A good read with some obvious flaws

Just finished Into the Raging Sea by Rachel Slade. Subtitled Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro. The SS El Faro was the cargo ship sunk in 2015 when sailing directly into a hurricane. It was shocking because it was American flagged and American ships are rarely lost at sea. It was shocking because it seemed inexplicable why the captain would sail directly into the storm.

We are seventy-five years or so since Admiral Halsey sailed two different fleets at different times into typhoons in the Pacific simply because our weather data and forecasting were so rudimentary that he could not know there were typhoons in his path. In 2015 everyone has near real time access not only to satellite imagery of storms but of multiple forecasts of paths.

And it was shocking because all ship sinkings and airplane crashes are shocking.

Slade's job as a storyteller is made fantastically easier because nearly the entirety of the El Faro voyage was recorded on the equivalent of the a ship's black box. In addition both the Coast Guard and the NTSB conducted thorough, comprehensive, and expeditious investigations.

She does a more than proficient job telling the story, pulling in interesting side issues without getting distracted or bogged down. I enjoyed reading it.

Chapter 1 - The Clock is Ticking is an example of her skill in framing.

The satellite call came into the emergency center at 7:08 on the morning of October 1, 2015.

OPERATOR: Okay, sir.

CALLER: Are you connecting me through to a QI [Qualified Individual]?

OPERATOR: That’s what I’m getting ready now. We’re seeing who is on call and I’m going to get you right to them. Give me one second, sir. I’m going to put you on a quick hold. So one moment, please. Okay, sir. I just need your name please.

CALLER: Yes, ma’am. My name is Michael Davidson. Michael C. Davidson.

OPERATOR: Your rank?

CALLER: Ship’s master.

OPERATOR: Okay. Thank you. Ship’s name?

CALLER: El Faro.

OPERATOR: Spell that E-L . . .

CALLER: Oh man, The Clock is Ticking. Can I please speak to a QI? El Faro: Echo, Lima, Space, Foxtrot, Alpha, Romeo, Oscar. El Faro.

OPERATOR: Okay, and in case I lose you, what is your phone number please?

CALLER: Phone number 870-773-206528.

OPERATOR: Got it. Again, I’m going to get you reached right now. One moment please.

CALLER: [Aside.] And Mate, what else to do you see down there? What else do you see?

OPERATOR: I’m going to connect you now okay.

OPERATOR 2: Hi, “good morning. My name is Sherida. Just give me one moment. I’m going to try to connect you now. Okay, Mr. Davidson?

CALLER: Okay.

OPERATOR 2: Okay, one moment please. Thank you for waiting.

CALLER: Oh God.

OPERATOR 2: Just briefly what is your problem you’re having?

CALLER: I have a marine emergency and I would like to speak to a QI. We had a hull breach, a scuttle blew open during a storm. We have water down in three-hold with a heavy list. We’ve lost the main propulsion unit, the engineers cannot get it going. Can I speak to a QI please?

OPERATOR 2: Yes, thank you so much, one moment.

The Captain is standing there on the bridge, his ship sinking beneath him and he has to endure the typical customer service hell we all know so well. The fake attentiveness, the wasted time, the repeated provision of the same information, the incapacity to meet the needs of the caller. Slade sets this up so skillfully.

Thirty-three minutes later, the American government’s network of hydrophones in the Atlantic Ocean picked up an enormous thud just beyond Crooked Island in the Bahamas. It was a sound rarely heard out there in the deepest part of the sea where, for decades, the government had been recording an endless underwater symphony. Three miles down, they listened to the lonely cries of humpback whales, the eerie hum of earthquakes, and the whirr of submarine propellers. Just white noise, really. But that morning, something huge and audible hit the ocean floor with terrific force.

Based on the positions of the hydrophones, the people listening knew approximately where the object landed. They also knew the precise moment that it hit. But what was it?

That the Americans had been listening in on the ocean since the 1960s was no secret, at least not to mariners. Some older guys remembered laying down the cable decades ago to feed this equipment, which served as the country’s first line of defense against submarine invasion or other nefarious activity on the high seas.

The precise locations within this network were considered classified, but one monitoring station, known as the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), occupies a piece of Andros Island in the Bahamas, just west of Nassau. The thud was notable enough that there was talk among a few members of the armed forces stationed there. That intel simmered among a handful of officers assigned to monitor maritime activity in the Caribbean.

When word got out that a large American container ship had vanished in Hurricane Joaquin somewhere east of the Bahamas, those stationed on Andros Island knew exactly what they’d heard. It was the sound of El Faro colliding with the ocean floor.

