33 souls on cargo ship missing in Hurricane Joaquin, October 2015

[jjenny]

Age has nothing to do with it. Ships have been doing that forever. When I was a kid my dad told me stories of riding out several hurricanes at sea, when he was in the navy during World War 2.

Considering this ship is sunk and everybody on board is dead, that's a strange argument to make. Obviously it couldn't handle a cat 4 hurricane, or we wouldn't be talking about it.

 

[Hiandmighty]

If they hadn't lost power they would have been able to face the waves. Without power, they turned sideways and rolled among other possibilities.

Why they lost power is the million dollar question. With power, they would likely be here today.

 

[jjenny]

If they hadn't lost power they would have been able to face the waves. Without power, they turned sideways and rolled among other possibilities.

Why they lost power is the million dollar question. With power, they would likely be here today.

It lost propulsion after it sailed into the hurricane.
"The ill-fated U.S.-flagged El Faro cargo ship sunk by Hurricane Joaquin was sailing at near full speed into the center of the storm before it lost propulsion amid mountainous waves and brutal winds, according to ship tracking data."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/08/us-ship-elfaro-tracking-insight-idUSKCN0S22W320151008

 

[jjenny]

"The data on Thomson Reuters Eikon raises questions about the ship owner's assertion that the vessel's captain had chosen a "sound plan" to pass around Joaquin "with a margin of comfort" but was then thwarted by engineering problems. It shows that even before the ship lost power it was in stormy waters that many mariners interviewed said they would never have entered."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/08/us-ship-elfaro-tracking-insight-idUSKCN0S22W320151008

 

[KaaBoom]

It lost propulsion after it sailed into the hurricane.
"The ill-fated U.S.-flagged El Faro cargo ship sunk by Hurricane Joaquin was sailing at near full speed into the center of the storm before it lost propulsion amid mountainous waves and brutal winds, according to ship tracking data."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/08/us-ship-elfaro-tracking-insight-idUSKCN0S22W320151008

Just because it's reported, doesn't make it true. I think it's way too early to tell that. I still haven't seen any good timeline of the events of the incident. But most of the reports I have read said the ship stalled, and couldn't get out of the path of the hurricane.

El Faro lost propulsion right in the path of the hurricane, Coast Guard Capt. Mark Fedor told CNN's "New Day."

"The captain did not explain in his communication why he had lost propulsion," Greene said. "He indicated that he had had a navigational incident."

Company: El Faro skipper had plan to deal with storm

 

[jjenny]

Just because it's reported, doesn't make it true. I think it's way too early to tell that. I still haven't seen any good timeline of the events of the incident. But most of the reports I have read said the ship stalled, and couldn't get out of the path of the hurricane.





Company: El Faro skipper had plan to deal with storm

Those early reports obviously didn't look at the ship tracking data.

 

[KaaBoom]

Those early reports obviously didn't look at the ship tracking data.

Well, hopefully they will be able to recover the data recorder. Then we will know for sure what happened.

 

[Hatfield]

Well, hopefully they will be able to recover the data recorder. Then we will know for sure what happened.

I do agree we need to let the full investigation be completed. It will help gather all the facts.

Where I have trouble with the "Sound Plan" is the captain did not consider that engine trouble could happen. He gave them "no backup plan". That is where I may never agree it was a good idea to head towards it and leave port area to begin with. It just seems to me if they had taken a route to totally avoid it would have been a better option.

I do agree we need to let investigation be completed because I read a couple things yesterday that I had not even considered before about the engine.

1-Polish crew was on board for 1 reason only. To work on the engine for some sort of conversion for the next Alaska run. This is very interesting and this work could be related to why propulsion failed.

2-I read that 1 way to really mess up an engine is if the props come out of the water. With those huge waves then if the prop came out of the water it could do severe damage to the engine because prop blades would spin too fast and burn up stuff.

