“This is the most hard and complex investigation I have ever worked on in my 17 years with the National Transportation Safety Board”, Roth-Roffy said. After the poor weather subsided, another operation was launched – this time, to locate the wreckage of the El Faro – as it had become evident that the large ship had definitely sunk.
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National Transportation Safety Board lead investigator Tom Roth-Roffy has said that the agency may renew the search for the missing black box recorder of the lost ro/ro cargo ship El Faro. This was the first look at the mangled ship that carried 33 crew members through the Atlantic.
Debris from the cargo ship El Faro, which sank during a hurricane in October.
Eventually, a remotely operated vehicle confirmed the vessel was at the bottom of the sea near Crooked Island, Bahamas, 15,000 feet below the surface – even deeper than the Titanic – its hull buried in about thirty feet of sediment. They are still determining if and when such a search would occur. But one thing was missing: the ship’s voyage data recorder, or VDR.
Investigators are still piecing events of the sinking together, but at this point they’ve ruled out a major structure failure as a cause of the El Faro’s sinking, Roth-Roffy said.
“The issue with the detachment of the upper two decks, we’re looking at that carefully”, he said. The captain last communicated that El Faro had lost engine power and that the crew was pumping water out from the cargo hold.
Families of crew members who went down with the El Faro have filed lawsuits against the ship’s owners, Sea Star Line, LLC.
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As the NTSB conducted its investigation into El Faro’s sinking, it allowed “60 Minutes” to report on its activities.
