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After three hours battling the brutal storm and winds recorded at 120 mph, the battered old ship began to finally break down. El Faro was in trouble. During a visit to the home of my parents in Jacksonville, Fla., my father, a World War II veteran, asked to visit the cemetery where he will be buried. It’s on the opposite side of the county-wide metropolitan area, so on the way, we decided to stop near the Jacksonville seaport on the St. John’s river.After crossing the massive Danes Bridge — one of the largest harp-designed cable-stayed bridges in the nation —...

The National Transportation Safety Board has contracted with the U.S. Navy to locate the El Faro, document the wreckage and debris field and recover the voyage data recorder (VDR). Below is an update of recent activities. The Curve 21 remote operated vehicle (ROV) was used to confirm that the vessel found was the El Faro. The ROV documented both the port and starboard sides of the vessel. The vessel is oriented in an upright position with the stern buried in approximately 30 feet of sediment. The navigation bridge and the deck below have separated from the vessel and have not...

A search team on board the USNS Apache has found the wreckage of a vessel that they believe to be the cargo ship El Faro, which went missing on Oct. 1 during Hurricane Joaquin. The vessel was located at a depth of about 15,000 feet in the vicinity of the last known position.

A search and salvage team from the U.S. Navy is expected to kick off its search for the American cargo ship El Faro this week which is believed to have sunk in some 15,000 feet of water near the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin.

MIAMI - Coast Guard search and rescue crews are searching for a container ship with 33 crew members that sailed out of Jacksonville and was reported to be caught in Hurricane Joaquin, near Crooked Island, Bahamas. The El Faro, a 735-foot ro-ro cargo ship, was en route to San Juan, Puerto Rico, from Jacksonville. About 7:30 a.m. Thursday, watchstanders at the Coast Guard Atlantic Area command center in Portsmouth, Virginia, received an Inmarsat satellite notification stating the El Faro was beset by Hurricane Joaquin, had lost propulsion and had a 15-degree list. The crew reported the ship had previously taken...

For days, the models that guide the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts had been split over the future of Hurricane Joaquin. Different models were sending the storm to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina or to Maine or to Bermuda. The official forecast — which held that the storm would make landfall in the mid-Atlantic — was “low” confidence, as the center put it. It was an attempt to compromise between models that fundamentally disagreed. Friday, the official forecast now takes Joaquin out to sea. A direct hit on the East Coast can’t yet be ruled out, but the top models doubt...

Just thought it interesting, and potentially very important for those living on the east coast, to point out how different the predicted path for this major hurricane is between these two major weather sources (Weather Channel and AccuWeather), at least as of the moment: Fri, Oct 02, 2015 @ 5:30AM EDT. AccuWeather appears to have it *several hundred miles* more west than does The Weather Channel. Perhaps the predictions are based on different computer models. The first map below is from AccuWeather. The second, The Weather Channel.

While there are still scenarios that would take Hurricane Joaquin out to sea, the possibility of the hurricane reaching the Eastern United States coast is gaining merit. Hurricane Joaquin is rapidly intensifying.