Into the Raging Sea

I loved this astoundingly vivid account of how a giant container ship sank near the Bahamas during a 2015 hurricane. I loved it because Slade makes the people she writes about people I can understand.

I’m fascinated by how people bury their heads in the most useless portions of jargon-laden procedures, and Slade highlights that dysfunctional tendency. I marvel at how people surrender to technology, like religious zealots ritualistically engaging in intellectual abdication.

Through meticulous research, Slade shows how this can happen. Finally, I can never get past the idea that people will harness all their mental energy to point… show more.

In most nautical disaster stories, we’re left to speculate what went through the minds of the victims as their fates unfolded. However, when the container ship El Faro steamed into the teeth of a hurricane in 2015, the voices of its crew were captured for posterity on a shipboard “black box” which was later recovered by divers. Author Rachel Slade was able to accurately reconstruct the fatal combination of bad luck, outdated technology, and outright hubris that brought this huge ship and its crew to their terrible end. A fascinating account of maritime disaster in the modern age.