Lost in the Bermuda Triangle (Full Episode) | Witness to Disaster | National Geographic

MICHAEL (over radio): I have a marine emergency. WOMAN (over radio): Give me one moment, I'm gonna try to connect you now, okay? MICHAEL (over radio): Oh man. The clock the, the clock is ticking. NARRATOR: October the 1st, 2015. US Merchant vessel El Faro sends a distress signal from its position off the Bahamas. KIM: The ship's completely at the mercy of the elements. She's in absolutely dire straits. NARRATOR: Then she disappears. JACK: The ship was just missing in a hurricane and that was the only information we had. REPORTER (over TV): The cargo ship that has been caught in hurricane Joaquin. REPORTER (over TV): With 33 crew men aboard, missing since. NARRATOR: The search begins. JEFF: We didn't know what to expect to be honest with you. We know it's gonna be bad. NARRATOR: The marine investigators launch one of the most complex enquiries in their history. ROCHELLE: It just seemed like it was unreal that a ship that big, made of steel and everything could sink like that. JILL: I can't imagine how they felt knowing this is most likely the end. NARRATOR: The ship's black box reveals a series of events that shock the maritime world. GLEN: 33 people lost their lives under completely avoidable circumstances. What happened? NARRATOR: Now investigator's reports... Engineering analysis and the final words of the crew as they sail into the storm. MICHAEL: We've lost the main propulsion unit. The engineers cannot get it going. NARRATOR: Reveal the true story of America's worst maritime disaster in three decades. (theme music plays). On the East coast of Florida in the United States is the busy sea port of Jacksonville. Nearly 9 million tons of cargo pass through the port every year. Among the ships calling Jacksonville home, is the 40 year old El Faro. A US flagged 790 foot roll on, roll off container carrier. El Faro spent her early life in the rough waters off Alaska but was transferred to Jacksonville in May of 2014. Jack Herne was her captain until 2012. JACK: El Faro was a ship that I loved. Probably my favorite and the ship was a heroic ship. She had been in the second Gulf War. She carried troops over and she was under attack for three days with soldiers on board in fact, she turned into a bomb shelter. I was on that ship a total of 14 years. I had a number of years in Alaska where the winter storms are well known. So, she's seen plenty. NARRATOR: On the 29th of September, 2015, El Faro leaves Jacksonville. Operated by the shipping company Tote Maritime, she's carrying cargo to Puerto Rico. More than 1200 miles to the south. On board is an American crew of 28 and five Polish maintenance hands. At the helm is 53 year old Michael Davidson. Now in his tenth year as a captain. GEORGE: Michael Davidson's character was one of a man accustomed to command. He'd been working in the sea since he was a teenager. He was a very, very good mariner. He was confident in his own abilities. He was confident in the ship. NARRATOR: Also on board is second mate Danielle Randolph. LAURIE: She was a spitfire. She didn't let no guys you know, stop her from doing what she wanted to do. And if you didn't hold your end up, she had no problems putting you in your place. NARRATOR: Jack Jackson is one of the ship's most experienced hands with 30 years at sea. GLEN: Oh he was just a wild man. You know, the best brother you could ever ask for. He was a good athlete you know, he was just adventurous beyond compare. You know, as soon as he got out of high school he hit the highway. The leader of the pack. Oh yeah. JILL: My brother was very good looking and people would say 'Oh, he looks like Robert Redford.' you know, and very tall and very trim. So he had physical presence that was, you know, wonderful. NARRATOR: Able Seaman Frank Hamm, has been a mariner for more than 15 years. ROCHELLE: I first met Frank. We worked together. We worked at realapsas together. I was the cook and he was the dish washer. He was a good dish washer. He was always clowning. Frank was a family man and he was funny. He enjoyed traveling the world and he loved making a lot of money. NARRATOR: El Faro's four day sailing to Puerto Rico is a regular trip for her crew. ROCHELLE: What was good about the El Faro was Frank would be home every week and that was his world. He got to the point where he didn't like being away from home. JILL: It was what they call a milk run you know, it was not a dangerous weather run. NARRATOR: But as El Faro leaves port on the 29th of September, a storm system is developing almost 700 miles to the east. Given the name Joaquin, it quickly gathers strength and on September the 30th at 7:39 in the morning, Joaquin becomes a hurricane. REPORTER (over TV): We now have hurricane Joaquin. This now with winds of 75 miles per hour. NARRATOR: But here, over the warm seas off Florida, hurricanes are nothing unusual. ROCHELLE: We have a season that's called