I have a small john boat and I once tilted my small outboard out of the water to avoid shallow rocks and the blades started spinning way to fast and I realized I have to keep prop in water all the time. I had to kill the engine and row out of the shallow water instead. Then restart engine.

Those are 2 reasons why the propulsion or engine failed them. They will need to determine exactly when that happened and where it happened. When that female crew mate sent her last message saying they were heading right for a Cat-3 it appears they still had power. By that point the captain probably had no other options than to try to punch through the storm because they were in the middle of it already.

So I think it will all come back to the original planning and not allowing themselves a backup plan if things got worse. They did not consider that engine trouble could doom them because the predictions were likely that storm would get worse.

 

[Ray_of_hope]

"Three former crew members of El Faro, a ship that apparently sank during Hurricane Joaquin, told CNN the ship had structural problems and questioned whether it should have sailed with a major storm in the region."
(snipped)
""The chief cook's room was constantly leaking water," Kurt Bruer, a quartermaster who spent six months on El Faro, said. There were other problems. "The drainage didn't work well on the ship.""


[video=cnn;us/2015/10/09/el-faro-crew-search-ac-savidge-intv.cnn]http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/08/us/el-faro-missing-ship/index.html[/video]

 

[KaaBoom]

1-Polish crew was on board for 1 reason only. To work on the engine for some sort of conversion for the next Alaska run. This is very interesting and this work could be related to why propulsion failed.

They were maintenance people preparing the engine room for a retrofitting. They were not working on the engine.

The mystery of El Faro: Search for answers in sinking of US cargo ship

 

[Hiandmighty]

Unfortunately this guy is right: it's a tragedy and that is all we are going to learn:

http://gcaptain.com/we-wont-learn-anything-what-sank-el-faro-and-what-didnt/#.VhhBxqKn5Ehhttp://

 

[jjenny]

"Several long-time ship captains, though they all stressed that it’s impossible to know exactly what the conditions aboard the El Faro were or what Davidson was thinking, believe he made a serious error on the second day of his voyage, when he learned the storm had reached hurricane levels."

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article38496843.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article38496843.html

 

[Nova]

Age has nothing to do with it. Ships have been doing that forever. When I was a kid my dad told me stories of riding out several hurricanes at sea, when he was in the navy during World War 2.

I guess your dad missed Typhoon Cobra in 1944. (You can look it up at Wikipedia; I'm not sure if we are allowed to link to there.) Several destroyers were swamped and sunk, with a death toll of nearly 800. Countless other ships were severely damaged.

 

[KaaBoom]

I guess your dad missed Typhoon Cobra in 1944. (You can look it up at Wikipedia; I'm not sure if we are allowed to link to there.) Several destroyers were swamped and sunk, with a death toll of nearly 800. Countless other ships were severely damaged.

I didn't know, my dad was in the Atlantic at that time. I'm not even sure which hurricanes he sailed through. I just remember him telling me that when they got to the eye of the storm, they had to repair as much of the damage to the ship as possible, before they went back into the storm again. I believe weather information was not that good at the time. No satellites to track the hurricanes in those days. So avoiding the storms was not really possible. They just had deal with it.

 

[KaaBoom]

Action News Jax spoke with Dennis Bryant, principal consultant at Bryant’s Maritime Consulting, who said it’s possible the 790-foot vessel took only minutes to sink.
“That’s probably what led to the loss of the vessel, was the capsizing. We won’t know for sure until they find the wreck,” said Bryant.

We may never know what was going through the mind of the captain as it entered Hurricane Joaquin but Bryant said the voyage data recorder will help answer a lot of questions.

He said the VDR is usually in the bridge of the ship once it hits the water it will ping for about 30 days.

Clock is ticking on El Faro's voyage data recorder/

 

[KaaBoom]

USNS Apache deploys to search for El Faro
Crew members' remains may be brought up if possible

The National Transportation Safety Board asked the U.S. Navy to begin searching for signs of the sunken merchant vessel.

