February 1983: a cement patch held the hull together.

February 10, 1983. 11:45 p.m.

CAPTAIN PHILIP CORL
I'm approximately 30 miles east of Chincoteague, and I'm going down by the head. I seem to be taking on water forward.

MARINE ELECTRIC
Our problem is we don't know exactly what our situation is.

MARINE ELECTRIC
We are abandoning ship right now. We are abandoning ship right now.

ROBERT CUSICK
But basically the hatches were in very poor condition at that time, I thought.

Philip Corl was the relief captain, the man Marine Transport Lines called when the regular master was not sailing. He had been going to sea for decades. By February of 1983 he knew the coal run between Norfolk, Virginia, and Somerset, Massachusetts, as well as any route he had ever sailed. Load at the Norfolk and Western pier, take the ship north for thirty-two hours, offload at the Brayton Point power station, steam back empty, and do it again. It was coastal freight, a routine run that did not make the papers. The permanent master, a captain named James Farnham, was ashore for this trip. Corl had the ship.

His wife Alice had planned to board the Marine Electric when it reached Massachusetts and ride south with him on the return leg. A few days together at sea, which was how they sometimes managed it. Corl told her not to come this time. The weather forecast along the coast had turned, and he did not want her aboard. He sent word for her to stay ashore and wait until the ship came back. She did not ask for an explanation. She did not argue.

The ship Corl was taking north had been built in 1944 by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Chester, Pennsylvania. She was a wartime tanker named Musgrove Mills at the yard. She carried oil for the Navy during the war, was sold afterward, and passed through several owners before Marine Transport Lines purchased her in 1961. They renamed her Marine Electric. The following year they cut the hull in half and had a new midsection fabricated at a shipyard in Bremen, Germany. The sections were joined at Bethlehem Steel in East Boston, and the work stretched the ship to six hundred and five feet. She looked like a working vessel from the waterline up. Below the paint, the bow section and the stern section were still the original 1944 steel. By the winter of 1983, those pieces of the ship were thirty-nine years old.

The chief mate was Robert Cusick, fifty-nine, out of Scituate, Massachusetts. Cusick had been sailing for close to forty years, and he knew what a sound ship looked like. The Marine Electric was not one. He kept detailed sketches of every defect he found aboard: holes in the deck plating, cracks in the hatch coaming, covers that no longer seated properly against their gaskets. One hole in the hull was large enough to put a fist through. It was temporarily repaired with a cement patch. He reported what he found to Farnham, the permanent master, and to the company. Farnham asked him to draw the defects up for possible future repair. Cusick also contacted the Coast Guard directly and told them to come look at the hatches.

The hatch covers had been manufactured by MacGregor. In 1981 a MacGregor representative named Maxwell Graham inspected them and sent Marine Transport Lines a written warning. The panels, Graham wrote, were not considered watertight, and much work was required to make them so. The company did not make full repairs. The covers stayed on the ship, and the ship kept sailing.

The Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping had both certified the Marine Electric as fit for service. The American Bureau of Shipping was a classification society whose fees were paid by the ship owners whose vessels it examined. At the ship's 1981 drydocking, a Coast Guard inspector did not examine the hatch covers because they had been removed from the vessel for maintenance. The inspection records, however, showed the covers as having been inspected. Other records listed equipment checks carried out during periods when the ship was not even in port. Paperwork approved what no one had looked at.

On December 27, 1982, the company's fleet superintendent, a man named Joseph Thelgie, wrote to the Coast Guard requesting that the Marine Electric's required drydocking be postponed until April 1, 1983. He said New England Power Company had asked the ship to remain in service through the winter coal season. New England Power later denied ever making that request. The postponement was granted. The drydocking was pushed to spring. The ship would not reach spring.

On the evening of February 10, the crew finished loading at the Norfolk and Western coal pier beside the Elizabeth River. Roughly twenty-five thousand tons of granulated coal sat in the holds, bound for the Brayton Point power station in Somerset, Massachusetts. A cold rain was falling on the pier and on the deck. Gale warnings had been posted along the mid-Atlantic coast, but the crew had made this run in bad weather before and the ship had always come through it. Alice Corl was by then waiting ashore in Massachusetts, sent away by a husband who had given her no reason beyond the forecast. Just before midnight the Marine Electric backed away from the pier with thirty-five men aboard and turned her bow north toward the open Atlantic.