Hurricane Season and it starts around June/July and it ends in November. So it's something that happens every year. NARRATOR: Hurricanes form when the moist air over warm tropical seas is heated and rises, creating cloud. As it does so, it draws in more air, which is also heated. This further powers the system. The Earth's rotation causes the whole thing to spin. As winds reach 74 miles per hour the storm becomes a hurricane. But forecasting the progress of hurricane Joaquin will prove unusually difficult. REPORTER (over TV): Hurricane Joaquin's strengthening is now a category 3. NARRATOR: At 10:49 in the evening on September the 30th, Joaquin's winds intensify to over 115 miles per hour and it registers as a category 3 hurricane. Professor Brian Haus has built a hurricane in a box at the University of Miami to try to understand how hurricanes work and so improve the accuracy of forecasting. BRIAN: In the case of hurricane Joaquin it was really important to know as soon as possible, how strong the storm could be. What I do is I'm an experimentalist. And I make observations of what's happening to try to help us get better predictions. Joaquin intensified from a minimal hurricane to a category 3 hurricane in less than 24 hours and so that's what we call rapid intensification. NARRATOR: Joaquin's abnormally fast growth is due to its slow track south westward over particularly warm seas. BRIAN: The massive amount of energy that's in the hurricane is extracted from the ocean. If it's moving slowly over warm water then it can continue to receive that energy. Just keeps mixing in more warm water and that just continues to provide power for the storm. NARRATOR: At 1:30 in the morning on October the 1st, Joaquin's winds strengthen further to 120 miles per hour. ROCHELLE: Honestly, I really didn't pay attention to it because Frank told me that they always divert it. So I never had to worry at all. NARRATOR: They are no more worried in Miami. The hub of the Coast Guard's district 7 and home to their incident response team. But at 7:30 in the morning they take a call from Tote Maritime, the owners of El Faro. TODD: We got a call from Tote saying that they had received a phone call from the ship's captain of the El Faro, saying that they had taken on water in the number 3 hold and they were without power and that they were going to set off their emergency signals basically to let everybody know. NARRATOR: All subsequent attempts to contact the ship, fail. JACK: The ship was just missing in a hurricane. And that was the only information we had at the time. NARRATOR: The 2nd of October, 2015, El Faro, a 790 foot US freighter, has now been missing for 24 hours. REPORTER (over TV): The cargo ship that that has been ROCHELLE: We start seeing it on the news and at that point I knew that I had to let the kids know that daddy's ship was missing and they didn't know where he was. NARRATOR: Hurricane Joaquin is now menacing the Bahamas. Wind speeds of up to 138 miles per hour make it impossible for the Coast Guard to launch a search and rescue mission for the stricken ship. Every minute that passes reduces the crew's chances of survival. The Coast Guard are desperate to begin the search. JEFF: We didn't have many of the detail other than the size of the ship and that it was very close to the center of the storm. We didn't know what to We used to see pictures of hurricanes so we know it's going to be bad. NARRATOR: At 5:00 am on the 2nd of October, the Coast Guard launch their air search. It's over 20 hours since El Faro sent her last signal. JEFF: It was pretty close to full day light but as soon as we started to fly in to the storm and get underneath inside those clouds, it was totally blocking out most of the sunlight and started to almost get dark again in there and it was very impressive. After several attempts of sweeping the radar over and over that area, we were not coming up with any returns at all. So we flew back out of the storm, got into clear air, descended down to 2,000 feet and then went back into the storm again. The turbulence was definitely greater down there. You could feel those gusts as they were coming. You could look out the window and see the wings flex, they're kind of flapping as the plane gets lifted up and down. NARRATOR: The 100 mile per hour winds of hurricane Joaquin take their toll on the aircraft. JEFF: You can see where there's a gap right there, in between the two flap panels. There's a break there. That's where we actually saw the fuel coming out. Three or four screws that had worked loose and just from the working of the wing up and down from the turbulence that we were flying in out there. NARRATOR: At noon, after seven hours of hard flying and with fuel running low, the crew reluctantly heads for home. JEFF: We had repeatedly saturated the search area with the radar. We were pretty confident that if there had been an 800 foot freighter out there, that if it was still afloat, we would