Episode 5: The America-First Ships
https://player.megaphone.fm/PPY7204462267
As always: the standards caveats around this script apply: it changes sometimes in production, we tweak things at the end, and it’s always better to listen to the episode if you can, so you can hear the majestic production by Jonathan Hirsch.
This is Containers, an audio documentary about global trade, capitalism, and the people who make the world’s supply chains work, presented by Flexport.
For the last few episodes, we’ve traced how logistics transformed the world and how trade actually works. We learned that American companies pioneered the container shipping model, but now it’s a global business.
Other countries dominate many industries that were invented in the United States. That’s one reason why Donald Trump seemed to have a lot of success arguing for an “America-first” trade policy. Shipping is one of those industries. Right now, there are no American shipping companies among the top 20 cargo carriers. And the American fleet carries less than 1 percent of the world’s ocean freight.
But what makes the American shipping industry interesting is that it already has an America-first policy. There is a law on the books, the Jones Act, which requires that any cargo moving between American ports — say Oakland and Honolulu or Jacksonville and San Juan, Puerto Rico — must travel on American-made, American-flagged, and American-crewed ships. Passed in 1920, it began as a way of nurturing the native merchant marine, so that when war broke out, we’d have a domestic industry to do military supply runs. Now, it is life-support for an American industry that has nearly withered away.
*
On the morning of September 30th, 2015, a storm became a hurricane. Joaquin was heading south and west towards a direct strike on the Bahamas, something that hadn’t happened in the month of October since 1866. At the same time, the El Faro, a 40-year old American-flagged ship, was on its way from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico. right into the eye of the hurricane
Here’s the thing: we don’t know why.
We should know. There are 500 pages of transcripts from 26 hours of recorded audio, which were stored on a black-box-type device that was retrieved from the bottom of the ocean. These low-quality recordings took 1100 hours for a team of investigators to decipher. The recordings themselves have never been released or we’d play them here.
What’s clear is that several crew members, realized the ship was sailing into trouble and yet the captain persisted in his course.
Danielle Randolph was the second mate, and she enters the transcript at 11:45am on September 30th. She says the captain is “tellin’ everybody down there, ‘Ohhh it’s not a bad storm. It’s not so bad. It’s not even that windy out. Seen worse,” A few minutes later, she suspects the captain is understating the situation the crew is in. “he’s tryin’ to play it down” she says. “Because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way.”
There was another way, another route between Jacksonville and Puerto Rico. The shortest and cheapest route is to cruise on an almost straight line from northern Florida through the open Atlantic Ocean. The other way is to run down the Florida coast and then cut east of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. That’s called the Old Bahamas Channel. It adds maybe 160 nautical miles to the trip, but the island chains like the Bahamas themselves and Turks and Caicos stretch through the water there, acting as a shield against the might of Atlantic storms. But that route would take longer and the faster the crew arrives with their cargo, the faster they can take on another shipment…and keep making money.
And businesses in Puerto Rico are nearly completely dependent on the goods that arrive on these ships. In other words, if the ships don’t get there, there won’t be cereal on the shelves.
Yet, because of Puerto Rico’s economic problems, shipping rates and cargo volumes have been falling for years on the Jacksonville-Puerto Rico route. The business is getting harder. In late 2014, one shipping line just gave up entirely and quit running cargo there.
At about 5 o’clock, the second mate Danielle Randolph plots their course again. The transcript records her laughing, “We’re gonna be right there with it.” she says. “Looks like the storm is coming right for us. Ahhhh you gotta be kidding me.”
“We’re gonna get our asses ripped,” a sailor identified only as Able Seaman 2 tells her.
“We are going to go right through the fucking eye,” she says.
Maybe the captain was willing to gamble because of the pressure inside the company. The El Faro Captain was angling for a promotion to a newer ship. Was he trying to prove his mettle within the company? If he’d taken the slow route or even delayed the ship’s departure, could that have hurt his chances of advancement? It’s hard to know. But we can say: as jobs within the American shipping industry dwindle, the competition inside it increases, especially in the officer corps.
