More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rachel Slade
Read between
June 17 - June 21, 2018
Fuel costs $38,000 a day to keep El Faro running full speed ahead.
Globally, ships lose an average of about six hundred containers each year to storms, collisions, and groundings.
For thousands of years, sailors have viewed crimson skies at dawn as a bad omen. Science backs this up: Red has the longest wavelength in the color spectrum—powerful enough to penetrate the dust and moisture kicked up by an atmospheric event, such as a major storm. Other colors in the rainbow get scattered by thick storm clouds, leaving the sky a blazing scarlet.
A few days before a storm, birds might go into a feeding frenzy to bulk up before winds and rains wipe out their feeding grounds.
“If the definition of wisdom is understanding the depths of your own ignorance, meteorologists are wise,” says Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor who has dedicated his life to understanding weather and climate. “It’s wise but it’s a wisdom that is not recognized. If you say there’s a lot of uncertainty in this, in the modern world, it’s translated as You don’t know anything.”
Due to uncertainty, prudent mariners follow the 3-2-1 rule: Three days ahead of a hurricane’s forecasted position, stay three hundred miles away; two days ahead, keep out of a two-hundred-mile radius of its projected center; one day ahead, stay one hundred miles away from its eye in all directions. The rule is based on the fact that hurricane paths are erratic and unpredictable, so it’s smart to give the system a wide berth.
Wind speed and force have an exponential relationship, meaning that as the wind notches up, its force doubles, then triples, and then quadruples, and so on. It’s based on a simple formula: wind pressure per square foot = 0.00256 x (wind speed)2.
A rough guide for wind to wave height is two to one—60-mile-per-hour winds (52 knots) stir up thirty-plus-foot waves, depending on fetch, or the length of open water over which the wind blows.
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
...more
Each night, John would stomp his shoes, knocking off the white, glistening, deadly flakes of asbestos.
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.
Danielle’s politics didn’t square well with the fact that her job depended on a complex network of protectionist laws, strong unions, heavy regulation, and corporate tax breaks.
The BVS forecasts were even less accurate because they lagged several hours behind the NHC’s forecasts. By the time the captain downloaded them, they were based on data more than twelve hours old. Here’s why: NHC meteorologists use dropsondes, ship-reporting, and satellite data to collect raw data from land and sea. They run this mountain of data through dozens of computer models that then produce a range of possible hurricane paths and intensities. The meteorologists analyze these models, toss out anomalies, and generate a forecast. This whole process takes four hours. The BVS programmers
...more
Davidson didn’t know that the BVS information he relied on was always stale. He probably never received formal training on the system, and he may not have read the manual.
“Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?” cried Captain Ahab to his chief mate, Starbuck. “There is but one God that is Lord over the earth, and one captain that is lord over the Pequod.”
According to some studies, white Florida is more racist than any other state—an attitude rooted in the state’s late entry into slavery. Under the Spanish, Florida was a haven for fugitive slaves from Georgia and Alabama. But when the territory became part of the US in 1822, opportunistic settlers rushed in to establish cotton and sugar plantations. By 1845, half of the state’s population was enslaved by these parvenu slave owners, the dregs of the slavery establishment. Some say that the word cracker comes from the crude Florida slave owners’ fondness for the whip.
the Jones Act is unabashedly protectionist. It shelters domestic shipping from the pressures of the global market by upholding an America-first monopoly. To participate in the US trade along its coasts and interior waterways, ships must be owned and crewed by US citizens, and they must be built in domestic shipyards.
The Jones Act has inherent economic costs: According to the World Economic Forum, banning foreign vessels from carrying cargo between US ports costs Americans at least $200 million each year.
Ultimately, it’s a small price to pay for a standing quasi-navy, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, which made all the difference during World War II when the US government conscripted America’s merchant fleet and seamen to transport troops and munitions to Europe under risk of U-boat fire. This was exceptionally dangerous work; the US Merchant Marine suffered more casualties than any other military division in the war.
Plenty of American-owned ships fly foreign flags to get around Jones Act requirements. This flight among shippers from America’s registers, called “flags of convenience,”
By registering a ship elsewhere, shipowners can avoid US taxes, labor laws, domestic construction requirements,
And oftentimes ships are registered to landlocked nations, which underscores the free-for-all nature of this system an...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In 1950, Congress enacted Operation Bootstrap, a stimulation package that would check several boxes. The tax-based incentives gave mainland manufacturers a new source of cheap American labor—Puerto Ricans; it created a new market for American stuff; and all this would result in a booming new trade route for US-flagged ships. Bolstered by these local and federal tax credits, mainland corporations raced to offshore manufacturing jobs to the island. Billions of dollars flowed to island from the US to build plants where lower wages meant things could get built cheaper, without the penalty of
...more
said Jeremie said to Jack.
