and savageries he witnesses.
It has also given him a unique authority.
When Attenborough speaks, viewers tend to trust him.
For years, he kept this trust to himself.
He was associated with several conservation groups, from Flora and Fauna International to the Dragonfly Society, but did not use his public platform to make prescriptions for the planet’s future.
For this, he was sometimes criticized by green activists, who wanted him to take a public lead on issues such as climate change.
It is evidently a criticism he feels a need to address, and, without prompting, he offers that in his earlier career he felt inhibited by his association with the BBC, where he was a channel controller as well as presenter, and the need to be strictly impartial.
“I joined the BBC after [national service in] the navy, and there was a monopoly and it was like a civil service.
So you had to be guarding against propaganda or guarding against grinding axes.
And so the moment had to be judged as to when it was you suddenly started talking about conservation and when it was that you were behind the Greenpeaces of this world.
They were the cutting edge and you, as a broadcaster, had to make sure that both sides of the argument were ventilated until such time as you, in your professional capacity, thought it was absolutely justified to say: ‘This is incontrovertible, this is what we’re doing to the natural world.’”
As he has felt more free to speak out, one of the more controversial areas Attenborough has addressed is population growth.
Of all the world’s problems, this is the one he sees as central and most difficult to solve, although it is a tricky and unpopular cause to take up.
Many high-profile environmentalists will privately agree that the rapid growth in the world’s population – now at more than 7 billion, a tripling since Attenborough was born – creates further problems, because feeding 9 billion by 2050 will be hard, and raising people out of poverty even harder, and it makes a real conundrum of giving people decent lives, opportunities and governance, while protecting dwindling natural resources and halting climate change.
For a start, it sounds offensive, even patronising – particularly coming from anyone who lives a relatively privileged life in a developed country.
For another, it crosses religious and other taboos.
And – for many the clincher – it can look like blaming the more numerous poor of the developing world for problems emphatically not of their making.
Attenborough chooses his words slowly.
“I sometimes question whether I should be more positive or more outgoing on the question.
The trouble is that we don’t know the answer.
What we all say is that if women are given political freedom and education and medical facilities and all the rest of it, the birth rate falls.
That’s actually not the whole question.
It’s more complicated than that.
But it’s all I can say in response.
One should be very cautious about imposing, from where I sit, regulations where other people have got the problems.”
But he will draw the links between population growth and ecological destruction.
“The whole question of migration out of Africa across the Mediterranean has multiple causes and part of it is the political systems, but part of it is undoubtedly ecological systems and sociological problems.
I mean the changing of the climate in Africa, the spread of the desert in Africa, the rise of political systems which oppress – all those things mount up.
That’s why conservation is not any more just the affair of ecologists.”
Viewing conservation as part of the whole future of humanity, rather than a thing apart, is one of Attenborough’s great legacies.
He is spearheading an effort at Cambridge University to bring all academic disciplines – “not just other botanists, not just ecologists, but law, international lawyers, psychologists, geographers, political scientists and so on” – to bear on the pressing problems of the planet.
“Break down those walls and get people talking about it who wouldn’t otherwise meet,” he says.
The Cambridge Conservation Initiative is a collaboration among 10 institutions, housed in the new Sir David Attenborough building in Cambridge.
Its future has just been assured by a $10m (£7.4m) endowment from Arcadia, the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing, one of the heirs to the Tetra Pak fortune, and her husband, Peter Baldwin.
It will work across all conservation and environmental issues, and its ethos mirrors Attenborough’s own polymathic approach: the idea is that people will congregate in the building, from all over the world as well as across disciplines, for the cross-fertilisation of knowledge.
Attenborough spent two years at Clare College, Cambridge, from 1945, taking a degree truncated by the war.
“It was two years of unalloyed bliss,” he says.
“It’s a sudden great opening of windows, if you’re a provincial grammar school boy like me.
And you were with these people who had been fighter pilots and so on and you realised that the sun had come out over Europe and over you.
You were just looking through intellectual windows and singing, yes, madrigals – never heard of madrigals before.
Gosh, how marvellous.”
It was here, while ostensibly studying X-ray crystallography (“it was ghastly – I couldn’t understand a bar of it”) that he embarked on turning his interest in nature into the beginnings of a career.
“A guest lecturer came in and talked for an hour about frogs.
And all the extraordinary varieties, the beauties of frogs, how the frog’s life was dominated by how on earth they were going to rear their young, who needed water.
Some did it by spinning foam and hanging it above a pond.
Some by taking their eggs into their mouths.
Some even did it by putting eggs in their stomachs – extraordinary.
And so you sat there with your jaw slacking, just the amazement and splendours and wonders of the world.”
Keeping that sense of wonder will be what keeps us alive, he believes, if we do choose to save the planet.
“If you want a comfortable life, what you do is you turn your mind, your face away from problems, of course.”
He sees his responsibility as reminding people that they can and must turn towards the problems, and find solutions – in day-to-day life and in collective efforts.
To do that, he believes, the most important thing is to remind people of what they have forgotten, and what is sometimes hard to remember – why we are in love with the world we live in.
Can a Minke whale escape a dramatic attack by Orcas?
“People say to me, ‘How did you first become interested in animals?’, and I look at them and I say: ‘Was there a time when you were not interested in animals?’ It’s the first sort of pleasure, delight and joy you get as a child.
As a child grows, he becomes aware of all sorts of things, sex or computers and the internet and so on.
But if he loses the first treasure, he’s lost something that will give him joy and delight for the rest of his life.”
