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It really was terrible. The audio transcription puts you right there and just wow.

Like you said think it was a number of factors, but I think the other ones only compounded the situation after the master committed the ship to the float plan. He looked at an outdated weather report, didn't know the software options to plot the up-to-date hurricane overlay, company didn't permit any of the crew to have access to the ship's satellite phone (and presumably internet access that came with it) for a double check, then he dismissed a confrontation about the conflicting NWS report from the 2nd mate, then delayed pulling up updated information from his lagging weather report and went to sleep.

The design of the ship played a factor too. It was a retrofitted RO/RO ship with waived safeties, and had ventilation hatches that apparently lowered the de-facto lowest-point-of-water-ingress (forgot the actual parameter name) underneath the unsecured hatches, which were - unsecured. Or unreliable. New engineer started doing maintenance mid-storm, lowering the engine's power output, and I think the loose cargo became a factor afterwards.

Aye, El Faro.

Remember few months ago when the Norwegian Cruise ship lost power and 1,300 passengers had to be evacuated by helicopter? That wasn't the only disabled ship in the area due to the storm. Once NTSB releases a report, you might see this as a cause, fuel sloshing. Large ships are just not designed or meant to be in waves and it's not economical to design them to be. So you check weather far in advance and steer clear of it.

El Faro's master looked at an old weather report regularly delayed by 12-18 hours or some such due to additional processing from BVS (his preferred software for checking weather) and didn't cross-check it with another source like NWS throughout the days, despite being challenged by the crew. He ended up steering the ship right into the eye of a hurricane.

Large ships do very poorly in waves.

The last thing you want happening in a storm is to lose power. Without power you can't angle yourself perpendicular to the waves. When that happens, broadside waves make the ship bob like a corkscrew. If you don't capsize, this makes the situation beyond recovery.

Waves tend to make large ships lose power easily because the engine oil sloshes in the pan, or the sump pit. The oil pump or inlet is located in a fixed place and can't be moved around. We're talking large engines here. Anyhow, the pump can't keep up with the flow due to this sloshing effectively cycling its flow rate and the engine starts overheating and it has to be throttled down then later shut off so it doesn't seize up. Once the engine is shut off and the vessel is no longer under command, the sloshing gets worse. Emergency battery power drains quickly. Meanwhile the fuel - bunker oil - cools off and turns into asphalt - it needs to be heated up to 120+ degrees F to be usable.

Even if you don't shut the engine off, in stormy weather the fuel filters get clogged up faster and have to be constantly cleaned. The fuel itself, bunker oil, is chunky to begin with and the additional sloshing somehow gunks up the filters faster. In one famous case, the engineers had to do it every few minutes in a storm and that required complete enclosure disassembly and reassembly. That particular ship survived that storm, but not another.

Matter of legality aside, it happens anyway.

"Carnival Corporation ships illegally dumped more than 500,000 gallons of treated sewage, 12 gallons of oil, 11,000 gallons of food waste & dozens of physical objects into the ocean during its first year on probation (4/17-4/18)."

That reporter's summary came from her tweet: https://twitter.com/taydolven/status/1118233060569493504

The full story: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism-cruises/ar...

She published her data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ERS2c_Kn4m9Ov4DfmzTh...

The large list of incidents have inane stuff, some human stuff, some funny stuff and some ironic stuff all mixed in with very serious stuff. You have to pick through a lot of entries and text to make sense of it.

Empathic: "While the ship was alongside in Mahogany Bay, Isla Roatan, a passenger accidentally dropped her purse into the sea from the pier. The MARPOL Annex V violation was reported to the port authority."

Funny? Inane? They had to file a report anyway: "During loading of provisions in Galveston, Texas, a shore side worker placed a pallet of watermelons on the ship's platform. Due to the pallet not being correctly positioned on the platform, the pallet tilted causing a number of watermelons to fall. All the watermelons were recovered from the netting placed below the ship's loading platform."

Ironic: "While alongside in Galveston, Texas, as a passenger was boarding the ship, he dropped his paper boarding pass, which was blown overboard and into the water in violation of MARPOL Annex V. The Harbor Master was informed by the ship's local agent. No additional actions were requested."

Serious: "Approximately 467 cubic meters of treated black water/sewage and 6.2 cubic meters of comminuted food waste was discharged inside Bahamian Archipelagic Baseline between June 13, 2017, and June 15, 2017, due to misinterpretation of Bahamas baselines listed in ENV 1001."

That's about 120,000 gallons.