Piracy also plagued the industry. Notorious waterways like the Malacca Strait (between Malaysia and Sumatra), the South China Sea, the Gulf of Aden (the entrance to the Red Sea), and both coasts of Africa teem with pirates looking for valuable cargo or, even better, officers to ransom. In late October 2017, six crew from a German container ship approaching a Nigerian port were reported kidnapped. In 2013, the World Bank estimated that the annual cost of piracy off the coast of Somalia ran somewhere around $18 billion.
Cyberattack posed another threat. Shipping is heavily dependent on computers for tracking vessels and complex logistics. Maersk, a global shipping giant based in Denmark, found its data held for a $300 bitcoin ransom (about $1 million at the time) by malware in June 2017. The attack cost the company approximately $300 million in lost revenue.
Compounding TOTE’s plight: Puerto Rico, the company’s cash cow, was collapsing. Islanders were fleeing the bankrupt state, reducing demand for goods from the mainland. TOTE’s direct competitor in the Puerto Rican trade, Horizon Shipping, went bankrupt in early 2015.
Further, new environmental regulations were about to render TOTE’s old steamships obsolete.
In 2011, TOTE engaged a consultant to figure out how to run the company leaner. He immediately replaced long-standing managers and staff. Other positions were deemed unnecessary and eliminated. It appeared to those who worked on the ships that TOTE wanted younger officers and the cocaine bust seemed like an excuse to clear house.
TOTE may have had an ulterior motive for firing Captain Hearn: the old shipmaster had become a troublemaker. A few years before the drug bust, TOTE replaced El Faro with a new class of vessel in Alaska to meet environmental regulations. The old steamship was tied up in a Baltimore slip. Hearn had mastered El Faro in the icy Pacific Northwest for seventeen years, then was transferred to helm her sister ship El Morro in the warm waters between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico.
In his estimation, El Morro was an inferior ship, a rust bucket, seriously neglected while working herself to death in the corrosive Caribbean run. The hot, humid climate relentlessly gnawed away at her steel, leaving rusty tears streaming down her ancient hull.
Both El Faro and El Morro were nearly forty years old but to Hearn, El Faro was an old friend, superior to his current clunker. It ate at Hearn knowing that she’d been left to rot away in a Baltimore slip.
Hearn’s fondness for his ship wasn’t rare in the maritime world. Many people who work closely with boats think of them as living beings, complete with their own personalities and peccadilloes. Even something as unwieldy as a cargo ship can have ardent admirers.
In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck wrote eloquently in 1951 of the intense bond we instinctively form with boats: “How deep this thing must be. The giver and receiver again; the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream. And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest.”
Hearn felt that clench in his heart each time he thought about El Faro. He alerted TOTE to the fact that El Morro desperately needed major maintenance. He considered the ship unsafe. When he wasn’t satisfied with TOTE’s unresponsiveness, he informed the coast guard.
Shortly thereafter, because of the drug incident, he was out of a job.
Retribution against seamen for lodging safety complaints violated maritime law but that didn’t mean it never happened. And sometimes mariners fought back. A few years before Hearn’s firing, Captain John Loftus, a shipmaster with forty years of experience, was fired for calling out safety concerns aboard a vessel owned by TOTE’s competitor, Horizon Shipping. In 2014, Loftus won a million-dollar whistleblower case against the company. The federal judge assigned to the case agreed that Loftus’s concerns were warranted.
Shortly after TOTE fired Hearn, the coast guard inspected El Morro and concurred with the captain’s assessment: Much of the ship’s deck steel was wasted, which made her structurally unsound. Instead of paying for the expensive repairs required by the coast guard, TOTE scrapped her.
While Hearn was lobbying against El Morro, TOTE was building a case against the other officers to hold them accountable for the aging ship’s deterioration. The three seamen had spent decades overseeing the company’s aging vessels’ eternal battle against the sea: scraping, painting, and epoxying, washing down decks, cleaning out pumps, compiling repair lists, and hunting down parts no longer in production. Instead of a bonus, they received warning letters from TOTE claiming that they weren’t doing enough to maintain the ships. By the time the drugs were found on El Morro, TOTE had a paper trail pinning the ship’s condition on its senior officers. Termination letters followed.
Subsequent arbitration led to undisclosed settlements in favor of the mariners but that was scant comfort for those who had given so much of their lives to the sea.
TOTE put El Faro back into service on the Puerto Rican run, tag-teaming with her sister ship El Yunque. It was a temporary fix. TOTE had just ordered two new liquid natural gas–powered (LNG) ships to replace its two remaining elderly steamships. It would take several years before those new vessels were operational, so the old steamships continued chugging back and forth from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico, patched, painted, and duct-taped together.
El Faro and El Yunque were not only aging, they were taking on more cargo since the bankruptcy of competing shipping line Horizon, especially reefers—refrigerated containers that required constant tending to prevent the food inside from spoiling. It was pricey cargo, so it made money, but it strained the already thin crew.
As the ship’s air conditioning struggled against the day’s stultifying heat, Third Mate Jeremie let loose his frustration with the increasing workload. One of the reefers hadn’t gotten plugged in during loading the night before, he told Jack. Now a whole trailer full of food was spoiled.
A port mate once helped with loading in Jacksonville, he said, but that position hadn’t been filled since early September.
Jeremie was sick of the constant scrambling and lack of support. “You know what’s changed?” he said to Jack. “I could not fucking keep up with the loading. I had a goodie helping me”—a GUDE, general utility, deck, and engine unlicensed seaman trained in all areas of the ship—“He couldn’t keep up. I was helping him plug in and I didn’t have time to get all the temps down.”
All the reefers got loaded on just before the ship left the dock, creating a shitstorm of problems. They had to scramble to get everything plugged in and secured to leave on time.
“We used to have a port mate and now we don’t. We had a longshoreman, now we don’t. Then we also lost our electrician. We used to have that system of checks where a guy would come down and make sure that every reefer was good. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
It was true. Lately, positions on the ships and onshore were being cut, and the remaining crew had to pick up the slack. Setting high standards was tough when the cast of characters was constantly changing.
“Your average union electrician wouldn’t even come on a ship like this,” Jack said. “It’s too much work for them. They’re not gonna work their way through jungles of lashing chains and dirt to get to a plug somewhere.”
“It’s insane down there in the holds,” agreed Jeremie. He guessed that the ship was carrying more than three dozen reefers, each one demanding someone’s time and attention during the short docking period between voyages. Second Mate Charlie Baird would lay out all the electrical cords neatly when the empty ship was heading back to Jacksonville, but his relief, Second Mate Danielle, didn’t do that.
“There’s just extension cords everywhere. It’s a mess down there. Everything is falling apart. I’m doing what I’ve always done, but it’s just not enough anymore.”
Jack nodded his head.
“I