The USNS Apache is equipped with a search and salvage team, as well as several pieces of underwater search equipment.

"The first thing we're setting down is called a towed hydrophone. It's an underwater listening device that the ship tows back and forth in a search box. It listens for the signal emitting from a black box." said Chris Johnson with Naval Sea Systems Command.

USNS Apache deploys to search for El Faro

 

[KaaBoom]

Finally we have some timeline of the events.

At about 8:15 pm EDT on Sept. 29, El Faro departed Jacksonville, Fla., for San Juan, Puerto Rico.

At 1:12 pm EDT on Sept. 30, the captain emailed a company safety official that he intended to take a route south of the predicted path of the hurricane and would pass about 65 miles from its center.

In an advisory issued at 2:00 am EDT on Oct. 1, the National Hurricane Center predicted seas of 30 feet with sustained winds of 64 knots (74 mph), increasing to 105 knots (121 mph) as the El Faro approached the wall of the eye of the hurricane.

In a recorded satellite phone call to the company’s emergency call center at 7:00 am EDT, the captain told the call center operator that he had a marine emergency. He reported that there was a hull breach, a scuttle had blown open, and that there was water in hold number 3. He also said that the ship had lost its main propulsion unit and the engineers could not get it going. The operator then connected the captain with the Designated Person Ashore (DPA). The DPA told investigators that the captain had communicated similar information to him that was provided to the call center operator, and also that the captain had estimated the height of the seas that El Faro was encountering to be 10 to 12 feet.

The USCG received electronic distress alerts from three separate sources on El Faro: the Ship’s Security Alert System (SSAS), the Inmarsat-C Alert, and the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB).

According to electronic alert system data sent by the vessel at 7:17 am EDT on Oct. 1, its last reported position was about 20 miles from the edge of the eye of the hurricane.

The USCG did not have direct voice communications with El Faro, only electronic distress alerts.

NTSB Issues Update on Investigation Into Sinking of Cargo Ship EL FARO

 

[LietKynes]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-32...acking-number-matches-vessel-s-cargo-log.html
Debris believed to be from doomed ship El Faro washes ashore in Bahamas - including a refrigeration unit with tracking number that matches vessel's cargo log

Probably wishful thinking... but it would bring solace to the family members if they could recover the bodies.
Or at least some of the crew's personal effects. Imo.

 

[KaaBoom]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-32...acking-number-matches-vessel-s-cargo-log.html
Debris believed to be from doomed ship El Faro washes ashore in Bahamas - including a refrigeration unit with tracking number that matches vessel's cargo log

Probably wishful thinking... but it would bring solace to the family members if they could recover the bodies.
Or at least some of the crew's personal effects. Imo.

Unfortunately I think the chances of that, are looking kind of bleak at this point. They have only one more week to find the El Faro's voyage data recorder. After that stops pinging, finding the ship is going to become a lot more difficult. And the Coast Guard kind of fumbled their one and only chance to recover at least one body, during the initial search.

 

[KaaBoom]

Same equipment used in MH370 search

Johnson said the search team will use the pinger locator until it either finds the VDR or its batteries run out.

According to the Naval Sea Systems Command website, "the pinger locator is towed behind a vessel at slow speeds (...) the received acoustic signal of the pinger is transmitted up the cable and is presented audibly ... the operator monitors the greatest signal strength and records the navigation coordinates. This procedure is repeated on multiple track lines until the final position is triangulated."

It's not the first high-profile mission for this particular towed pinger locator.

In 2014, it scoured a large swath of the Indian Ocean looking for the still-unrecovered black box belonging to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

But whereas that search area was massive -- equivalent to the size of New Mexico -- the search area for El Faro is only a fraction of that size -- about half the size of Lake Tahoe.

It's one of the reasons why Johnson is feeling confident about their chances this time around.

"If we get out there and can't find the (VDR), we have other options, and those options might be better anyway," he said.

Search For El Faro's 'Black Box' Underway