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A new book takes us aboard the doomed El Faro

Inside the shipping disaster that killed 33 people

(NEWS CENTER Maine) — At 7:30 in the morning on October 1, 2015, the container ship El Faro, sailing from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico, sank in a hurricane in the Bahamas. All 33 people on board went down with the ship. Four of them, including the captain, were from Maine. It was the worst shipping disaster the United States had seen in 35 years.

Rachel Slade, a journalist who lives in Massachusetts and Maine, has told the story in her new book, “Into the Raging Sea,” a gripping account that takes the reader right into the bridge of the ship, where the vessel’s data recorder captured the conversations of the captain and crew in their final days and hours. “This was a very emotionally draining project,” Slade says. “It was very painful to talk to the families, to read these transcripts, to get inside the heads of people who are now gone and shouldn’t be.”

The tragedy unfolds slowly at first. Weather forecasts are ignored or misread or studied too late; equipment is stressed, then fails; Captain Michael Davidson of Windham repeatedly refuses to change course to move away from the increasingly powerful storm. In the end El Faro, taking on water at an alarming rate, sank beneath the waves, fell three miles through the Caribbean waters, and slammed into the ocean floor. It’s an extraordinary story, and Slade tells it in an understated way that gives it even more power. “El Faro will always be a singular experience for me,” she says. “I’ll never find another like this.”

www.rachelslade.net

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