The captain of the U.S. cargo ship El Faro reported “a hull breach” and said a hatch had blown open before the vessel sank off the Bahamas in a hurricane earlier this month, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday.
In a recorded satellite phone call Captain Michael Davidson told the ship’s owner he had “a marine emergency” after taking on water in one of the holds, the NTSB said in an update on its two-week-old investigation of the sinking.
According to the NTSB, electronic distress alerts were received by the U.S. Coast Guard from three separate sources on board El Faro but the Coast Guard never had direct voice communications with the ship.
It was not clear if the hull breach was directly related to the ship’s loss of propulsion, perhaps due to water flooding the engine room and short-circuiting the ship’s generators.