The next day brought heavy seas and a falling barometer. Waves built through the morning. On the afternoon of February 11 the Coast Guard radioed the Marine Electric and asked her to stand by a fishing vessel called the Theodora, which was taking on water to the southeast of the ship's track. The Marine Electric diverted and held station near the fishing boat until early evening, when the Theodora's situation stabilized and the Coast Guard released them. The ship resumed her northbound course. The storm kept building.

In the early hours of February 12 the bow began to ride low. The ship was settling by the head, carrying weight forward that the trim could not account for. Water was finding its way into the cargo holds through the hatch covers, through the deck plating, through the cracks and gaps that Cusick had sketched and Graham had warned about and the company had not repaired. Coal absorbs water. As the cargo grew heavier the bow sank lower, and as the bow sank lower more water came aboard. At two-thirty in the morning Captain Corl called Cusick to the bridge. Cusick came up and looked forward into the dark. The bow was going under.

At 2:51 a.m. Corl picked up the radio and called Coast Guard Station Ocean City, Maryland. He reported that the ship was approximately thirty nautical miles east of Chincoteague, Virginia, that she was going down by the head, and that she appeared to be taking on water forward. By three o'clock the foredeck was under six feet of seawater. The hatch covers were failing. The covers that Graham had found unfit. The covers that the Coast Guard had recorded as inspected when they were not on the ship.

The Marine Electric listed five degrees to starboard. Minutes later it was ten. The crew tried to reach the lifeboats, but a ship listing that far, with the main deck already awash, does not cooperate. The davits could not swing the boats free. The deck was tilting away faster than the men could work. The lifeboats stayed where they hung.

At 4:14 a.m. Corl radioed that he was abandoning ship. One minute later the Marine Electric rolled hard to starboard and went over. The hull turned and the sea came across the deck in one long motion and thirty-five men went into the Atlantic in the dark. Some had life jackets. Some did not. The water temperature was thirty-seven degrees. At that temperature a man in a life jacket has minutes before his hands stop working and perhaps an hour before his body gives out.

The Coast Guard helicopter from Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, arrived at 5:20 in the morning, more than an hour after the ship went over. The aircrew looked down into the dark water and saw strobe lights scattered across the surface. Empty life rafts bobbed with no one in them. Men floated face down in their life jackets. A Navy petty officer named James McCann, deployed from Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, went into the sea. He pulled five men from the water, one at a time, lifting each into a rescue basket. None of them responded. McCann kept working until hypothermia seized him and he had to be hoisted back into the helicopter.

Three men survived roughly ninety minutes in the water. Robert Cusick, the chief mate who had drawn the sketches and patched the hole. Eugene Kelly, the third mate, thirty-one years old, from Norwell, Massachusetts. Paul Dewey, twenty-eight, from Granby, Connecticut. In the days that followed, recovery crews brought back twenty-four bodies. Eight were never found. Captain Philip Corl was among the missing.

The Marine Electric settled in roughly a hundred and twenty feet of water, thirty nautical miles east of Chincoteague Island, Virginia. She rests on the sand bottom in three pieces. Thirty-two of the thirty-five men aboard were dead.

The Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation, led by Captain Peter C. Lauridsen, issued its report in 1984. The board found that the ship had been poorly managed and horribly maintained with respect to repairs to the hatch covers, main deck and holes in the cargo hold area caused during offloading. It recommended criminal prosecution of the permanent master, James Farnham, and the fleet superintendent, Joseph Thelgie, for sending the ship to sea in an unseaworthy condition likely to endanger lives. Neither man was prosecuted. The Department of Justice concluded there was insufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

On September 30, 1988, Marine Coal Transport Corporation, the operating subsidiary, pleaded guilty to a single felony count for failing to report outstanding ship defects to the Coast Guard. Judge John MacKenzie levied the maximum fine allowed by the statute.

The investigation led to the scrapping of more than seventy aging World War II-era vessels still in service on American sea lanes. Mandatory survival suits were required for winter runs on the North Atlantic. The Coast Guard established a rescue swimmer program in 1984; the first unit was deployed in March 1985 at Air Station Elizabeth City.

Robert Cusick went back to the merchant marine. The wreck of the Marine Electric still lies thirty nautical miles east of Chincoteague, broken into pieces on the bottom, upside down. Fishermen anchor over it. On the island, a memorial plaque at a small park called Mariner's Point lists the names of the crew. Eight of those names have no graves beneath them.

The maximum fine the statute allowed was ten thousand dollars.