Deadly waters

Joey Petty:

I was, like, going under water diving, ran out of air. You know, you can’t breathe underwater but that’s what you gotta do to feed your family in this corner of the world.

Speaker 4:

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Joey Petty:

You know, it’s like a two foot by two foot horseshoe shaped tank goes right under the engines and they got holes in them you gotta crawl through about the size of five gallon buckets so I’m a small person so guess who always got stuck in the little places?

Al Letson:

He knew it was gonna be uncomfortable. Crawling around on his hands and knees, dragging a paint hose with a spray-gun at the end. He also knew it was gonna be dangerous. He had a plastic onesie and goggles to keep the paint off his skin but in a confined space like that, he’d also need industrial fans. Even with a respirator, the fumes could build up in his lungs.

Al Letson:

But when Joey checks out the engine room, there aren’t any fans. So he goes to his boss Danny Cobb.

Joey Petty:

And as I was stepping on the boat it just, “Boom, boom, boom!” Three big flashes, explosions.

Al Letson:

The two men still inside the boat were dead … Joey was a shipyard painter and sand-blaster for 28 years all across the country. So we asked him, if he made a list of all those shipyards from the safest to the most dangerous, where would he rank this shipyard owned by V.T. Halter?

Joey Petty:

V.T. Halter, they would be between half and three quarter down the list. They not the worst one by no means. I’ve seen some bad places but that’s what you gotta do to feed your family in this corner of the world.

Jennifer Gollan:

The first guy that Joey saw running off the boat, the guy who’s skin was melting, that was Bram Ates. He actually survived and he’s the key to understanding what happened in the boat that day and what happened after. He’s now divorced and living at his mom’s house in Moss Point, Mississippi on a street that dead-ends at a swamp.

Stan Alcorn:

You must be Bram.

Stan Alcorn:

Having a morning root beer?

Stan Alcorn:

Hello.

Jennifer Gollan:

That’s because the burns on his arms, legs, back, and chest left him unable to sweat. The doctors also told Liz that because of his head injury, Bram would have short-term memory problems.

Jennifer Gollan:

That afternoon we went with Bram back to the shipyard. We also took Joey Petty, the painter who witnessed the explosion.

Joey Petty:

Glad to see you doing good, brother.

Bram Ates:

That’s the death yard!

Bram Ates:

They said just a snap of your fingers like that, just the frictions from your fingers right there could have caused that explosion.

Speaker 1:

On the boat, Joey tells Bram something he hadn’t heard before.

Joey:

Do you see them rusty old boxes out there? They got paint on them, different colors? Those are game boxes.

Bram:

That really pisses me off. He’s more worried about his bonus than he was saving our lives.

Russell:

We’re installing engines, we’re doing all the electrical work for the engines and the alarm systems. All of this almost has to be completed at one time.

Russell:

I don’t know of us ever cleaning with paint thinner.

Speaker 1:

When VT Halter failed to test the air for flammable gas, when they failed to use explosion-proof lights and ventilation, they were breaking federal law and the official enforcing that law, that was this guy.

Clyde:

And we oversaw the safety and health of several million workers here in Mississippi.

Clyde:

The physical damage was not as massive as you might think, but you just feel the emotion of the loss of life in the air.

Joey:

That was pretty easy to figure out. I’m not a smart man but I’m not a dumb man. OSHA’s walking through the gate, you get a phone call, “Hey, you got to go.” Oh man, don’t play me for a fool, I know exactly what’s going on, you don’t want me talking to him, just say so.

Clyde:

I think in the long run, they’ll find themselves less profitable. They will lose business from some companies.

Lisa:

I christen the Maury, may God bless the ship and all who sail in it.

Dale:

So good morning to you, it’s early out there.

Tracy:

The ship builder has the responsibility to abide by all federal laws and it’s specified in the terms of the contract.

Speaker 1:

So if you’re not … If NAVSEA doesn’t have an enforcement role, then if a safety hazard emerged, how would it be treated? Can you take me through each step?

