Coast Guard knew El Faro was in serious trouble from first notification

The one thing the Coast Guard wishes the El Faro crew had was an enclosed, self-launching lifeboat.

Coast Guard 7^th District Chief of Incident Response Management Captain Todd Coggeshall walked the Marine Board of Investigation through their search and rescue efforts from the moment they were told about problems on the ship. The El Faro Captain had told the operating company, TOTE Services, that the vessel had taken on water, had lost propulsion, and had a 15 degree list. TOTE relayed that to the Coast Guard, who initially assessed the vessel as being disabled, but not in distress, because they were told the flooding was contained and the vessel thought she could dewater.

AUDIO: El Faro's emergency calls ahead of sinking

Coggeshall says, for him, the classification was about needing to gather more information.

“Whether the watchstander said that we were in the ‘alert phase’ or the ‘distress phase’, we took all the action that was available to us as if it was an emergent distress,” he says.

He says they took the situation seriously from the first notification. That awareness was heightened when they couldn’t get back in touch with El Faro. Then, what he found alarming, was that they received a registered, unlocated EPIRB from the vessel, which he says amounts to a "mayday”.

On the day the emergency calls were made, Coggeshall says the Coast Guard couldn’t get any assets to the area. Part of the reasons is the way those assets were disbursed, part was the distance to get to El Faro, and part was because of Joaquin. In fact, a Hurricane Hunter aircraft was launched to call out to El Faro, but couldn’t descend to a level where they may have been able to see something because of the storm. Even on the second day, when they sent in a Coast Guard plane, it was damaged by the storm.

“A high risk mission outside of the normal parameters that we would operate in,” Coggeshall says.

EXHIBIT: Detailed look at Coast Guard search and rescue efforts for El Faro

Hurricane Joaquin, which was a Category 4 by this time, was also hampering them in other ways.

First, the Coast Guard 7^th District was doing another search and rescue at the time they were dealing with El Faro. The Bolivian-flagged Minouche container ship had her crane break loose, and as a result the ship had a 30 degree list, and their location was getting tropical storm conditions on the fringe of Joaquin. The crew abandoned ship, and the 12 people were recovered through three separate rescue flights conducted over about eight hours.

Second, the Bahamian government wasn’t providing any resources to aid in the El Faro search, because they were either in storm prep or sheltering in place.  The Coast Guard works with 34 countries over 1.8 million square nautical miles through various agreements and treaties, according to Coggeshall.

Finally, there was only one other vessel that had any proximity to El Faro- the Emerald Express commercial vessel, which was on the west side of Crooked Island, Bahamas. Because of Joaquin, the vessel told the Coast Guard they were “unable and unwilling” to try to get closer to El Faro, although they did attempt to call out. A member of the Board indicated the Emerald Express actually wound up running aground, but did not call on the Coast Guard for help.

GALLERY: El Faro wreckage

Still further complicating the situation were some software upgrades on Coast Guard systems. One, according to Coggshall, was constantly locking up. With the second system, they weren’t getting the needed tech support and were training on the fly. The result is a lot of the initial search grid planning was done manually, although Coggshall says their estimations for drift and other factors in conducting the search wound up matching up when the software was in use.

Coggshall says, from the beginning, he was considering the possibility that the vessel had gone down. He ultimately made that determination October 4^th, and by the 5^th he was telling families they changed their efforts to searching for lifeboats and life rafts. Ultimately, after a week of search efforts, they recovered a life ring and a badly damaged lifeboat, but no survivors.

“In a survival suit in those condition, I would imagine is measured in minutes, not hours,” he says.

There was one survival suit found by the search teams, and a set of human remains was inside. Coggshall says it would be possible to recover the remains, but would have led to the plane being grounded until it could be cleaned because it would become a bio-hazard scenario. While they were having discussion on whether to recover the remains, however, they received a call about another potential survival suit in the area- and it appeared to be waving. Coggshall says they determined the possibility of finding a survivor was more important than immediately recovering the remains, so they left a beacon with the hope of coming back later.

The waiving survival suit turned out to be a false report, and the beacon the Coast Guard left with the remains never activated, so they were never found.

Coggshall says they’re actually now in the process of replacing those beacons, because they have a failure rate of 40-50%.

GALLERY: Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation convenes in Jacksonville

The NTSB asked Coggshall to speculate on why search crews did not find more suits and remains. Coggshall told them it's possible the rest of the crew was still below deck and the ship went down quickly. He said it's likely the engineers were even still working on trying to get propulsion back for the ship.

The Chair of the Board asked Coggshall about whether he thinks the El Faro having open life boats was at all a factor in what happened. Coggshall told the Board that, through the search and rescue process, an enclosed, self-launching lifeboat is the one thing he hoped the crew would have had. He added that having that type of lifeboat still would have had to come with the timely decision to abandon ship,

“In my professional opinion, the safest place for that crew to be in those conditions was on the ship. Once that was compromised, in my opinion, they did not have any other options. That life boat would have given them an option they could have used earlier,” he says.

WOKV will continue to follow the MBOI. Get instant information on Twitter.