The Hurricane That Swallowed a Cargo Ship (Classic)
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What sparked the investigation into the El Faro cargo ship disaster?
Super real.
Hey listeners,
I'm actually on the road at the moment. I'm in New York. Uh we're working on a new show. I won't say more than that right now, but it's gonna be great. So this week we're gonna bring you one of our favorite episodes from the vault. We're going back to 2024 for this episode. I think it's a little deviation from our usual format. But it's probably one of our most exhilarating episodes to date. So I'll just leave you with that. There's also no subscriber episode this week, and we'll be back to regular programming
next week. Thanks for listening. Let's do it. Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to What It Was Like. The show that asks people who have lived through big, dramatic events what it was like.
I have an admission
to make. I think my favorite thing to watch on YouTube is big ships in big storms. I love weather. When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Twister. And I also think, well, this might come as no surprise, but I like looking at how people behave in extreme situations. I mean, look at this podcast. So as you can imagine, ships in big storms as a genre, as a YouTube category, it just kind of ticks all my boxes. But the thing about these videos is that they're somehow never quite enough. I always want bigger waves, bigger lightning, I want disaster pawn on an epic scale. And that's how a few weeks ago I found myself Googling the words cargo ship hurricane. And it was that Google search that brought me to this story.
You see, cargo ships don't sail through hurricanes. Well not usually. It's one of the advantages of the modern era. Thanks to GPS and satellite imagery, uh commercial ships they can just navigate around hurricanes or or just not go out to sea when there's one in the area. But in this case, in twenty fifteen, a very experienced American captain sailed his ship into the eye of a monster hurricane and killed everyone on board. The ship was called the El Ferro, which means lighthouse in Spanish, and it was en route from Jacksonville, Florida, under the command of Captain Michael Davidson, and it was bound for San Juan in Puerto Rico, and And if you've ever wondered how food and cars and suppliers get to small tropical islands, the answer is everything is delivered on ships like the El Faro.
The El Faro was a big ship. Okay, it was huge, and it was built in nineteen seventy-five, and it's kind of this ugly, blocky thing. Um imagine a boat-shaped platform with a rectangular block in the middle that contained all the cabins, and then there's hundreds of shipping containers stacked all over the bow. and all over the stern. And when it went down it was loaded with almost thirteen thousand tons of cargo, including food, cars, trailers, and machinery. But what I think is truly interesting is how the captain and the crew managed to convince themselves that it would be okay to sail through a hurricane, or to even just sail near a hurricane. The universe had dealt them this unlikely array of of misconceptions, little miscommunications, um pieces of faulty equipment, and just just a sprinkling of bad luck that had created this situation that was just
perfectly stacked against them, and in ways that none of them really properly understood. And I think that if you'd removed any of these one factors, the El Faro's crew would have survived. But it all played out in a perfect sequence. But not just that, I think for me, the most interesting part to this story is the way that everyone ignores their intuition. I think it's really the subtext throughout this whole case. And I know this because the ship had a black box. Okay, so you know how planes have got black boxes. Every time there's a plane crash, you hear about how they retrieved the black box and they can listen to the recordings of the pilots and the things that they talked about leading up to the disaster.
Well, it turns out that ships have exactly the same thing. Ships have black boxes as well. And after the old pharaoh went down, it took investigators about a year to find the black box.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What sparked the investigation into the El Faro cargo ship disaster?
0:01–6:21
2
Who was Captain Michael Davidson and why did his career matter?
6:21–12:19
3
How did the crew’s black‑box transcript reveal their decision‑making?
12:19–17:25
4
Why did the crew choose the fast “straight‑across” route instead of the safer Bahama Channel?
17:25–22:32
5
What warnings did the crew voice about the storm and how were they ignored?
22:32–28:06
6
How did equipment failures and the hurricane’s rapid intensification seal the ship’s fate?
28:06–33:05
7
What happened during the final minutes as the El Faro began to sink?
33:05–38:03
8
What lessons does the El Faro tragedy teach about trusting instincts and speaking up?
38:03–47:18
Speakers
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