have been able to see it. NARRATOR: Over the next two days as hurricane Joaquin begins to move away, the search is widened. Multiple aircraft fly a total of 42 sorties with support from six ships. They sweep 184,000 square miles of ocean. LAURIE: The Coast Guard was really, really good about keeping us up to date you know, 'did you find anything?', 'did you hear anything?' you know, and it's always no. JILL: I thought, 'I'm gonna die just from the stress of this.' You know, I can't absorb it. GLEN: It's hoping against hope. You know, I mean again. I had total belief in my brother's abilities but these are circumstances beyond his control. NARRATOR: But then, two days after El Faro's last communication, one of the Coast Guard planes spots debris. TODD: We found two pretty major debris fields that were separated by 60 or 70 miles. But the first really concrete clue for continuing the search was a life ring with El Faro stenciled on it. We also found the El Faro's life boats. They looked like egg shells that had been crushed. LAURIE: They found some debris. Everybody's hopes is a little higher. While there's debris that means there's hope. ROCHELLE: And then they found a lifeboat and then they just started finding all these different things and. I was just hoping that they would have found you know, some survivors. NARRATOR: The crew has now been missing for more than 72 hours. And the reality is that surviving in the sorts of seas thrown up by the category 4 hurricane, is next to impossible. BRIAN: Being in the ocean surface in a category 4 hurricane would be an intensely difficult situation to be in because the spray that's in the air and the large breaking waves with tremendous amount of water in the air. I mean you would be literally unable to breathe. Very difficult to survive that condition for very long. TODD: The ship was that crew's best chance for survival so finding the debris fields coupled with the wide sweep of the ocean, we could conclusively determine that El Faro had sank. So losing the ship really turned down the... turned down the hope that you're going to find survivors. NARRATOR: Knowing that the crew had no chance. Todd Coggeshall must tell the families that the search is over. TODD: Working with the families was the hardest part of the case. You've been walking them down the path of mutual acceptance that everything that could possibly be done has been done and that their loved ones aren't coming home. ROCHELLE: They told us 'the ship has sank.' and I just lost it. Cause it just seemed like it was unreal that a ship like that, that big and made of steel and everything could you know, GLEN: How could this happen? You know, that 33 people lost their lives under completely NARRATOR: It's been three weeks since the discovery of debris confirmed that the US cargo ship El Faro, had been lost along with her 33 crew. The US Navy's ocean going tug Apache is sent in, and on board is the National Transportation Safety Board's lead investigator, Tom Roth-Roffy. THOMAS: The initial search area was determined by the last known position that was received by electronic signals that the vessel transmitted before it sank. NARRATOR: After four days of searching, the Apache's crew has found nothing. But then, her sonar detects a large structure lying on the seabed 15,000 feet down. On November the 1st, Apache's remote controlled camera vehicle is sent down to investigate. At this depth, almost three miles, the water pressure is 3.5 tons per square inch. THOMAS: It's quite remarkable to see the wreckage of the El Faro for the first time. It was laying on the bottom of the ocean upright. It was partially submerged because as it struck the bottom it sunk into the mud. The sunken hull, largely intact but nobody around. Almost like a ghost ship. ROCHELLE: When I saw those pictures they were hard to even look at because of the conditions of the ship. And because the ship was just beat up. LAURIE: If a ship of that magnitude cannot withstand those winds and those waves, what's the chances of a 5 foot 3, 120 pound girl surviving it? NARRATOR: The pictures reveal part of the story but to get answers, investigators must find a key part of the ship. The voyage data recorder or VDR. Like an airplane's black box, it holds a record of the ship's movements and most importantly, a recording of conversations on the bridge. But the VDR is missing. On April the 26th, six months after the discovery of the ship, they finally find it. The two foot long recorder had ended up a quarter of a mile from where El Faro had come to rest. THOMAS: When it's recovered from the bottom it's washed in distilled water and then transported to the laboratories and the memory chips are read out for the information. They found that about 26 hours of audio recording and data had been saved on the electronic memory. NARRATOR: The investigators hope that somewhere within those hours of recordings are the clues that will reveal what happened