Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-three mariners, one megastorm and the sinking of El Faro. Rachel Slade

employees through tough times paid off for Sun Ship. By 1937, as World War II loomed, the US government began looking for a shipyard to fill orders for hundreds of vessels. Sun Ship was ready to go, replete with a huge, trained staff. At its peak during the war, the shipyard employed more than thirty-five thousand women and men, including my paternal grandfather, who had taken a hiatus from his clothing manufacturing company to sire my father and join the war effort. In 1944 alone, Sun Ship launched an astounding seventy-five tankers and military vessels.

      When John Glanfield rode his bike to the shipyard in 1961, the place was abuzz, but with a different kind of energy. Sun still built ships, about six or so per year, but it had diversified. Taking advantage of its sophisticated large-scale industrial design, engineering, and custom machining departments, its executives began landing contracts in a broad range of industries. Working inside the cavernous hull of a seven-hundred-foot-long steel ship was exciting enough, but the occasional top-secret government projects that came along made a young guy like John thrill with excitement.

      John built rocket casings for NASA, nuclear reactors, catalytic towers for the oil industry, wind tunnels, and—the one that he still rhapsodizes about in hushed tones fifty years later—the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a decoy deepwater drilling rig financed by the CIA.

      The official story was that billionaire Howard Hughes commissioned the vessel for his underwater mining company. In fact, “Project Jennifer” was paid for by the CIA to recover a sunken Soviet submarine lost off the coast of Hawaii. It’s rumored that the sub was sunk when a rogue team of Soviet sailors wrested control and tried to fire a missile at Hawaii, tripping a fail-safe, which caused the missile to explode as it was exiting the torpedo tube. The agency desperately wanted to study the sub to prove that America’s Cold War opponent had equipped its vessel with nuclear missiles and torpedoes.

      While the Soviets hunted in vain for their lost vessel, Sun Ship’s offshore drilling decoy parked right over the sub, precisely located by the navy’s system of hydrophones in the area, which had heard the doomed vessel explode and sink. Once in position, the belly of Hughes Glomar yawned wide above the ocean floor, dropped a giant claw thousands of feet down, clamped onto the sunken sub, and pulled the mangled wreck up into her hollow hull. After closing up, the operators dewatered the hold and stood in awe of their prize.

      Shipbuilding was demanding work but John was enthralled. He loved the “camaraderie of the people, the fact that your work was appreciated,” he says. “Guys worked hard in all kinds of weather—rain, snow. The heat in the summertime was brutal. In the hull of a ship with the sun beating down, sometimes the tools got so hot you couldn’t pick them up.”

      He’d come home dirty, tired, and satisfied, his clothes riddled with burn holes from errant welder’s torches or tangles with sharp objects. His wife, Dot, learned to shop in thrift stores, buying John three used coats per season; after a few months at the shipyard, they’d be nothing more than rags. Each night, John would stomp his shoes, knocking off the white, glistening, deadly flakes of asbestos. The heat-insulating material, cut by handsaws on-site, was used to wrap the steam pipes of the turbine engines that drove ships’ propellers. John would shake out his jacket before sitting down to dinner, the kids playing nearby. “I’m lucky now,” he tells me, “because all the people that I worked with are dead. The difference is I never smoked. If you smoked, you were doomed.” Researchers have determined that smoking can increase risk of asbestos-related diseases by 90 percent.

      John learned how to sequence construction in the shipways, very useful knowledge for the elite naval architects working at their desks in Sun’s brick office building, worlds away from the noise and chaos of the construction zone. Even though he lacked an engineering degree, he was frequently pulled into meetings to help the architects work out the complex steps required to execute their designs.

      One day, hull designer Eugene Schorsch presented the Sun Ship team with plans for a sleek, revolutionary new class of vessel he was working on, something called a roll on/roll off “trailer ship.” This one would be a game changer.

      At the time, the United States ruled the global economy. Because Europe hadn’t yet fully recovered from the ravages of war, American exports were in high demand. A sign on a bridge up the Delaware River installed in 1935 proudly declared: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. It was never more true than in the early ’60s. America had laid the groundwork for industrialization after the Civil War. Now it was reaping the rewards, shipping its goods everywhere, especially to Europe and Asia.

      But imports were beginning to creep in. By 1970, the US would experience a trade reversal from which it would never recover.

      To stay competitive, American manufacturers had to up their logistics game. After all, most of their exports had to traverse at least one ocean—either the Pacific or the Atlantic. Unless someone figured out how to ship goods cheaper and faster, Americans would lose market share to local outfits in Asia and Europe. But loading and unloading cargo was still stuck in the nineteenth century. On the docks, boxes, bags, and goods of all sizes and weights were at the mercy of an army of longshoremen who worked with ships’ crews to strategize how to pack all that random stuff into a hull.

      Sometimes it would take days to load a vessel, affording seamen plenty of time to blow their money on drink, girls, or gambling. That was, of course, part of the fun of pursuing a living on the high seas, but it wasn’t efficient. And it was expensive. The more handling, the more expensive the export.

      As long as a ship idled in port, it was losing money. But nearly every American port depended on unionized longshoremen and stevedores to carry cargo onto ships, then stow and lash it down. These thousands of dockworkers were pricey and potentially problematic. If they called a strike, they could close the port, costing shipping companies serious money. They’d done it before; they could do it again.

      American manufacturers couldn’t risk losing their customers abroad. Any interruption in the supply chain presented yet another risk in an inherently dicey business. Economics were one thing. Political turmoil was another. Weather always loomed large, ready to thwart a shipper’s best-laid plans. But operating at the mercy of organized labor was an insulting vulnerability. How could shippers cut out the uncertainty of people from the logistics equation?

      The answer was containerization. A one-size-fits-all shipping crate that could be packed, shipped, and reused would make things go a lot faster. Regardless of what you loaded in the box—rubber duckies, underwear, guns—it would stack neatly onto a ship’s deck along with the others, just like children’s blocks. You’d need a lot fewer dockworkers. No more thinking. Just pack, stack, and go.

      You’d have to standardize a lot more than the shipping crate to get containerization to work. Successful implementation would require every port of call to embrace a universal system because only special cranes could load and unload such big, heavy crates. Someone had to patent an open-source design for the box itself. Every naval architect would need to imagine new vessels to accommodate the box’s dimensions. From New York to Papua New Guinea, all ports would have to invest in container-ready cranes to accommodate a standardized mounting clip system, and clear huge open lots nearby to warehouse empty boxes. Someone would have to design and build new flatbed trucks onto which containers could be lowered directly from the ship and driven straight onto the interstate.