Breaking: Coast Guard Ends Search For El Faro Survivors

By Sherri London (Patch Staff)

The U.S. Coast Guard has announced on Wednesday afternoon it is suspending its search for survivors of a container ship that ran afoul of Hurricane Joaquin at sunset Wednesday.

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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.”

Fedor said Coast Guard crews, joined by 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. Fedor also mentioned 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 personal nature of the search, Fedor hopes, will bring some comfort to families of the 33 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.”

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

The 735-foot container ship was headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico, from Jacksonville 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. 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.

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

As of Tuesday night, 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.

Coast Guard personnel from Clearwater and St. Petersburg have been actively involved in the search.

Photo of debris from the El Faro courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard