FLORIDA, United States--The quest to find out the details leading to the El Faro cargo ship sinking with 33 people off The Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin experienced another setback Thursday after a salvage team located the bridge deck that separated from the wreckage, but the voyage data recorder (VDR) was missing.
The VDR, which is similar to an airplane’s black box and is usually affixed to the ship’s bridge, should contain the last 12 hours of information related to the ship’s engine and other communications from the bridge.
The wreck of the ship was discovered 15,000 feet underwater earlier this month, but the bridge was missing. The search then turned to finding the bridge in hope of recovering the VDR. That was found about one mile from the main wreckage Thursday.
Now, says the US National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) – which had contracted the US Navy to locate the sunken freighter, document the wreckage and debris field and recover the VDR – attention has turned to finding the recorder elsewhere.
It will be a much harder task as the VDR is about the size of a piece of carry-on luggage.
“This makes our job harder, but we’re going to try” to find it, said Eric Weiss, an NTSB spokesman.
El Faro, owned by Sea Star Line, LLC, and operated by TOTE Services, and its crew of 33 disappeared on October 1 northeast of Crooked Island in The Bahamas, after sailing into the path of the Category 4 Joaquin as it headed to Puerto Rico with a cargo of containers and vehicles. ~ Caribbean360 ~
