Ship with 33 aboard missing as Hurricane Joaquin slams Bahamas
The U.S. Coast Guard was searching Friday for a missing cargo ship with 33 crewmembers, including 28 Americans, as a slow-moving Hurricane Joaquin continued to batter the Bahamas.
The 735-foot ship called El Faro was caught in the storm Thursday, when it signaled that it had lost propulsion and begun to list at 15 degrees near Crooked Island in the Bahamas, the Coast Guard said in a statement. The other five crewmembers are Polish.
"This vessel is disabled basically right near the eye of Hurricane Joaquin, right where the strongest winds are” Capt. Mark Fedor said at a news conference Friday afternoon. "So the challenge is trying to get our assets as close as possible to try to find the vessel."
The crew reported the ship — en route from Jacksonville, Fla., to San Juan, Puerto Rico — had taken on water, but the flooding was contained, the Coast Guard said. Aircraft and rescue crews have been unable to locate and re-establish communications with the vessel, the Coast Guard said.
The waves in the area are currently 20 to 30 feet tall, and the ship, without power, is at the mercy of the waters, Fedor said.
TOTE Maritime, the owner of the ship, said in a statement that it was in contact with family members of those on board and was working to "establish communication by whatever means possible" with El Faro.
The vessel has 391 containers topside and 294 cars, trucks and trailers below deck. That cargo makes the listing problems even worse at sea, Fedor said. He added the Coast Guard is "very concerned" about the ship and is doing everything it can to locate it.
The Coast Guard has contacted the Air Force for additional resources, such as C-130 airplanes and more helicopters, Fedor said. A C-130 with sophisticated radar flew down to 2,000 feet earlier Friday but came up empty handed.
"Hurricane Joaquin is absolutely a very dangerous storm. ... That's pretty far offshore from where we are here, no one should go out there," Fedor said.
The National Hurricane Center predicted Friday that Joaquin will move to the northeast, avoiding a direct hit of the U.S. East Coast. A bigger U.S. concern is potentially historic flooding this weekend that's forecast in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic from a weather system not directly related to Joaquin.
The combination of a low-pressure area, a stalled front and a plume of moisture streaming into the Southeast from Joaquin will lead to extremely heavy rainfall over portions of the Southeast and southern Mid-Atlantic states, the National Weather Service said.
Already, howling winds and pounding waves were causing coastal flooding at beach towns in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. Many roads were closed due to the high water.
A majority of the area could see 1 to 5 inches by Monday morning, and 5 to 15 or more inches are possible from Virginia to the South Carolina-Georgia border, the weather service said. In South Carolina, the weather service called it a "historic and potentially life-threatening rainfall event."
Because of those expected totals, officials are urging people to use extreme caution throughout the weekend, as flooding is likely even in areas not normally prone to it.
In the Bahamas, Hurricane Joaquin ripped off roofs, uprooted trees, knocked out power, and unleashed heavy flooding as the Category 4 storm dumped torrential rains across the eastern and central Bahamas on Friday.
Some people remained trapped in flooded homes, but no fatalities or injuries have been reported so far, according to Capt. Stephen Russell, the director of the Bahamas National Emergency Management Agency.
Residents reached by relatives said they were "trapped in their homes, and reported feeling as if their structures were caving in," Russell told the Associated Press. "It's too dangerous to go outside because the flood waters are so high, so we ask that persons stay inside and try to go into the most secure place of their home."
Joaquin had maximum sustained winds of 125 mph, the National Hurricane Center in Miami reported. As of 5 p.m. EDT Friday, the storm's center was located about 15 miles west-northwest of San Salvador in the Bahamas and was moving north at 7 mph.
The hurricane center warned that even if Joaquin remains off the East Coast, high winds, rough surf and coastal flooding will batter areas from the Carolinas to New England.
Even as forecast models pointed to an increasingly northeastern track, it remained uncertain how close Joaquin would come to Bermuda.
