PHOTO COUTESY : MASSACHUSETTS MARITIME ACADEMY
Photo of Keith Griffin, 33, a 2005 graduate of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — The Coast Guard says its search will end this evening for 33 missing crew members from a U.S. cargo ship that sank last week during Hurricane Joaquin.
Officials said during an afternoon news conference that the Coast Guard will end its search for survivors from the El Faro at sunset. Officials had broken the news to relatives of the missing earlier in the day.
The 790-foot cargo ship sank Thursday off the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin, a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds that was producing 50-foot waves. Officials say the ship’s captain had plans to go around the storm as he headed from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico but the El Faro suffered unexplained engine failure that left it unable to avoid the storm.
Massachusetts Maritime Academy graduates Keith Griffin, 33, and Jeffrey Mathias, 44, were among the crew.
Griffin was a native of Winthrop and graduated from the Academy in 2005. Mathias was from Kingston and graduated in 1996.
The Coast Guard had searched across a 300-square-mile expanse of Atlantic Ocean near Crooked Island in the Bahamas. Searchers found a body in a survival suit, but were unable to retrieve it. They also found an empty life raft, empty survival suits, a life ring and other debris.
The National Transportation Safety Board says it will try to retrieve the data recorder from 15,000 feet deep to learn why a cargo ship sank.
Bella Dinh-Zarr, vice chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said late Tuesday that she hopes the ship can be found so investigators can access the voyage data recorder.
PHOTO COUTESY : MASSACHUSETTS MARITIME ACADEMY
Photo of Jeffrey Mathias, 44, of Kingston who graduated from MMA in 1996.
Dinh-Zarr says the VDR begins pinging when it gets wet and has a 30-day battery life.
Investigators are focusing on the communications between the captain and the vessel’s owner and may further explore whether the five workers whose job was to prepare the engine room for a retrofitting had any role in the boat’s loss of power.
Officials from the company that owns the vessel, Tote Inc., say they don’t believe so. but the question — along with the captain’s decision to plot a course near the storm — will help investigators figure out why the boat apparently sank near the Bahamas, possibly claiming the lives of all 33 aboard.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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