US Coast Guard calls off search for missing United States ship

It’s official: the U.S. Coast Guard has ended the search for 33 El Faro crew members lost in Hurricane Joaquin.

Efforts will now shift to determining what went wrong on the fatal voyage.

F John Nicoll, a retired captain who spent years piloting the run to Puerto Rico, said he doubts the age of the El Faro was a factor, noting that there are many older ships plying United States waters without incident.

The U.S. Coast Guard has been in charge of the search for survivors and relatives of the missing confirmed that they had been told by authorities that the search will stop at 6 p.m. Wednesday.

“Our focus has been, for the last week, very much on the search for the El Faro and the families of the crew”, Parrott said.

The hope is to mobilize the salvage unit by the end of the week, the source said.

The 790-foot cargo ship sank last Thursday off the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin, a Category 4 storm.

“Mike was a very capable and experienced captain”, Legere said. That left 32 people aboard the ill-fated ship, which was carrying 28 American crew members and five Polish contractors, unaccounted for. Families keeping vigil at the Seafarers worldwide Union hall reacted with both grief and anger.

Schmiora Hill, whose cousin, Roosevelt Clark, was a crew member, said the decision was a bad mistake. They want to make sure all of the things that are perishable are received in due time, including the data recorder aboard the ship. More than half of the crew was from Florida, and other members were from Maine, Delaware, Massachusetts, Virginia, Tennesee, New York and Poland. “I feel somebody, somewhere, somehow, is surviving”. The Coast Guard wasn’t able to search for survivors until Sunday because the storm stayed over the Bahamas for a few days, causing unsafe searching conditions.

As WCBS 880’s Ginny Kosola reported, Richard Pusatere and his crew were the subject of prayers Wednesday evening at the campus under the Throgs Neck Bridge.

Searchers have found one body, in a survival suit. Among the items found was a destroyed lifeboat, cargo, life jackets and styrofoam.

The owners of El Faro insist the captain had a “sound plan” to avoid Hurricane Joaquin – a plan that only unraveled when the ship’s main propulsion stopped working. “I hope the families can take a few small measures of peace in that”, he said at a news conference Wednesday.

An intensive air-and-sea search has found the remains of only one person, in a survival suit.

On Friday, NTSB investigators will be at TOTE’s Blount Island facility to examine the El Yunque, which is almost identical to the one that sank.

The captain, identified as Michael Davidson of Casco Bay, Maine, 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, Phil Greene, president and CEO of Tote Services Inc., said Monday. The NTSB sent a team to Jacksonville on Tuesday to begin the agency’s inquiry.