Mike:

I want to go off the record.

Woman 2:

Would you have chosen to sue VT Halter, if you could have?

Woman 2:

But why didn’t you?

Jennifer:

They’re all on stilts. The whole area is flooded during the rainy season, and you need a boat to get home. The people here call them “camps”. Bram’s does seem temporary.

Bram:

I haven’t been here.

Jennifer:

He can’t work. He can’t sue, and the only fines VT Halter paid for the explosion went to the government, not the survivors. That hundred thousand dollars in workers compensation, it’s all Bram got, and he spent all of it.

Jennifer:

And why isn’t it done?

Jennifer:

Two months after we visited, Bram is still sleeping on his mom’s recliner. VT Halter on the other hand, they just won a contract from the state of Virginia. They’re building a ferry for 16 and half million dollars.

Woman 3:

We’re now on a boat, where there’s two hundred crew, and you. It’s easy to just get rid of you, to do what they need to do to make money. It’s open water, and it’s a war for money for tuna. So, life is respected differently out there.

Al:

You’re listening to Reveal. For the Center of Investigative Reporting and PRX.

Lindsay:

Hey listeners. Reveal’s Lindsay Green-Barber here. Are you the sort of person who stays up late on Friday nights, waiting for Reveal to hit your feed? Well, we’ve got a sweet deal for you. We’re offering up an exclusive first listen of our latest episode, to one new Twitter follower each week. So, if you don’t already follow us there, you should consider it. Every Friday, we’ll randomly select one new follower from the previous seven days and send them a password protected link to the next episode of Reveal, before anyone else gets it. We’ve done this twice already, and you could be next. To enter, just open up the Twitter app on your phone, and give us a follow. We’re @Reveal.

Al:

From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. VT Halter, the company we just heard about, is one of only eight shipyards in the country that builds ships for the Navy. Everything from Massive aircraft carriers to small patrol boats, to nuclear attack submarines, and these companies could soon be winning even more contracts. President Trump is pledging to expand the nation’s fleet, big time, from it’s current 275 to 350. Now to meet that goal, the Navy would have to spend at least 50 percent more on ships than it does right now. Up to 25 billion dollars a year, according to the Congressional Budget office. Right now, US Naval ships are all over the world. From the South China Sea to the Middle East. When their mission is over, many of them will come here, to the San Diego Naval Base. The day we visit starts off rainy with things clearing up by early afternoon. The massive gray hulls along the pier gleam in the sunlight. An American flag snaps overhead. Naval officers salute one another as they pass by.

man 6:

Morning, Welcome aboard.

Sookie Lewis:

So how fast do you go?

Erin:

The class as a whole, for us, has had some pretty well publicized engineering problems, but every time I’ve been on board we’ve had a lot of success and been able to operate at full power and everything. It’s been very effective.

Al Letson:

That’s reporter Sookie Lewis in San Diego. Those engineering problems she mentioned are a really big deal. In fact, even before these futuristic ships hit the water, they had major issues. GOP Senator John McCain held a hearing about the ships in December.

Michelle Mackin:

So what we’re left with now is the fact that these ships have little chance of survival in a battle space.

Michelle Mackin:

That was over-promising. They cannot operate independently in a combat scenario, and the modular swapping of the mission packages has not panned out either. All of the promises the Navy made to convince Congress to fund this program have really degraded over time.

Michelle Mackin:

We’re talking about clutch assembly failures, main propulsion diesel engine was contaminated with seawater. There have been sone hull cracks on some of the ships.

Michelle Mackin:

The biggest problem is really that the Navy tends to begin constructing these ships before the design is fully understood and stable, and that has definitely been the case with the littoral combat ship. I would actually call this program a poster child in a way for what can go wrong with Navy shipbuilding programs.

Michelle Mackin:

That is correct, and there are lots of reasons why that happens. One is just a desire to get the hulls in the water as soon as possible. Another, quite frankly, is to keep the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base busy.