to El Faro. THOMAS: The transcription of the voyage data recorded audio is done by a team that's assembled at headquarters and the National Transportation Safety Board. NARRATOR: The audio quality from the bridge's six microphones is poor. Of the more than 61,000 words recorded, almost 2,000 are unintelligible. But after three months of meticulous work, the resulting volume reveals a vivid picture of the last hours on board El Faro. MAN (over tape): 22 miles from the center. WOMAN (over tape): That's where the hurricane's gonna be. THOMAS: This is a transcript of the El Faro's voyage data recorder. Quite moving for somebody with a marine background to read these words. To kind of live with them in the moments before the sinking. NARRATOR: As the investigators begin their analysis of the transcripts, the crew's families also search them for answers. JILL: I wanted to read the transcript. I loved the idea of being able to have a window into what they knew, what they experienced. LAURIE: I see Danielle through this big time. Big time. NARRATOR: The NTSB has never released the audio recordings so here actors have re-voiced the words of the crew. In this extract, second mate Danielle Randolph is talking about the Captain. DANIELLE: He's telling everybody down there 'Oh it's not a bad storm. It's not so bad. It's not even that windy out. I've seen worse. Nothing, it's nothing.' LAURIE: That's Danielle mimicking the Captain. And then her, Danielle's saying 'Think he's trying to play it down' DANIELLE: Because he realizes he shouldn't have gone this way. Saving face. LAURIE: So she's on to him. She knows that he screwed up. Now she kind of retaliates by being a bit sarcastic. MICHAEL: We're getting killed with this speed. DANIELLE: Oh yeah? It's not a matter of speed it's when we get there, we get there. So long as we arrive in one piece. ROCHELLE: This really is the most important thing and I was so grateful that we were able to get it because if we didn't it would have been nothing but just assumptions. GLEN: At least with that, you have a time line of what actually occurred. It's like reading a screen play to a horror movie where you know the ending unfortunately. NARRATOR: Now investigators can discover why El Faro sailed straight towards a hurricane. NARRATOR: Ten months after the US cargo ship El Faro sinks with all hands, the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB, analyses the transcripts taken from the ships Voyage Data Recorder and begins to piece together what happened. Jack Herne's 25 years as a captain, included 14 on El Faro. JACK: The weather is in the captain's mind 24/7. You're always thinking about it. NARRATOR: As El Faro steams south towards Puerto Rico, regular weather updates known as Sat Sea reports come in via the telecommunications station at the rear of the bridge. JACK: When the weather comes into the station these printers start screaming information, very loudly, and they print endlessly. Line after line after line. You can see how much paper is ready. The mates will hear that alarm. They'll come over and then they'll start to decode and process all that information and then they'll take it to the chart and plot it and triangulate that with their course. NARRATOR: At just before 5:00 pm on September the 30th, one day into the voyage, a National Hurricane Center forecast comes through on the Sat Sea system. The transcript records second mate Danielle Randolph plotting the ship's course against Joaquin's new track line. LAURIE: I visualize her plotting this. She says 'Looks like the hurricane is right over our track line. So I can see her pointing. So at 2:00 in the morning. DANIELLE: So at 2:00 in the morning it should be right here. Let's see where we'll be. We're gonna be right there with it. LAURIE: And she's laughing. DANIELLE: Looks like the storm is coming right for us. Oh, you gotta be kidding me. LAURIE: So she has a nervous chuckling going on. And then as she's still plotting she says... DANIELLE: We're gonna go right through the eye. LAURIE: So she's pissed at this point. Yeah. And scared. Yeah. NARRATOR: At around 7:00 pm, the Captain does order a course change of 10 degrees to the south. But according to the Sat Sea system forecast, this still puts them on a collision course with the eye of the storm. Danielle can't understand the Captain's course change. What she doesn't know is, he's relying on an entirely different weather forecast. One provided by BVS or Bon Voyage Systems. These reports are sent only to the Captain's email address. GEORGE: There was a nice clear track of the storm that was going to give them a good miss. Basically allowing room for El Faro to sneak around the back of the storm system. NARRATOR: At around 8:00 pm, the Captain retires to his cabin. He's convinced his route is not only safe but that it will allow them to take advantage of the weather. JACK: We know from the transcript that he was confident in his voyage plan. And he