Into the Raging Sea. Rachel Slade
China; they were unceremoniously scooped back in and shipped according to plan.
No port authority has the resources to monitor what’s inside the hundreds of thousands of shipping containers crossing the oceans at any one time. Worldwide, approximately 1 percent of the boxes are actually opened and inspected. Drug dealers and arms brokers count on this fact to move their illicit wares around the globe; they build rare losses into their business plan. Because occasionally, someone gets caught.
Jack Hearn was captain of El Morro when the drugs were found, but how could he have known about them? Jacksonville Port was known as a major gateway for drugs traveling from South America to the US, especially since Puerto Rico’s economic collapse created a jobless, desperate population on the island. Of course TOTE’s ships occasionally carried contraband.
Hearn’s job was to deliver cargo and keep the vessel and crew safe. He’d done just that for more than thirty years. In that time, he’d watched the profession go from sextant to satellite. And in that time, the role of the captain evolved from running the ship to pushing paper. Hearn spent countless hours in his stateroom logging records, time charts, and data, managing the milk run back and forth to Puerto Rico. It was load and roll. Everyone was hustling. There wasn’t time for him to inspect every box that went on his ship and quiz every deckhand. Following the arrests, TOTE hired security guards to search crew as they came aboard.
TOTE’s firing of the four officers came as a shock to those working on the vessels. Haley wasn’t even on duty when the drugs were found. Two respected captains and two chief mates, all elders of the trade, were gone. With them, decades of knowledge and experience had been tossed out like yesterday’s garbage. The message was clear: no one’s job—on land or at sea—was safe.
TOTE became ruthless, driven to squeeze as much profit as possible out of an operationally expensive industry. Some mariners who worked for TOTE say that the company was making a significant profit at that time. The ships cost several million dollars, the labor, the berthing, the fuel, the endless maintenance, plus the insurance (El Faro’s hull and machinery were covered for $24 million)—all these big-ticket necessities cut into their bottom lines.
And lately, cargo prices had plummeted; worldwide, there was too much capacity, an abundance of ships, and not enough customers. Hanjin, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, filed for bankruptcy in 2016, leaving seventy-eight of its laden ships wandering the oceans in search of ports that would unload their goods without guaranteed pay.
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 territory, 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