The captain and chief mate were recorded commiserating commiserating about their fortunes with the company.
“I hear what you’re saying captain. I’m in line for the chopping block,” the chief mate says.
“Same here,” the captain responds.
“I’m waiting to get screwed,” the chief mate continues.
“Same here,” the captain agrees.
In the middle of the night, Second Mate Danielle Randolph realizes that Hurricane Joaquin has kept following its highly unusual path. “Every time we come further south, the storm keeps trying to follow us,” she says. And Joaquin did.
Randolph calls up the captain and explains the situation. Most of the conversation is lost on the recording. When she hangs up, though, the directive is clear. “He said to run it. Hold on to your ass.” They make a small course correction, heading further east. In future maps of the incident, this turn makes it look as if the El Faro is a missile steering for the eye of the storm.
Her mother receives an email sent in the wee hours of the night. ““Don’t know if you’ve been hearing, we’re in really bad seas and really bad wind and heading straight for the hurricane. Give my love to everyone.”
*
The El Faro was an old steamship, like many of the old freighters. That means it has boilers, which drive a steam engine. It’s almost like a electric power plant. It was built in 1975 in Pennsylvania, then saw action along the eastern seaboard as the Puerto Rico, before steaming through the Panama Canal to run the string from Seattle up to Alaska as the SS Northern Lights. During that time, it also ran 25 supply missions to the Middle East during the first Gulf War. Finally, it was renamed the El Faro, the lighthouse, and sent back to run down to Puerto Rico. It had two sister ships. Both had been retired.
While Randolph is off the bridge, the real problems start to emerge. Right after 4am, the ship enters sustained hurricane force winds. In the 5 o’clock hour, water is discovered in one of the holds, most likely due to a hatch cover that came undone.
As the ship lists from side to side, the oil that lubricates the machinery gets drained away from where it needs to be. And shortly after Randolph returned to the bridge at 6am, the ship’s powerplant went out.
Nonetheless, at 6:50, Randolph is making coffee. She’s something of a connoisseur. The captain takes sugar. Able Seaman 1 requests Splenda.
The ship is underwater an hour later.
We know that the captain eventually gave the order to abandon ship. It can’t have been an easy decision.
New ships have enclosed lifeboats and the state of the art ones are almost like escape pods, designed to be launched into the water. On an old American ship like the El Faro, the lifeboats are open and have to be dropped into the water with a crane. It’s not clear if the crew could have deployed them in hurricane conditions.
So the captain must have known they would probably die if they left the ship. [pause] And that they would probably die if they stayed on it.
The last recorded words on the black box are the captain trying to coax a sailor off the bridge.
“Come on, gotta move. We gotta move. You gotta get up,” he says. “You gotta snap out of it. And we gotta get out.”
Minutes later, they are still struggling. People are yelling. “I’m a goner,” the sailor says.
“No you’re not,” the captain yells.
The captain’s last words were, “It’s time to come this way.”
The ship went down. No one survived.
*
It was the first time an American-flagged ship had sunk in decades. Many things had to go wrong, all compounding each other — imprecise initial weather forecasting, unusual hurricane movement, global economic pressure, implicit corporate dictates, bad decisionmaking, a hatch left improperly secured, an old ship’s weaknesses. Even now, in the spring of 2017, many months and thousands of pages of documents later, no one is precisely sure what combination of factors drove the El Faro to the bottom.
But it highlighted a fact about the American fleet: its ships are old, many years older than the average ship in the global fleet. They have old engines and old lifeboats. They’re outdated.
This is a structural problem. The small American shipping lines don’t want to spend a bunch of money on new, expensive American-made ships. Two companies have ordered a few new freighters: TOTE, the operator of the El Faro, and Matson, which is based here in Oakland. But the market is tiny, so the companies know they won’t recoup the costs of new vessels for a long, long time. As a result, excluding tankers, the average Average American freighter running between US ports was built in 1982.