That is a magnificent opening to a sea disaster.

My one caveat is that she, like so many Mandarin Class writers, cannot constrain herself from lecturing her reader. She can't help insulting their intelligence with foolish political blather.

The first instance is on page 125. It is like walking barefoot across a wood floor and suddenly stepping on a glass marble, bruising the arch of your foot. You didn't expect it. It was out of place.

On El Faro, tensions between white officers and mostly black crew increased exponentially after the 2012 shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the subsequent exoneration of his Latino killer, George Zimmerman. The tension further escalated when, in 2013, TOTE ordered its officers to clamp down on overtime. Everyone’s paycheck was affected, but as the manager of the unlicensed crew, the chief mate stood on the front lines of this wildly unpopular shift in compensation. The mostly black ABs viewed the change as another indignity forced on them by their white bosses and became increasingly passive aggressive.

The ship’s boatswain’s job was to mediate between the chief mate and the crew. If the boatswain wasn’t plugged in or committed, things could get difficult aboard the ship. Work would take longer. Rumors would spread. Fuses got shorter.

By 2015, hostility and resentment aboard El Faro were at an all-time high, presaging the shift in national political rhetoric from President Obama’s conciliatory tone to President Trump’s white supremacist leanings. (Florida would go on to vote for Trump.)

Trayvon Martin? Slade thinks that was the source of black-white tension on ships three years later? I find that markedly improbable. Especially when she introduces a much more proximate source of tension in the very next sentence. Reductions in overtime are always harbingers of employee unrest. Seems likely Trayvon is just Slade's opportunity to do some virtue signaling.

A suspicion reinforced by her attempt to introduce Trump into this sea story which occurred a full year before his election. That seems a desperate stretch. It has nothing to do with the narrative and it is an improbable claim. Why make it?

Then there is the obligatory but purely partisan claim of "Trump’s white supremacist leanings" which I know many in the Mandarin Class believe but for which they have zero evidence. Finally there is the empirically dubious claim of racial tensions declining with "Obama’s conciliatory tone" but rising with Trump's rhetoric. Empirically unsound on two grounds. We know that racial tensions, after a brief moment of optimism at the beginning of 2008, increased steadily and persistently across Obama's administration. Likewise, we know empirically that racial tensions have been easing across Trump's first two years.

Slade was doing so well, why did she throw this into the story when it had nothing to do with the story, is empirically unsound, and is likely insulting to the intelligence and opinions of three quarters of those most likely to read a sea story such as this?

Slade struggles with economics and regulatory environments so consequently many of her comments sound shallow or simply wrong to anyone accustomed to business, and particularly to the business of logistics. She's a writer and not a business person, but still, a better editor would have caught some of these gaffs.

The final flaw in her story is that she really wants it to be a morality tale where the evil of businessmen earning profits causes the death of thirty-three innocents. Its not that simple.

That is the conclusion she wishes to present but the story she actually tells shows the tragedy to be just about equal parts bad public policy, bad regulatory enforcement, bad business management, and bad job performance by the officers of the ship. It is a tragedy. Everyone contributes to the bad outcome. We don't want to say anyone is to blame. But we do and the NTSB concludes somewhat differently from Slade,

that the probable cause of the sinking of El Faro and the subsequent loss of life was the captain's insufficient action to avoid Hurricane Joaquin, his failure to use the most current weather information, and his late decision to muster the crew. Contributing to the sinking was ineffective bridge resource management on board El Faro, which included the captain's failure to adequately consider officers' suggestions. Also contributing to the sinking was the inadequacy of both TOTE's oversight and its safety management system. Further contributing factors ... were flooding in a cargo hold from an undetected open watertight scuttle and damaged seawater piping; loss of propulsion due to low lube oil pressure to the main engine resulting from a sustained list; and subsequent downflooding through unsecured ventilation closures to the cargo holds. Also contributing ... was the lack of an approved damage control plan ... Contributing to the loss of life was the lack of appropriate survival craft for the conditions.

There is no doubt that the management of TOTE made repeated bad errors and created conditions in which such an accident was more likely to happen. But all the proximate actions which caused the sinking sat solely with the officers on the ship. It was an entirely avoidable tragedy, had they made different decisions which were reasonably obvious ones. Everyone took shortcuts and avoided hard confrontations multiple times. The cumulative error across all those actions caused the sinking.

My criticisms are specific and reflect a real issue for the author. She chose to mare her own story to score cheap political points. That said, it was a good book, well told with only a handful of irritating errors which are mostly irritating because they were so avoidable.