Three years later, El Faro disaster leading to reforms

Sept. 29--For three years, people who loved the crew of the El Faro have lived with its sinking.

They have cried together, questioned, and sat through weeks of government hearings about the disaster that killed 33 mariners caught in a hurricane as the cargo ship sailed from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico.

Finally last week, they had, in a way, something to cheer.

After months of start-and-stop discussion, both houses of Congress passed in minutes a bill to improve safety rules on oceangoing commercial ships. It needs President Donald Trump's signature to become law.

The bill was an answer to dozens of changes the Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board recommended after studying the El Faro's sinking on Oct. 1, 2015.

"The families of the El Faro crew deserve much of the credit" for the bill's success, said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. "Hopefully other mariners will benefit from these safety improvements and be spared the tragic fate befallen the El Faro."

The fact that the protections weren't in place already hangs over families of the seafarers who have come to be called the El Faro 33.

"I feel like this tragedy would never have happened" if the changes had been made earlier, said Rochelle Hamm, whose husband, Frank, was a helmsman on the ship.

The nonprofit Hamm launched to advocate for seafarer safety, Hamm Alert, is commemorated in a title in the bill, the Hamm Alert Maritime Safety Act of 2018.

The El Faro was near the Bahamas when Hurricane Joaquin's Category 3 winds overwhelmed it, flooding cargo holds and killing the engine before the 790-foot ship sank to the ocean floor three miles below.

Finding the sunken hull took searchers a month.

A particularly painful fact of the disaster was that only one body was ever found, wearing a flotation suit, and the search crew that located it left it at sea to chase another report of a possible survivor.

To avoid repeats of that situation, the bill requires oceangoing ships to be outfitted with distress signals and equipment to locate each crew member lost at sea. The bill also tells the Coast Guard to buy devices like beacons that rescuers can attach to items left at sea, so they can be retrieved later.

Another part of the bill requires the Coast Guard to set up, as a pilot project, a system for crew members to anonymously report "urgent and dire safety concerns" to the Coast Guard. Nelson added that to the bill, which he co-sponsored, after a request from an El Faro family member.

Other sections require changes to safety systems on board ship and an effort to negotiate changes to an international agreement created through the International Maritime Organization.

But other changes that El Faro investigations recommended -- like requiring lifeboats that are enclosed, not open to the elements-- were kept out of the bill.

"I am grateful for the efforts made to increase safety ... but the bill could have done much more," said Glen Jackson, whose brother, Jack, was an able seaman on El Faro.

New ships use enclosed lifeboats but the Coast Guard's former commandant, Paul Zukunft, told the NTSB in July that a proposal by his agency to replace open lifeboats on old ships had been dropped years earlier "due to cost-benefit and competitiveness concerns." He said his agency uses a campaign of concentrated inspections to ensure the lifeboats are in good shape.

The bill tells the Coast Guard to report plans and costs to triple the number of inspectors the agency uses to examine ships' seaworthiness.

A separate part would require advanced training for Coast Guard inspectors on how to oversee outside organizations the agency delegates its inspection power to.

Those ideas were touted as fixes to lapses perpetuated by routinely low funding of the agency's inspection arm.

"The Coast Guard will not do more with less. The Coast Guard is in fact doing less with less. ... We now know that the Coast Guard's internal marine safety and inspections function was one of those missions that did less with less," U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., told the House Transportation Committee before it approved the bill in June.

"This legislation requires the Coast Guard to rebuild its internal marine safety competency," Garamendi said.

The Coast Guard operates an "alternative compliance" program under which many old or unusual ships are inspected by an influential nonprofit organization, the American Bureau of Shipping.

Zukunft said after the El Faro investigations that the alternative compliance system "requires reform." The bill calls for the Coast Guard to create an office to handle "comprehensive and targeted oversight" of organizations like the shipping bureau and give the Coast Guard commandant a year to review and make whatever changes are needed to powers the agency delegates.

Separate from the bill, the NTSB urged the shipping bureau in February to improve training of its inspectors. A shipping bureau spokeswoman, Cathy Mann, said the organization updated a refresher training program that inspectors have to complete every three years.

The bill also tells the Coast Guard to try to negotiate changes to an international ship-safety agreement to require use of high-water alarms in ship cargo holds so buildups of water are noticed faster. Flooding in the El Faro's holds caused the ship to list to one side, and steering in another direction to help a crew member seal a flooded hatch may have led to the ship losing propulsion and being thrown helplessly by fierce waves, the NTSB concluded.

Another treaty change the bill seeks through the International Maritime Organization would require ship data recorders to be mounted so they'll float free and activate an electronic beacon if the ship sinks. The El Faro's recorder was attached to a 4-ton mast that had separated from the ship and sank, and searchers who found it months later had to return with special equipment to free it.

The bill also wants a change in the same agreement -- the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, an agreement created after the Titanic sank -- to require ships to receive "timely synoptic and graphical" weather forecasts.

The El Faro crew received satellite updates on Joaquin's movement, but an NTSB member told the Senate Commerce Committee in April that the ship's captain, Michael Davidson, mistakenly relied on information that "was out of date by many hours."

The bill lays out deadlines for carrying out changes and repeatedly reporting results to Congress over the next couple of years.

While that unfolds gradually, people close to the El Faro crew will keep adapting to life after the disaster, holding the ship and crew in their hearts.

Hamm formally incorporated Hamm Alert in June and said she'd wants to grow the organization to be able to work with mariner families internationally.

"This has become my life. This is my baby," she said of Hamm Alert's work. "This is important for me."

Recently, she was invited to the home of another mariner, Roderick Frazier, to bless a painting.

Frazier, a Realtor who was previously an El Faro engineer, had commissioned Jacksonville artist Roosevelt Watson III to create a vibrant image of the ship that dominates a wall in his Talleyrand-area home.

"That's from the heart," Frazier said of the image of the ship in storm-tossed waters.

A figure hovers overhead, pointing. It's the spirit of an engineer who died after a heart attack onboard in 2014, Frazier said.

He's pointing the crew toward land.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263

___

(c)2018 The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.)

Visit The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.) at www.jacksonville.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.