Shipwreck: How a Captain, Company, and Culture Sank the SS El Faro
This was a free Podcast from Audible. It basically goes over the SS El Faro sinking that happened in 2015 (https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/A…). This podcast is much in the vein of various True Crimes podcasts made popular by Serial back in 2014 and focuses on the events that led to the sinking of the ship.
At the end of it all, the reasons for the sinking is as old as time. The owners of the boat wanted to keep on sailing it even though it needed maintainence. They exercised too much control over the captain (the captain is solely responsible for decisions made during the vessel’s sailing, but they can just as easily fire him once the boat reaches port) such that the captain was forced to make sub-par decisions based on his hoped for continued employment. The boat wasn’t just under maintained, it was also too old and was previously retrofitted such that it was worse in poor weather than it otherwise should have been. The inspections that should have taken place to prevent issues were never done, and…you get the idea.
The podcast masterfully deals with each of the above and also re-enacts parts of the conversation that happened upon the bridge (they did recover the black box from the ship), and also some of the aftermath that happened after (what happened in the hearings, what penalities were inflicted on the company, and what the families of the lost did afterwards).
This is definitely one of the best podcast in this vein that i’ve heard and deserved all the flowers its received. It does deal with a pretty easy to understand event, a sinking of a ship, and goes into a pretty deep dive of the entire topic. Its sad to say that this will probably happen again because human lives are relatively cheap compared to how much this type of commercial traffic makes monetary sense.
Highly recommended, albeit a bit depressing when you realize that business needs will always trump human lives.