Into the Raging Sea by Rachel Slade

Author:Rachel Slade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

We’re Gonna Make It

Shultz, Davidson, Danielle, and Frank Hamm braced themselves on the bridge holding their breath, waiting in the howling dawn for word from the engine room. Without propulsion, they couldn’t steer. Instead the old ship lolled helplessly in the churn of the sea until her bow pointed longingly back to Jacksonville. For several agonizing minutes, Davidson stared at the ship’s phone, hoping that Rich Pusatere would call with good news. In the engine room, the chief engineer was trying to get the turbines back online but water was sloshing around everywhere, pouring in from above, seeping through the watertight doors. He didn’t have enough oil to get his lube pressure up.

Third Assistant Engineer Mike Holland was opening valves in the engine room manifold to bilge three-hold. It would take hours to pump out all that water. “Is there any way to tell if you actually have suction and it’s pumping?” Davidson asked him over the ship’s phone.

Not really. Unless someone could look over the side of the ship and actually see the water flowing out of the hull, it was almost impossible to tell. There was even a chance that, as Holland opened valves, water got inadvertently pumped into other holds. Mariners who knew those ships told me that the combination bilge/ballast system aboard never worked well; the valves between the two intake and outtake systems were always getting pinned open by chips of rust or paint causing ballast water to flood the fourth decks.

High water alarms were sounding in the engine room but no one on El Faro knew where all the water was coming from or where it was going. The old watertight doors between holds began weeping; some of the man-doors inside those doors may have been left open during loading. Water rained down onto the engineers from the ventilation ducts in the ceiling and seeped through the doors protecting them from the holds. Soon every chamber in the ship would be filled with seawater.

Davidson ordered Holland to open all the valves on the bilge system to pump all the holds at once. But if some spaces they were pumping were dry, the entire system would gurgle and sputter to a halt.

In the end, it didn’t matter. The ocean had found another way in.

Twenty feet below the waterline on the starboard side was the ship’s main fire pump. It was connected by a short length of pipe to a small hole in El Faro’s hull. The pump was designed to draw seawater through piping to the engine room manifold. From there, engineers could open and close valves to direct water to extinguish fires anywhere on the ship. The crew regularly used this system to wash down the ship’s decks, so the main valve between the fire pump and sea was nearly always left open.

As the cars in three-hold slipped their moorings and floated free, they crashed back and forth against the hull with every roll of the ship. Some cars probably slammed into the fire pump, busting the pipe, causing an eight-inch breach in the hull.

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