And yet, without the Jones Act, there almost would not be an American merchant marine. The Jones Act has created a situation that costs Americans a lot of money in shipping costs, but that doesn’t even generate enough cash to keep the fleet up to date.
The sailors on American vessels are well aware of this paradox. When I visited a ship docked in Oakland in December, I kept hearing about both the Jones Act and the El Faro. One reason is that the cargo ship I visited was almost a sister ship of the El Faro, with a similar powerplant, age, and size. It was even built at the same docks in Pennsylvania.
It was almost like the El Faro has become a ghost ship that haunts the rest of the old American fleet.
And yet inside the American maritime world, people support the Jones Act. It helps keep them employed, sure, but it’s something deeper, too. They have this idea that a country should have its own merchant ships. A merchant marine fleet is just part of what being a country is, or has been, like having a postal service or an army or a flag.
When we come back, who are the people who board these ships and risk their lives. I went to find out.
*
AD: Containers is brought to you by Flexport. Flexport is a freight forwarding company built around modern technology. They help over 2,500 companies run better global supply chains. Check them out at Flexport.com, where they have a super interesting insider’s blog about the shipping industry.
*
In the first half of the show, we learned about the demise of the El Faro, and the pressures on the tiny American shipping industry to stay afloat under the constraints of the Jones Act. What’s frightening about what happened with the El Faro is that it could have been any of these crews: hustling out an extra trip, cutting corners, thinking ahead to the next gig. I wanted to meet some of these sailors, to get a glimpse inside their lives. That’s how I ended up back at the Port of Oakland.
At the terminal you show your ID to a little camera. A longshoreman arrives in a bus to take you to the ship.
My driver was a middle-aged man named Kenneth. In the four-minute ride to the ship, I managed to glean that he was getting married, grew up in Houston, and was a metalhead.
Kenneth: A lot of good metal came from Austin. Like Watchtower one of the most cult bands of progressive thrash, is from Austin. They just got back together and put out an EP. I lived in the inner city, it was mostly blacks. Latinos, and Vietnamese. And maybe a couple white kids. I started listening to hard rock and it evolved into metalhead. I’m still listening to it today.
After a while we arrive at the ship, which I’ve agreed not to name, enormous cranes loading containers onto the ships loom over me. I clanged up the gangway.
Inside, I put my stuff into the officer’s dining room. There’s a table with a blue cloth covering it running down the center of the room. Condiments — ketchup, Cholula, Sriracha, A1 — are clumped along the surface. Because it’s December, a set of 23 tiny stockings arcs across a window, one for each member of the crew.
Every once in a while, the ship shudders with the impact of the shipping cranes loading and unloading containers. It’s loud. Steel on steel.
https://soundcloud.com/alexismadrigal/a-container-shipping-crane-in-operation
Venturing out to explore the ship, I heard three people rushing by. 2 new guys coming aboard. I asked if I could tag along as Dirk, the radio officer, a kind of IT man of the sea, showed them around.
New Guy 1: It’s kind a like, I pinch myself, “I’m here. Ahhhh!”
New Guy 2: I couldn’t believe it either.
Dirk and I go up to the bridge and I have a chance to really get a look at him. He’s an All American guy. Former Air Force TAC-P in a plaid shirt and cargo pants. Trim beard. Grew up in Knoxville, east Tennessee, he would want me to note, which is totally different from west Tennessee. He talks like a drill sergeant who has reformed himself into a life coach.
Dirk: This is a perfect utilization of my skills and education for which I can be compensated to support my family. And moving forward out of this, there is no such thing as a guarantee anymore. You continually have to upgrade your skills, change with the pace of time, and such and so forth.
He’s a radio officer, a position that used to be crucial to the basic functioning of ships because it was hard to operate the communications equipment. Now, computers do most of what the people once did.
Dirk: That really subjugated our career to automation. We hung in there and blossomed our role to include IT, admin, support. And there were still lots of things on the vessel that could use someone like a radio officer to maintain and work on.
