SS El Faro
ship built in 1975
SS El Faro was a United States-flagged, combination of roll-on/roll-off and lift-on/lift-off cargo ship crewed by U.S. merchant mariners. Built in 1975 by Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. as Puerto Rico, the vessel was renamed Northern Lights in 1991 and, finally, El Faro in 2006. She sank with her entire crew of 33 on October 1, 2015, after steaming into the eyewall of Hurricane Joaquin.
El Faro departed Jacksonville, Florida, under the command of Captain Michael Davidson, bound for San Juan, Puerto Rico, at 8:10 p.m. EST on September 29, 2015, when then-Tropical Storm Joaquin was several hundred miles to the east. Two days later, after Joaquin had become a Category 4 hurricane, the vessel likely encountered swells of 20 to 40 ft (6 to 12 m) and winds over 80 kn (150 km/h; 92 mph) as she sailed near the storm's eye. Around 7:30 a.m. on October 1, the ship had taken on water and was listing 15 degrees. The last report from the captain, however, indicated that the crew had contained the flooding.
The public source identifies “SS El Faro” as ship built in 1975. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Faro, ship and built.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21058951. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1991, 2006 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS El Faro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.