Storm data supplied to El Faro was 10 hours out of date

The ill-fated cargo ship did not have an accurate forecast of the path of Hurricane Joaquin due to delays in the BonVoyage reporting system, according to official testimony from the second round of Marine Board of Investigation hearings into the incident.    The ill-fated TOTE Maritime general cargo vessel El Faro was not given up to date weather information before sailing into the path of Hurricane Joaquin last October, according to official testimony from the second round of U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) hearings into the incident.
   The El Faro lost propulsion and sank near Crooked Island, Bahamas Oct. 1 after being caught in the category 4 hurricane, claiming the lives of the 33 crew members on board.
   Officials from Applied Weather Technology (AWT) and TOTE confirmed El Faro’s weather forecasting system received data about Hurricane Joaquin that was 10 hours old by the time it set sail Sept. 30.
   AWT delivers weather forecasts from the National Weather Service through the BonVoyage system, but officials said the inputting the data into the system can take as much as nine hours, meaning that forecasts given to cargo vessels are often out of date.
   The BonVoyage system provides forecasts that extend out to at least 16 days, showing surface pressure, wind velocity, and wave height, as well as a three-day forecast for surface events.
   “The underlining model data was up-to-date,” Rich Brown, vice president of operations for AWT, told the MBI. “The winds, the waves, the pressure were all up-to-date. The storm track was out-of-date.”
   Compounding the issue, initial forecasts of Hurricane Joaquin contained errors “much larger than normal,” according to testimony from James Franklin, branch chief of the National Hurricane Center’s hurricane specialist unit.
   Franklin said the storm was initially expected to develop into a “relatively weak system” on a west-northwest heading. In fact, weather experts predicted Joaquin would dissipate by the time El Faro was scheduled to sail from Jacksonville, Fla. to Puerto Rico, but the storm picked up speed and intensity and tracked south-southwest instead.
   TOTE executives testified in the first round of MBI hearings back in February that the captain of the El Faro, Mark Davidson, emailed management to request permission to transit a different route on the ship’s return trip to Jacksonville. 
   For the Jacksonville to Puerto Rico trade on which the El Faro served, there is one primary route, referred to as the Atlantic route, and two secondary passages, called the Tropics Channel and the Bahamas Channel. Davidson was given permission to transit the slower Bahamas Channel on the northbound section the ship’s voyage, but the El Faro never reached Puerto Rico.
   In other testimony this week, Capt. Jack Hearn, who worked on El Faro‘s sister ship, said he was fired after reporting safety issues with the El Morro. Hearn said he was “disappointed” when TOTE did not report holes in the vessel to the Coast Guard until after it sailed an additional voyage.
   According to Hearn, a TOTE official came onboard the El Morro several weeks later and told him he would be fired if he did not resign on his own. Hearn said he asked TOTE to investigate the matter, but was fired before entering into arbitration.
   In an apparent effort to discredit Hearn, William Bennett, an attorney for Davidson’s widow, read from a letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection accusing the El Morro and its crew of smuggling cocaine. Hearn confirmed knowledge of the letter, which the Coast Guard refused to release to the media until after the MBI investigation is complete, but did not comment further.
   The second set of USCG MBI hearings into the sinking of the El Faro are scheduled to run through next Friday, March 27. TOTE officials and employees, along with vessel safety and maintenance professionals, members of the Coast Guard, and weather experts have testified in an attempt to identify any potential illegal or otherwise negligent conduct in the incident.