And so that’s what he does. He maintains the wifi. He keeps the highly specific maritime comms systems running. He’s the IT guy. And yet Dirk sees more to it. He sees it as a patriotic act.
Dirk: It is a duty because I feel like I’m assisting in some small way to the GDP. But also under duress, I feel like I have skills that I can offer the merchant marine with regard to emergency communications. That’s always been my niche: it’s patriotic… A lot of people see it as economy propulsion and mainly from an economic sense, but for me, it’s still patriotic.
Dirk never explicitly mentions the Jones Act, but he’s calling on the same registers: Duty, patriotism. But I’m also stunned by the way those values are hooked to the capitalist ones that have kept him bouncing around the economy. He’s assisting the GDP, and maybe under duress — war or emergency — he will be called on to serve in some deeper capacity.
I returned to the dining hall and got a chance to chat with the Steward, the guy who runs the kitchen. He’s a massive dude, maybe 6’7”, 350, and he’s got a really, really deep voice..
Duane: I was a professional basketball player in Australia.
When his career wrapped up, he took a cruise ship gig for a couple years, went back to school for cooking, and now he’s been a steward for 15 years on ships. His first freighter was a military supply vessel during the first Gulf War, operation Desert Storm.
I asked him if he’d ever had a ship with a basketball court inside. I knew that some of the big trans-Pacific freighters do. And indeed he had, a ship called the Greatland.
Duane: And we’d go down there and play and the ship would roll around, all of a sudden, it’d roll over and you’d be dribbling. What was interesting about the Greatland is it sunk at the dock…
Apparently that can happen. But it got pulled up, repaired, and refloated.
Duane: And about 28 years later that ship went to Florida and they changed the name to the El Faro and it sank again in a hurricane. And it was the same ship, the El Faro.
That’s not exactly true, but it’s close. The Greatland was a sister ship of the El Faro, built at the Sun Shipbuilding yard in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, Duane can’t stop himself from passing judgment on the El Faro’s situation.
Duane: They shouldn’t have been there where they were. They lost power during the storm and started listing. And ro-ros are… What a ro-ro is is a roll on, roll off, and what it is is a parking garage, where they drive these trucks on with these things and then they undo the cab and leave them on their chassis.
Having spent a lifetime on these kinds of ships, he had developed his own theory of what happened to the El Faro.
Duane: So when the ship starting rolling, this water started going on this ship… every time it rolled, it took more and more water and eventually it took so much, it went straight to the bottom.
And he suspected that his own ship might get into similar trouble, if it ended up in the wrong place..
Duane: These ships are … This one has open holds too, if this ship started to roll and take on water, it could have the same problems.
I leave Duane, so he can prepare the kitchen for lunch. It’s been a disturbing conversation. The ocean wants to kill you. That’s the fundamental reality of this world, no matter how masked it is by the simulation of normal life ashore.
It’s time to talk with the captain, Tony Mociun. He’s a ringer, a legitimate ringer, I think, for Tommy Lee Jones. Maybe a finer-featured Tommy Lee Jones. And I’ve come to find him one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. We walk to his office.
Tony: It’s really nice. I hate this being in Port. It’s like, then I’m not doing my job. I’m doing paperwork.
Alexis: You like when you’re sailing, when you’re moving.
Tony: That’s what these things are supposed to do.
There’s a couch! There’s a computer. Books and things are scattered about. It looks like we could be on the 7th floor of an office building in Kansas City. Except for the occasional thud of containers outside, at least. Mociun, who has been a captain for almost a decade, still doesn’t quite seem to used to having made the jump from chief mate to captain.
Tony: That chief mate time, I’m Tony. And I know what’s going on. I’m part of the crew. Soon as you become captain, you don’t fucking know what’s going on anymore. It’s unbelievable. No one comes to visit. They want in a way, a mother figure. They don’t want a friend. They want someone they can trust in a rough time. Because there is a nurturing that you have to do, too, sometimes.