was trying to use that speed and the following winds from the hurricane's system itself to help with his voyage efficiency and speed. NARRATOR: What Davidson doesn't realize is that the weather reports he's relying on are always six hours out of date. Joaquin, by now a category 3 hurricane, is not where he thinks it is. It's dead ahead. But El Faro can still avoid the storm. JACK: One of the advantages of the run is that there are places that the ship can turn and take advantage of all those barrier islands and many ships were in here holing up, waiting for the hurricane to pass. But it takes time, but it it's all you've got that's what you've got to do. GEORGE: To take the escape route would have meant another 160 miles for the trip. It isn't enormous but it's still would have a knock on effect in terms of fuel costs and then if you're late for docking then that will usually incur extra charges so there's just an innate pressure with ships Captain's to stick to schedule. NARRATOR: At just after 11:00 pm, 3rd mate Jeremy Ream phones the Captain in his cabin to suggest they change course to shelter behind the islands. JEREMY: Hey Captain, sorry to wake ya. NARRATOR: The voice data recorder only records one side of the conversation. JEREMY: At 0400 we'll be 22 miles from the center and with max 100 and gusts of 120 and strengthening. The option we do have is at 0200, we could head south and that would open it up some. NARRATOR: But Jeremy Ream's suggested course change is not implemented. Nearly two hours later at 1:20 in the morning, second mate Danielle Randolph is back on duty. She also calls the captain in his cabin to try to convince him to change course. It's their last chance to avoid the storm. LAURIE: So as I'm reading through the transcript, I see where Danielle is asking the Captain if we can change course to protect the ship. The Captain presumably said 'No, run it.' So then she hangs up the phone and then turned to her colleague and said. DANIELLE: He said to run it. Hold on to your ass. LAURIE: And it says with laughter. And knowing Danielle, it wasn't a laughter of happiness. It was a laughter of damn, we're doomed. Cause she knows damn well that that was the wrong answer. NARRATOR: The crew knows Captain Davidson is taking them straight into the hurricane but they can't find a way to make him listen. Why? The answer lies in a theory that emerged from the aviation industry in the 1970's. JOHN: People were beginning to recognize that while the airlines did an outstanding job in terms of training technical skills, they didn't do anything to train the leadership and management skills that are also fundamentally important part of being an airline pilot. NARRATOR: This was having fatal consequences. In 1978, a United Airlines flight crashed in Oregon. A Captain had delayed landing to diagnose a hydraulic problem. While he did, the plane's fuel was running low. JOHN: The cockpit voice recorder transcript is fascinating to read because you can hear the concern on the part of the flight engineer but it never arose to the level of 'Captain, we have a critical fuel state, we need to go back to the airport now.' NARRATOR: The fuel ran out. The plane crashed. Ten people died. JOHN: This only happened because of this breakdown in crew dynamics. It was an accident that simply didn't need to have happened. NARRATOR: The potential for breakdown of communication between crew and Captain is even more pronounced in the maritime world. GEORGE: Maritime tradition goes back 10,000 years and ships depended on a very solid and defined chain of command. And it is absolutely a sea going tradition that, the Captain is the sole master aboard after God. LAURIE: I could sense the urge of frustration there. Like 'what the hell.' You know, this is not good the way we're going. We need to change course. But she was taught you do what your Captain tells you regardless. So she did it. Against her better judgement, but she was just following orders. NARRATOR: At 4:09 am, the Captain returns to the bridge. He mentions several times that they are on the back side of the storm. The NTSB believes Captain Davidson is still relying on the out of date BVS forecast from 5:00 pm the night before. GEORGE: That must have informed Davidson's decision making and it was old information and it was wrong. NARRATOR: In reality, Joaquin's eye is just 25 miles to the east of El Faro and the ship is in mortal danger. Hurricane Joaquin is gathering strength in the Caribbean Sea. To avoid it, all ships in the area have headed out to sea or are sheltering in the old Bahama channel. Except for one ship. El Faro. Which heads straight towards KIM: I've never read another story of a ship being driven into a storm like this in the way that this one was. NARRATOR: Master Mariner, Kim Milnes has made a study of the events that befell El Faro. He can dial wind, waves and all the characteristics of the 40 year old ship into his bridge simulator. KIM: This