Pitching would cause new problems for the engineers: Every time the ship tipped into a dive, the propeller would come out of the water. Without resistance on the blades, the screw would spin wildly, radically changing the load on the engine. If this speed went unchecked, the force of the shaft spinning that fast would cause catastrophic engine failure. To prevent his overspeed relay from tripping (which would immediately kill the propulsion system), Rich had to gear down the shaft’s RPMs by hand each time the stern came out of the drink.
On the third lap around, they prepared to lower their rescue swimmer when Rick looked down. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Do you guys see what I’m seeing? Am I seeing this right?” he said in horror. The Minouche’s lights were still on, but she was completely under water. Getting smaller and smaller, vanishing into the deep. It was one of the eeriest things Rick had ever seen: watching a big ship sink before his eyes.
The USCG motto is Semper paratus, always ready.
one the coast guard’s first rescue swimmers,
Likewise, the US Coast Guard had an economic, not human, mission. Formed by Alexander Hamilton, it was established to enforce customs laws rather than protect the men and women aboard the ships. Its officers boarded vessels only to check manifests to ensure that the government collected duties it was owed; if they saw a man float by clinging to a mast, they had no obligation to fish him out.
There are incredible photos of San Francisco Bay during the Gold Rush showing the harbor literally choked with skeletons of rotting sailing ships abandoned by mariners who’d seek their fortunes in the hills. Sailors on the East Coast had signed onto the ships in droves, rounded Cape Horn, and came up the California coast, only to desert their vessels as soon as they reached port.
When the coast guard became America’s waterborne policing unit, spending much of its energy on drug interdiction rather than safety, the American Bureau of Shipping stepped in to take over the job of monitoring the commercial fleet. As a result of its growing responsibilities, ABS has grown exponentially to become a rich, politically powerful entity.
The third casualty was the SS Marine Electric—a World War II–era bulk carrier loaded with coal that went down in 1983 when she sailed through a storm off the coast of Virginia, killing thirty-one of the thirty-four crew aboard. The ensuing Marine Board investigation was a massive undertaking and the final report detailed serious flaws in the ship inspection process.
Perhaps most important, the Marine Electric report raised serious questions about the ABS’s role in ship inspections: “Basically, ABS surveys and visits are oriented toward protecting the best interest of marine insurance underwriters, and not for the enforcement of Federal safety statutes and regulations,” it said. “Since the cost of these surveys and visits is borne by the owners, or other interested parties, the attending surveyor is subject to the influence of such persons.”
Ultimately, the Marine Board report warned the coast guard not to cede something as critical as ship inspection work to third parties. “For the purpose of enforcement of Federal Statutes and Regulations, [inspections] should be conducted by an impartial governmental agency having expertise in that field, with no other interests and/or obligations other than assuring compliance with applicable requirements. By virtue of its relationship to the vessel owners, the ABS cannot be considered impartial.”
In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales writes, “The word ‘experienced’ often refers to someone who has gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.”
The Limitation of Liability Act, passed in 1851, caps a shipowner’s liability to the value of the ship, if the accident is not caused by the vessel owner’s neglect or malfeasance. In other words, as long as a shipping company doesn’t interfere with its captain’s decisions while he or she is at sea, explains admiralty and maritime lawyer Chris Hug, vessel owners can limit their liability when the causes of the accident occurred without their “privity or knowledge.”
After the sinking of El Faro, those who tried to make claims against the company—either for loss of life or loss of cargo—came up against the limitation law. Families of the dead were dismayed to discover that they had the burden of proving that the company’s deliberate malfeasance led to the vessel’s unseaworthiness, which led to its undoing. The law even precluded the plaintiffs’ right to a jury trial. All families would eventually settle with the company for undisclosed amounts.
Most accidents aren’t as dramatic and protracted as El Faro. For plane accidents, it’s usually a quick hit. Doug says that the pilot might say “mountain” or “crane” and then hit it and the audio goes dead. But this tragedy unfolded over the course of days.
It’s an open secret in the meteorological community that the ECMWF is consistently better than the NWS. The one question that gnaws at America’s scientists is why.
Since the mid-1990s ABS has taken over about 90 percent of the inspection work of deep draft vessels the coast guard once did. The $1 billion Houston-based nonprofit gets most of its revenue from the companies it’s paid to monitor. Some say it’s like the fox guarding the henhouse. After all, the shipping companies are its only client. They’re paying the ABS to keep their crew safe, but their real interest is in keeping their insurance premiums low and keeping their vessels sailing.
