U.S. Coast Guard to Suspend El Faro Search at Sunset

By SHERRI LONON (Patch Staff)

The U.S. Coast Guard announced will suspend its search for survivors Wednesday evening from the container ship El Faro that ran afoul of Hurricane Joaquin.

Capt. Mark Fedor, chief of response for the Coast Guard 7th District, announced the decision Wednesday afternoon, saying the search was a personal one for members of the guard.

“Any decision to suspend a search is painful,” Fedor said during a Wednesday press conference. “In this particular case, we were also searching for fellow mariners.”

He referenced an email he received from a civilian Coast Guard employee from Baltimore who knew one of the El Faro’s crew members since he was born.

“He saw one of the crew members come home as a baby,” Fedor said.

The El Faro had 33 crewmembers on board. Twenty-eight crewmembers are from America and five are from Poland, the Coast Guard said.

Frank Hamm, 49, one of the crew, graduated from Woodlawn High School in 1984 and went to Morgan State University, then moved in 1995 to Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife, according to The Baltimore Sun.

After announcing the belief on Monday that the El Faro likely sunk, the Coast Guard has continued efforts to search for any survivors.

The 735-foot container ship was headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico, from Jacksonville, Fla., when it became caught in the fury of Hurricane Joaquin near Crooked Islands in the Bahamas, the U.S. Coast Guard reported.

Watchstanders at the Coast Guard’s Atlantic Area command center in Portsmouth, Va., received the ship’s distress call around 7:30 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 1. At that time, crew members said the ship had lost propulsion and had a 15-degree list.

“The crew reported the ship had previously taken on water, but that all flooding had been contained,” the Coast Guard wrote in a media release.

Capt. Fedor said Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force personnel and commercial ships searched tirelessly for survivors, but ultimately found none.

“On Sunday, one of our helicopters flew over 11 hours because they wanted to keep that search going,” he said.

The personal nature of the search, Fedor hopes, will bring some comfort to families of the crew members on board the ship.

“I want the families to really know how committed we really were to finding their loved ones, to finding our professional mariners,” he said. “I hope the families can take some small measure of peace from that.”

The wife of Frank Hamm, a crew member with Baltimore ties, said the fact that the ship went out in a storm was “unacceptable,” according to USA Today.

”I don’t know why they didn’t steer the ship in a different direction,” Rochelle Hamm said.

“The ship should never have left,” Rochelle Hamm told Reuters.

“They knew that the storm was coming,” Destiny Sparrow, Hamm’s daughter, said in an interview with CBS. “...that makes no sense.”

• Ship Caught by Hurricane Joaquin Still Missing
• Search for El Faro Crew Continues

As the search comes to a conclusion, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has stepped in to investigate just what happened to the El Faro and its 33 crew members.

NTSB investigators arrived in Jacksonville Tuesday. That agency plans to have investigators on the ground for the next week to 10 days. The priorities are finding out what happened to the ship and why it sank, according to Bella Dinh-Zarr, NTSB’s vice chair.

As of Tuesday night, officials said 172,257 square nautical miles had been searched in the vicinity of the ship’s last known position about 35 miles northeast of the Crooked Islands.

So far, the Coast Guard has found one deceased person in a survival suit, a heavily damaged life boat with El Faro markings, life rings and other debris. The whereabouts of the crewmembers remains a mystery. The search for survivors will end at sunset on Wednesday, Oct. 7.

Photo of debris from the El Faro courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard. Screenshot from DE PA/YouTube.