is the simulated bridge of the El Faro. We're simulating conditions that the ship would have been experiencing and the hurricane that's coming directly towards us. There's actually a two and a half meter swell. It's quite rough but she's quite a large ship. 30, 32,000 tons and she's not uncomfortable at the moment. NARRATOR: At 4:09 on the morning of the 1st of October, Captain Davidson arrives on the bridge. It's eight hours since he was last there and conditions have deteriorated massively. The ship is now fighting 70 mile per hour winds which are causing her to list 15 degrees to starboard. KIM: This is 4:30 in the morning. We're experiencing the sea swell exactly as it would have been. 60 knots of wind is twice a gale. It's very, very windy and the ship would be becoming very uncomfortable and the lower side of the ship is almost in the water and that's not a good situation. Cause the ship is almost unmanageable, and that's how she would have been in these conditions. NARRATOR: The auto pilot can no longer control El Faro and at 4:43 in the morning, Frank Hamm is told to take the ship in hand and to steer her manually into the wind. KIM: It would have been a bit of a struggle to bring the ship to wind. But he did it in the course of some time, but he still had a list to starboard. NARRATOR: The bridge crew struggles to keep the ship heading into the wind until at 5:43 am they receive a call from down below. There is water in number 3 hold, deep within the ship. The chief mate goes down to investigate. The problem seems to originate on the second deck immediately above number 3 hold. JACK: The second deck on the El Faro was just like this. A long continuous deck with open hole openings, I should say side shell openings that allow water to roll right in, heavy waves. It's a natural feature of the El Faro that they would take seas on this deck but protecting the holds down below is of utmost importance because you can't have it go down there. NARRATOR: The chief mate confirms that water has entered hold 3. He suspects that the source is a scuttle, a normally bolted access hatch on the starboard side of deck two, immediately above. JACK: We know from the transcript that the chief mate went down and found an open hatch. But that hatch is open. It's just a drain of water and water will tank into that large, large opening and just start to fill up the ship. NARRATOR: Steering the ship into the wind has not removed the starboard list. Water is flooding over the edge of the scuttle. KIM: The Captain decided that if wind on the port side gave him a 15 degree list, if he put the wind on the starboard side he would get a 15 degree list the other way. NARRATOR: But for the engines, a list to port is a big problem. The engine draws oil up through a suction pipe from a sump below. the pipe is offset to starboard. So a port list leaves the pipe exposed and sucking only air. They close the scuttle but at 13 minutes past 6:00 in the morning. The engines stop. KIM: The ship's completely at the mercy of the elements, and we have no power, and they've lost the main engine. THOMAS: It became at the mercy of the wind. And it became a very, very serious situation because the ventilation openings on the port side were now allowing free water to enter to the lower side of the ship. JACK: And she would take a big gulp of water and then of course the list is increasing with this weight. So that the gulps are getting bigger and longer and until finally the ship leans into the water, and the water will just flow into the ship as rapidly as possible and that's the ship, it's lost. NARRATOR: It's 6:13 in the morning on the 1st of October 2015. The US cargo ship El Faro and her crew of 33 is adrift in the Caribbean Sea just 25 miles from the eye of a savage hurricane. She's lost all power and is at the mercy of the storm. JACK: A ship at sea, that is in a storm and has lost propulsion is in distress. And they were in distress. NARRATOR: The ferocious winds blow her onto her side. Sea water floods down her ventilation shafts and into her lower decks. KIM: She's in catastrophic straights. I would say that when she was in this situation, anyone who wasn't totally ignorant of ships, must have known they were going to die. They must have. It was impossible for them to escape. NARRATOR: The ship and with it the crew's only chance of survival, is sinking fast. But at 6:48 in the morning, second mate Danielle Randolph decides what everyone needs is a cup of coffee. LAURIE: I'll see her little sense of humor here and there you know. Let's have another cup of coffee. Ah! Her and her coffee. Coffee will fix everything. Yeah. She's still being her spunky self, offering... DANIELLE: Coffee? Cream and sugar? LAURIE: She even offers coffee to the Captain. DANIELLE: Sugar's fine with the Captain right? LAURIE: Even Frank gets in and says 'Yeah, he'll have coffee.' FRANK: Right, give me the Splenda not the regular sugar. LAURIE: And Danielle, being