NTSB launches team to Jacksonville to investigate El Faro

The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team to Jacksonville on Tuesday to begin investigating the loss of the cargo ship El Faro.

The Coast Guard search, which will be run separately from the NTSB investigation, continued overnight into this morning.

Greene said the captain, whose name has not been released, had conferred with the El Faro’s sister ship – which was returning to Jacksonville along a similar route – and determined the weather was good enough to go forward.

Coast Guard ships and aircrews ongoing to really search for the 28 You can introduce.S. mexican people and five Polish citizens that travvelled missing out on having the ship, Fedor said. “My office has been in touch with the U.S. Coast Guard for additional information and will continue to remain in contact with them as the search continues”.

He said he didn’t want to speculate about what happened to El Faro.

The ship’s owner, Tote Maritime, says the El Faro left port in Jacksonville for Puerto Rico last Tuesday when Joaquin was still a tropical storm. “We have interest in finding my son and the rest of the crew alive, and the only thing I blame in this in Hurricane Joaquin”.

It was also unknown how much time lapsed between the time the propulsion failed and the time the captain reported the problem to his bosses.

At the press conference late on Monday, Tote officials said the fix crew was working on an unspecified engine room issue as part of conversion work before it was moved to the west coast Alaska trade.

“We’re not going to discount somebody’s will to survive and that’s why we’re still searching today”, he said. 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.

Company spokesman Mike Hanson said he was unable to specify what kinds of repairs were under way, but such ancillary crews are commonly hired to perform repairs and maintenance.

“What we have to assume as search planners is, if the vessel did sink on Thursday, and that crew was able to abandon ship, they would have been abandoning ship into a Category 4 hurricane”, he said. The academy says four graduates worked for Tote Maritime, but they do not know whether they were aboard the El Faro.

Still, seafarers who have long experience in the Caribbean say its weather can be treacherous.

A few have questioned the ship’s path, which, by all accounts, seemed to directly head into the hurricane. The El Faro departed Jacksonville, Fla., on September 29, 2015 when Joaquin was still a tropical storm. In addition, the investigation will include combing through marine logs, interviewing people involved and trying to collect perishables from the scene.

“He would cook. He’d do whatever else was needed on the ship”, she said.

The El Faro had no history of engine failure, Greene said, and the company said the vessel was modernized in 1992 and 2006.