Michelle Mackin:

That is definitely part of the story here, and I think for shipbuilding, it’s particularly apparent because shipbuilding is a lot of jobs. I mean, it just is.

Geordie Harriso:

If I was concerned, I would tell you, I wouldn’t certify the crews in the ships to go. If I am not prepared to go do the mission set, I am not going to send people to go do that for me ill-prepared or ill-resourced. Do we have challenges? Absolutely. What I will tell you is that every class of ship, every warfare system that’s developed by the military, at some stage or another, goes through growing pains.

Al Letson:

According to Harrison, these growing pains are a necessary part of testing out new designs and technologies. “The failures of the littoral combat ship program have already taught the navy a lot,” Harrison says, “and those lessons have value, even if it’s just learning what doesn’t work.”

Byard Duncan:

Hey listeners, Byard Duncan here, Reveal’s community manager. I don’t want to give too much away about this next story, so suffice it to say that it’s a gripping account of trouble on the high seas. We’ll have a text story to go along with it on our website this Tuesday, a total page-turner from Reveal’s Tom Knudson, a two-time Pulitzer prize winner.

Keith Davis:

The song I’d like to play, originally wrote it out at sea here on a transhipment vessel.

Keith Davis:

#He went down to the sea.

Al:

How did a man, who’s known as a stickler for safety, just disappeared from the ship on a calm day? Did he commit suicide? Did he have a heart attack and fall overboard or as many of Keith’s friends and family have wondered, did somebody kill him? It’s a mystery that Reveal’s Tom Knudson has been trying to solve for months.

Tom:

The first thing I wanted to do was reconstruct the last day of Keith’s life, so I went to Arizona to meet his father. John Davis showed me some of the notes Keith took on board the ship. Federal investigators have returned them to him.

Bryan:

Yeah. Keith had worked for us as an observer in multiple programs. A very professional individual that really enjoyed the work that he did.

Bryan:

When he didn’t show up to sign that declaration, they went to look for him and that’s when they realized that he was missing.

Bryan:

It was all very hard as a company, as are friends of Keith, and as an observer community as a whole that something like this could happen.

Tom:

The unfortunate thing is sometimes, things like this do happen, but something else was going on too. Keith had seen things out at sea that troubled him. In the weeks leading up to his disappearance, Keith had seen fish coming aboard so heavily carved up, he struggled to identify them.

John:

“This boat is a little bit different than I’ve ever seen before, and I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

Cheree:

I had trained observers and I work with observers all the time.

Cheree:

You’re the only one out there. When you’re on a boat where there’s 200 crew and you, it’s easy to just get rid of you to do what they need to do to make money, and then it’s open water and it’s a war for money for tuna, so life is respected differently out there.

Reuben:

Here you are dropped down to the middle of a bunch of hairy-ass, hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-swearing guys.

Reuben:

He maybe should’ve backed off and made a note and said, “Okay, boss, we’ll report this when we get back,” but knowing Keith, he probably didn’t and shit happened.

Michael:

You’re dealing with ships in international waters that are flagged by other countries. The amount of U.S. jurisdiction is virtually none.

Michael:

They allowed us to be part of that investigation for about five days.

John:

This is where my anger comes at, these commissions that are not doing the right thing by protecting their observers out there and saying they are.

Tom:

The U.S. delegation to the Tuna Commission also wants to see more done. This year, it plans to urge the commission to take action to better protect observers from harassment and interference, but none of that will answer what happened to Keith. For now, his friends can only speculate. The Panamanian investigators, if they know anything, haven’t told the Coast Guard.

Ike:

We just boarded the Victoria 168.

Alex:

I’m pretty sure that, in total, they can hold 1,200 ton of fish.

Ike:

Here you can see everything. Is somebody always up here?

Alex:

That’s a big mystery. Nobody knows what happened, including me.

Roy:

Yeah. That’s right. It’s part of the job and it happened. If it happens, then it happens.

Tom:

Or as Keith wrote it in a song, “They went down to the sea.”