a smart ass, says 'No, no,'. NARRATOR: Ten minutes later, at 7:01, Captain Davidson tries to phone a qualified individual, a QI, at Tote Maritime, the ship's owners. He gets only the emergency operator. MICHAEL (over radio): Are you connecting me through to a QI? WOMAN (over radio): Give me one second. Okay, Sir, I just need your name please. MICHAEL (over radio): Yes Ma'am, my name is Michael Davidson. WOMAN (over radio): Ship's name? MICHAEL (over radio): El Faro. WOMAN (over radio): Spell that. The clock is ticking, can I please speak with a QI. WOMAN (over radio): One moment please... Mr. Davidson. MICHAEL (over radio): Okay. NARRATOR: When at last, the Captain reaches a Tote manager, he describes the ship's dire state. Then, at 7:29, he rings the alarm to abandon ship. He orders the crew to throw life rafts into the water. Only the Captain and Able Seaman Frank Hamm are left on the bridge. ROCHELLE: The hardest part was when I had to read the last part of the transcript when they were like getting major, major trouble. And the ship was already sinking, drastically. This page here, 501, Frank says 'Help me.' It's basically just him and the Captain. I could just hear Frank screaming and crying and begging for two life vests and just hearing him panic and as he's saying these things in the transcript, I can just hear his voice. No he's, 'Help me, Help me.' The Captain's telling him not to panic. It was was just him and Frank on the ship and you know, he hated leaving. FRANK: We're going down! MICHAEL: You're not going down Frank! Come on! FRANK: You're gonna leave me? MICHAEL: I'm not leaving you! Let's go! FRANK: I'm gone! MICHAEL: No you're not Frank! FRANK: Just help me! MICHAEL: Frank! ROCHELLE: And then after that, the transcripts it stops recording. And so when I asked what would stop the recording and they said 'When it gets submerged under water is when the recording stops automatically.' So, I know you know, the ship was completely submerged. NARRATOR: More than two years after El Faro was lost, the NTSB publishes its conclusions. They say the main cause of the accident was the Captain's insufficient action to avoid hurricane Joaquin which included his failure to listen to his crew. THOMAS: On a ship, the master is ultimately responsible for the safety of the crew and the ship. The Captain's decision making to approach the storm was perhaps the greatest cause of the accident. JACK: One of the developments from the El Faro sinking is the opportunity to discuss the dynamics of personnel to dissect this in the right way respectfully because no one wants to go through this. NARRATOR: Among the report's recommendations is to improve crew communication by encouraging Captains to see themselves as part of a team. JOHN: You should never put subordinates in a circumstance where they have to basically commit mutiny in order to countermand what they clearly understand is a bad decision. NARRATOR: Lessons have been learned but they have come at a high price. LAURIE: I feel anger but then I feel very proud as well of Danielle. She never showed fear. She knew what was going on. I was, as a mum, really proud of that. GLEN: I miss my brother terribly every day. He called me before he set sail on September 29th. You know, the usual checking in but, as I did with... Every conversation, I told him I loved him and we had a little secret joke about keeping your powder dry. So, yeah, call me when you get in! JILL: I feel for the younger people that died on the ship. One fellow, it was his first voyage you know, and I just think, the pain those parents have all these years to come. ROCHELLE: All of the pain that I had, I took it and turned it into something positive. And I didn't want anyone else to suffer like we did. And so I just started pushing for change. NARRATOR: In October 2018, three years after the sinking, the Hamm Alert Maritime Safety Act is signed into law, in memory of Frank. The Hamm Act's key element is a whistle blower's charter that gives seamen the chance to report safety concerns anonymously. ♪ Amazing Grace. ♪ ROCHELLE: I want people to know that even though you're a Mariner, you have a voice. ♪ A wretch like me. ♪ ROCHELLE: There is a button they have on vessels and the mariners can press that button anonymously because you know, when you're a seaman and you report certain things, your job is at jeopardy. It immediately goes to the Coast Guard so the Coast Guard will know that something is wrong. LAURIE: She really turned something negative into something very positive in memory of Frank and I bet ya, that's gonna save some lives down the road. ♪ And now I'm found. ♪ ♪ But now I'm found. ♪ ♪ Was blind but now I see. ♪♪ ROCHELLE: I believe he would say 'You doing all this for me?' I believe he would say that. And I would believe that he would say 'You know, Roch, I never thought that she would you know, get anything like this done.' And I would say 'Me neither but you know, we did it.'