The final heart-wrenching words heard from a captain going down with his ship were promises not to leave a seaman behind.
A telling 500-page transcript released Tuesday of voice data recordings made during the ill-fated trip of the cargo ship El Faro chronicles the last hours before the vessel sank amid the roar of 2015's Hurricane Joaquin.
It is an uneasy read — a tale told through the banter of sailors increasingly concerned with their plotted course and a captain who appears to rebuff the growing danger of an explosive and unpredictable tropical cyclone until it is too late. All 33 people aboard El Faro died.
While the audio recording of the transcript was not released by the National Transportation Safety Board, context to conversations was provided with descriptions such as “spoken loudly," “sound of scream” or “yelled.”
Eight minutes after the alarm to abandon ship was sounded on the morning of Oct. 1, El Faro Capt. Michael Davidson and an unidentified crew member were recorded in a chaotic exchange on the bridge.
“Hey, don’t panic,” Davidson is heard, first yelling, then speaking loudly.
“Goin’ down,” an unidentified crewmember yelled.
“You’re not goin’ down. Come on,” Davidson said.
“You gonna leave me?”
“I’m not leaving you, let’s go,” Davidson said loudly.
“I can’t. I can’t. I’m gone/I’m a goner.”
“No, you’re not,” Davidson yelled.
“Just help me,” the seaman yelled.
“Let’s go. It’s time to come this way,” Davidson exclaimed.
Then the transcript ends with “yelling cut off by the termination of the recording.”
The transcript is one of five reports the NTSB made public Tuesday as part of the agency’s ongoing investigation into the maritime tragedy that left a broken El Faro at the bottom of the ocean near Crooked Island in the Bahamas.
In the months since the accident, investigators have tried to understand what led to the sinking, and have looked closely at which weather forecasts were available to the crew and when. One of the reports released includes 2,000 pages examining the meteorology and forecasting of Hurricane Joaquin.
Joaquin was a Category 3 hurricane with 127-mph winds when El Faro sank just 25 miles north-northwest of the storm’s center.
“This is not the complete NTSB report,” said NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart. “There is no analysis, no statement of probable cause and no recommendations on how to prevent this from happening in the future. That is still to come.”
But the NTSB considers the information captured by the six microphones on the bridge of El Faro critical to determining the events leading to its sinking. The transcript required more than 1,100 hours to complete and is the longest the NTSB has ever produced.
The National Hurricane Center’s report on Hurricane Joaquin notes the difficulty in forecasting the storm’s track and intensity.
Meteorologists first noted the emerging system to abandon ship west of the Canary Islands on Sept. 8 but, according to the NHC report, “forecasters were unable to recognize that tropical cyclone formation was even a possibility until 48 hours before genesis occurred.”
Intensity and track go hand in hand. Weak storms are steered more by surface flows, and strong storms by upper-level winds. Because the forecast was for a weak storm, most models predicted it would get picked up by a trough that was developing along the East Coast and head harmlessly to the northwest.
Early forecasts “indicated there would be little to no strengthening of Joaquin,” the National Hurrican Center's report notes.
Joaquin became a tropical storm Sept. 28, making it the 10th named storm of the 2015 hurricane season.
El Faro left Jacksonville on Sept. 29.
Tuesday’s transcript shows the captain made an early route change to avoid the storm.
“We’re gonna be further south of the eye,” he is heard telling people on the bridge. “We’ll be about sixty miles south of the eye. It should be fine. We are gonna be fine – not should be – we are gonna be fine.”
But crew members grew increasingly concerned as they watched Joaquin blow up to a Category 3 storm, even chatting about the movie "The Perfect Storm," which tells the story of the commercial fishing vessel Andrea Gail that was lost at sea in 1991.
“Remember in "The Perfect Storm" with that container ship rockin’ and rollin’ and all?” one crew member asks at 6:47 p.m. on Sept. 30.
“Uh, I saw that, but I don’t like watchin’ that. I saw it but when I saw it, I did not like that movie. [sound of chuckle] Cause I’m on that thing, you know,” the other crew member responds.
James Ritter, NTSB director of the office of research and engineering, said crew members on the bridge had access to current forecast information, while a second forecast that was delayed 6 hours was also sent to the captain via email.
When the captain left the bridge at 8 p.m. Sept. 30, he was called twice overnight by people on duty who had concerns about the ship’s route and suggestions on alternative paths.
He rejected both.
Part of the pending analysis will be how, if at all, those different forecasts may have impacted El Faro’s fate, which was sealed when the ship lost propulsion at 6:13 a.m. Oct. 1.
“Wake everybody up,” the captain is heard “exclaiming in an urgent, almost angry tone” an hour later. “Wake’em up,” the report said.
