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    Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of the El Faro
    Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of the El Faro
    Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of the El Faro
    Audiobook11 hours

    Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of the El Faro

    Written by Rachel Slade

    Narrated by Erin Bennett

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “A Perfect Storm for a new generation, Rachel Slade's Into the Raging Sea is a masterful page-turning account of the El Faro's sinking.”
    —Ben Mezrich, bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook

    On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in thirty-five years. No one could fathom how a vessel equipped with satellite communications, a sophisticated navigation system, and cutting-edge weather forecasting could suddenly vanish—until now.

    Relying on hundreds of exclusive interviews with family members and maritime experts, as well as the words of the crew members themselves—whose conversations were captured by the ship’s data recorder—journalist Rachel Slade unravels the mystery of the sinking of El Faro. As she recounts the final twenty-four hours onboard, Slade vividly depicts the officers’ anguish and fear as they struggled to carry out Captain Michael Davidson’s increasingly bizarre commands, which, they knew, would steer them straight into the eye of the storm. Taking a hard look at America's aging merchant marine fleet, Slade also reveals the truth about modern shipping—a cut-throat industry plagued by razor-thin profits and ever more violent hurricanes fueled by global warming.

    A richly reported account of a singular tragedy, Into the Raging Sea takes us into the heart of an age-old American industry, casting new light on the hardworking men and women who paid the ultimate price in the name of profit.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 1, 2018
    ISBN9780062699725
    Author

    Rachel Slade

    Rachel Slade is a Boston-based journalist, writer, and editor. She was a staff writer at Boston magazine for ten years, and her writing earned her a City and Regional Magazine Award in civic journalism. She splits her time between Brookline, Massachusetts, and Rockport, Maine.

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    Reviews for Into the Raging Sea

    4.5/5

    96 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Fascinating listen. Seems very well researched. Written with compassion for the lives lost. RIP

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I really liked this audiobook, and I think I would have liked reading it as a normal book too. I liked the depth the author achieved, both in her scientific understandings and her ethical questions. I learned a lot about what makes a ship more sinkable. I also learned a lot about hierarchies and human politics and how people function at all levels of prestige and in all lines of work, which is to say: like humans. And I learned that the better sort of human is the more humble kind. Humble, not self-loathing. Trust that you are a better sort of human even if your boss fires you because you were “too careful.” That’s what this captain didn’t do. I think he donned a cloak of arrogance to convince himself he was making good decisions. But the truth is, good decisions make themselves when you know who you are and what matters.
    • 4/5
      We had an exciting night at book club meeting we had discussing this book. We were joined by a journalist from our local newspaper who is doing a feature piece on book clubs and after interviewing me over the phone about book clubs at the store, she asked if there was one she could come to and the timing just happened to work out that nonfiction book club was meeting the next day!

      She started by taking pictures of the book club displays in the store, and then as members started arriving and talking, she sat down to interview them as well. Thankfully, the group is full of chatters and people who LOVE to share their opinions, which I think makes for a great book club. Hopefully the journalist got some good copy, and I’ll share the link to the article when it’s published!

      As for the book, I love a good sea/shipwreck story. Dead Wake has been a favorite book of mine since my old book club read it years ago and is part of the inspiration for my continuing nonfiction kick. Add in the fact that the loss of the mariners and ship was preventable, and we all had a lot to talk about.

      It’s next to impossible to believe that, in 2015, ships are allowed to sail without modern GPS systems. When the ship went down, the coast guard had absolutely no way of locking down it’s last known location. The company that owned El Faro couldn’t be bothered to keep the ship in good working order, or even track their own ship. While Rachel focuses on the ship and crew for the bulk of the book, she alluded to so many other issues, from global warming to shipping monopolies, to government corruption and corporate cover ups.

      The pacing of the book reads like a long form essay, and I could see a piece on the El Faro in the New Yorker or Atlantic serving as a jumping off point for the many books that have been published since. Alternating between actual conversations had by the crew, history of the shipping industry, the first three quarters of the book focuses on the history of the company and the concerns of the crew regarding their route. The last quarter of the book starts when the ground lost contact with the ship and details the rescue efforts and subsequent hearings.