I loved that this old salty dog would describe himself as a mother figure to the ship. It was beautiful and unusual to hear. But Tony Mociun has had an unusual career and an unusual life. He went to the California Maritime Academy, like so many other officers on the west coast, but in 1970, jobs were hard to find.
Tony: 1970 the Vietnam war is winding down. The cargo volume is dropping. Ships are being pulled out of service, and these old guys are still around. So it was hard to get a job. American flagged ships, of course. Jones Act. That’s why we like the Jones Act. Especially if you’re gonna have presidents who get us into wars. It’s really important.
He went back to school and got a teaching certificate. But he couldn’t find a teaching gig, either, so he ended up going back out to sea a few years later. But then…
Tony: I fell madly in love and didn’t really want to go to sea too much. At that point, my wife and I team taught in our little community and I would work the winter time and in the summertime, I’d go down to the union hall and get a 6-week job.
But then tragedy struck the young family. His wife was diagnosed with cancer and died. They had two children. Mociun suddenly had to try to be both mother and father.
Tony: I made a button. It said, “Embrace the mundane.” … I noticed myself, I’d be making dinner, cutting the carrots up in smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. But you know, I was thrown into that. It was the only right thing to do.
During that time, he leaned heavily on his community, which is a pretty unusual place located a few hours north of San Francisco on the Yuba River. It’s called the San Juan Ridge and it is home to the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gary Snyder.
When he’s on the water, though, Tony sees the ship as his community. The crew as his children.
Tony: Kinda my nickname in the company for a while was Turnaround Tony. We had, a wiper, the lowliest guy in the engine room had put his finger into a flywheel near the generator and we thought he had chopped his finger off, but it was a little bit still hanging on there.. I turned the ship around and took him back to Hawaii. For me, the crew wants mothering.
Tony can’t help bringing up the El Faro. He says his maritime family talks about the incident all the time. It weighs on their minds. Their office is an old steamship that actually looks like the one that went down.
Tony: The El Faro, old steamship, costs a lot of money to maintain, and the companies of course, really don’t want to spend money on maintenance.
A month or two after the El Faro sunk, Tony Mociun’s ship was coming down the Pacific Coast in a hell of a storm.
Tony: it was the worst weather I’d ever been in in my life… This is an old ship, but they are really well built. The steel is thick and it is strong. And so I trust my seamanship. I trust the structure of the ship. I don’t trust that the propeller is gonna keep going around. It’s too many moving parts and we had been having problems.
Tony says in that moment, he thought about the El Faro.
Tony: This is what happened to the El Faro… You lose power and you can’t maneuver anymore. It was really the first situation where I really started picturing crew members. But it was the young crew members. Those were the ones that I was really picturing. These kids.
So far, Turnaround Tony always takes care of the kids.
*
Like so many pieces of the global trade system, there is no slack available in the American shipping system. Global capitalism has scoured out the inefficiencies and cut up all these enterprises into their most profitable arrangements. No one wants to spend money on new expensive American ships for Jones Act trade but no one wants to spend money on maintenance for old ships either.
The US can’t have a skilled merchant marine on the cheap forever, even if that cheap is much more than the economists think would make sense.
So here we are, officers and crews doing the best they can under the circumstances, hoping the propeller will keep going around.
That’s it for the show this week. Containers is edited and produced by the illustrious Jonathan Hirsch. Mandana Mofidi is the director of audio at Fusion Media Group. Special thanks to Sylvan Mishima Brackett, creator and chef of Izakaya Rintaro, the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco and the one of Tony Mociun’s students who happens to be my friend. Thanks to Tony Mociun for letting me crawl all over his ship. And to Rachel Slade for her excellent reporting on the families of the victims of the El Faro. You can’t research that tragedy and not come to feel like you know the people on board. And I’d like to dedicate this episode to the families of those 33 lost sailors. May they find justice and peace.
Next week we meet Margaret Gordon, a pioneering activist in West Oakland, who has been instrumental in channeling community sentiment into legislation that’s cleaned up the Port. And she’s brilliant and she’s feisty.
