JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The captain of the 790-foot El Faro planned to bypass Hurricane Joaquin, but some kind of mechanical failure left the U.S. container ship with 33 people aboard helplessly — and tragically — adrift in the path of the powerful storm, the vessel’s owners say.
On Monday, four days after the ship vanished, the Coast Guard concluded it sank near the Bahamas in about 15,000 feet of water. One unidentified body in a survival suit was spotted, and the search went on for any trace of the other crew members.
Survival suits help mariners float and stay warm. Even with the water temperature at 85 degrees, hypothermia can set in quickly, said Coast Guard Capt. Mark Fedor. “These are trained mariners. They know how to abandon ship,” he said. But “those are challenging conditions.”
The ship, owned by Tote Services Inc. and carrying cars and other products, had 28 crew members from the U.S. and five from Poland.
Coast Guard and Navy planes, helicopters, cutters and tugboats searched across a 300-square-mile expanse of Atlantic Ocean near Crooked Island in the Bahamas, where the ship was last heard from while on its way from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico.
