re: The sinking of El Faro

Did they ever find the couple or the boat? I remember reading about them but never saw an update

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Old ship. Outdated instruments. The instrument that measured wind speed hadn't worked in months...

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Not even a factor. I’ve ran that route more times than I can remember with way less instruments and have never had an anemometer on board. What is an anemometer going to do for you? You’re in a fricking hurricane. Only a fool skirts or tries to skirt a tropical storm/hurricane. The captain fricked up, plain and simple.

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Crazy that they didnt have rail launched enclosed life boats on a ship that size.

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This. I can't believe that wouldn't be a standard update? Seems like this is the #1 reason the entire crew died?

I gave up on Vanity Fair a long time ago and I would totally have missed this. Thank you again for posting the link. I've read it twice and even gotten out old charts we happen to have. I tend to stay inland for hurricanes and I had never thought of islands as wave breaks. Maybe more people should look at islands that way.

Very interesting read.

Between this and the river pilots thread, I feel like the O-T is giving me some maritime education this week.

Early on the article, it said a ship was lost every 2-3 days??? That's insane.

Also, this was a Jones Act flagged vessel. Defenders of the Jones Act often will say that having a US flagged vessel results in a safer journey. Given how the story was told, clearly that did not apply here. This was almost 100 percent human error - either in the actions they did or did not take during the trip, or the decisions to not pay for better information.

There would have generally only been a mate and an AB on watch as the captain would have assuredly closed the deck off from day work due to weather. But in 30 to 40 footers, I assure you nobody was sleeping

I was surprised to read that the captains family was one of the families who recieved compensation. It seems like there should be some blame on his part.
What do you think?

That was a really interesting read. Thanks for linking to it.

Vanity Fair actually sometimes has some excellent writing. Their story on Air France Flight 447 is terrifying.

Oh the NTSB definitely blamed the captain for putting the ship and crew in harm's way to begin with. But some people say the captain was scared to delay arrival by too much because he was under pressure from TOTE management. Of course management has denied that but unfortunately when the entire crew dies, you end up only getting half the story.

Man, I wanted to bang my head while reading that. Totally avoidable.