      The book finishes with the final words of the crew as they face their fate. Despite knowing their fate, the tension in the moment, knowing that their final words were captured for the world to read, it gave me goosebumps. Overall, we loved the book as a group, and I personally thought it was a spectacularly written book.
    • 4/5
      Very well researched and reminiscent of 'A Perfect Storm' in terms of how the story is told. It took a little bit to get absorbed into the book, but hard to be critical of it in any way.
    • 4/5
      Shortly before dawn on Thursday, October 1, 2015, an American merchant captain named Michael Davidson sailed a 790-foot U.S.-flagged cargo ship, El Faro, into the eye of a Category 3 hurricane near the the Bahama Islands.

      This book was a riveting sea story of a horrible disaster. Many readers will enjoy it purely for that reason, but it's so much more. It details the struggles and challenges faced by mariners making a living on the sea, and the impact our society has on people when it makes decisions and laws based on economics, without also considering safety as equally important.

      I was completely oblivious to the difficulties and risks facing the men and women who deliver our goods across the sea. The chapters alternate between the crew profiles and the more dry statistics of the ship, computer systems, and history of sea shipping. But I did find that history much more interesting than I expected I would.

      I found this book to be a gripping narrative of a cargo ship’s tragic voyage. This is a well written book, and when the author sticks to the main narrative is quite compelling. I prefer not to have to read every author's political opinion, so I could have done with less social commentary. However, it's full of fascinating detail for anyone remotely interested in ships or shipping.


      1347

    • 3/5
      A heavily padded magazine article, but still good. Did Slade really need to go into the history of the American Revolution? There are hundreds of capsule portraits of characters who disappear by the next page—fortunately, Slade doesn't draw them out too far. Slade constantly misuses the word "exponential," as in: "Wind speed and force have an exponential relationship, meaning that as the wind notches up, its force doubles, then triples, and then quadruples, and so on. It’s based on a simple formula: wind pressure per square foot = 0.00256 (wind speed)^2." This makes me wonder what other basic facts she gets completely wrong. Another flaw is that the narrative is strongly biased, especially against the corporate owner of the El Faro. To me, it seemed like most of the blame fell on the captain for heading right into the hurricane (based partly on mistaken weather reports), and some of what Slade assails as corporate doublespeak sounded completely reasonable. I'd like to know the truth, but we mostly get one side here. Also, despite all the padding elsewhere, the chapter on recommended safety improvements following the investigation is too brief. I am glad it is there. Also, not the author's fault given the publication date, but I would like to know whether these recommendations have been adopted or not. Despite these criticisms, the story is definitely spellbinding, and it reads quickly. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is an excellent recounting of the horrifying wreck of an American container ship in a 2015 hurricane off the coast of Puerto Rico. Since the "black box" recorder on the ship's bridge was retrieved (at great peril and expense), the author is able to document the hour-by-hour combination of human hubris and mechanical failure that caused the deaths of 33 mariners. And since she attended the post-accident inquest, Slade is also able to pin the tail on the corporate donkey. There's plenty of neglect and avarice to be spread around. Quote: "The word "experienced" often refers to someone who has gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have."
    • 5/5
      This was an absolutely riveting and tragic account of El Faro, the container ship that ran into Hurricane Joaquin while enroute to Puerto Rico from Jacksonville, Fl, in October 2015, and disappeared, resulting in the loss of 33 lives. The first half of the book tells of the mariners and the final hours aboard ship (possible because of the subsequent find of the ship’s VDR that had recorded hours of conversations on the bridge). The second half details the search and subsequent infuriating investigation. The author is a journalist and the book has a “you are there” feel - it’s impossible not to feel deeply as ill formed decisions are made. It’s a page-turner of a book even as you know it’s going to end tragically. This isn’t a technical story, it’s more a story of people - the mariners and coast guard personnel - who work the water. Highly recommendedMy thanks to the publisher for providing a copy of this book for honest review.