SS V. A. Fogg

At 12:40 on 1 February 1972 the tanker V. A. Fogg left the Phillips Petroleum terminal at Freeport, Texas, with thirty-four crew and five hired tank cleaners aboard, bound for a few hours in the Gulf of Mexico washing out the cargo tanks she had just emptied of benzene. At about 15:45 she blew apart and sank in minutes in 30 metres of water. Everyone aboard died. Three bodies were recovered from the chartroom; two were identified, one never was. Because a big ship had vanished without a distress call, the loss was absorbed into Bermuda Triangle literature — from a stretch of the Gulf well over a thousand kilometres from the Triangle — in a version where the captain was found sitting in his cabin with a coffee cup still in his hand. A librarian named Lawrence David Kusche took that detail apart in 1975 by telephoning the men who had been on the dock. What the Coast Guard Marine Board found instead is documented to the minute, and it is the harder story: benzene vapour, an ungrounded pump, and twelve hours of work nobody had been trained to do.

The ship was much older than the disaster that made her famous. She was built at Mobile, Alabama, in 1944 as the SS Four Lakes, one of the mass-produced T-2 turbo-electric tankers that fuelled the Second World War. In 1957 she was bought by Tanker "Four Lakes", Inc. and run in coastwise petroleum service by Texas City Refining and its successor, Texas City Tankers, Inc. In 1959 she was jumboized at the Maryland Drydock Company in Baltimore: an entirely new cargo midbody, built at Orange, Texas, and towed round to Maryland, was spliced between the original bow and the original stern. She came out about fifty feet longer, with twenty-seven cargo tanks instead of twenty-six, and her gross tonnage rose from 10,172 to 12,569. In 1964 the tank interiors were sandblasted and coated with Dimetecote 3, an inorganic zinc silicate that left them hard, smooth and grey. She was never fitted with any equipment for filling her tanks with inert gas, and the Marine Board recorded flatly that inerting had never been practised aboard by any other means either, at any stage of gas-freeing, cleaning, loading or discharging. By the end of 1971 she was owned by the Ithaca Corporation of Wilmington, Delaware, operated by Texas City Tankers out of Texas City, Texas, enrolled at Galveston on 16 December 1971, and named V. A. Fogg. Her master was John E. Christy, of Houston. She arrived at Freeport on 30 January 1972 loaded almost end to end: twenty-three cargo tanks of benzene, part of it for Phillips Petroleum and part for Dow Chemical, plus the two centre tanks numbers 8 and 9 full of xylene for the Tauber Oil Company. The benzene came off at the Phillips and Dow terminals; the xylene stayed aboard. The next cargo was to be loaded at Houston, and the emptied benzene tanks had to be washed, gas-freed and wiped dry before it could go in. There were roughly twelve hours of sea time in which to do it: fourteen wing tanks to wash and ventilate, twelve of them to be wiped by hand. At 12:40 on 1 February 1972 she left the Phillips plant. Aboard were thirty-four crew, five labourers hired from the Marine Maintenance Company of Houston, and a pilot. The pilot dropped off at 13:15 and remembered that several crewmen and the five labourers were already out on the foredeck, with the Butterworth openings and tank tops still closed. At about 15:45, some thirty nautical miles offshore, the tanks began to go. The bridge clock stopped at 15:45 from physical shock; the two navigation chronometers stopped about two and a half minutes later, when the water reached them. That is how long the ship had. The engine order telegraph was still standing at full ahead when divers reached the bridge, the rudder was six or seven degrees right, the general alarm switch was off, the lifeboats were never swung out, and the portable lifeboat radio was found still strapped into its rack in the after house. No shore station or vessel ever received a transmission from her. At 16:10 a NASA pilot flying over the Gulf reported a rising mushroom-shaped dark cloud, a mile and a half wide, three miles long and 8,000 feet high, bearing 151 degrees at 48 miles from the Galveston Vortac. A Mexicana airliner reported smoke too. A Coast Guard UF-16 was airborne at 17:08 and flew back and forth through the smoke at 500 feet and lower for over two hours; nothing was visible on the water, and the origin of the smoke could not be determined. Nobody connected it to a ship. That first air search crossed the very position where the hull was eventually found. The alarm came from the office. Mackay T. Conard of Texas City Tankers tried to raise the ship at 21:30 and again at 22:00 on the 1st, cabled her at 06:00 on the 2nd, and at 14:30 on 2 February reported her overdue to the Coast Guard. The search that followed ran until 11 February and used 71 aircraft sorties, 336 flight hours and 532 hours of surface time. It brought up a ten-man inflatable raft, found inflated and undamaged, a wooden door, a life ring, a burned lifeboat storage box, and a life preserver with a money belt tied to it. On 11 February a survey crew from EG&G International, working from the M/V Miss Freeport with a Mark 1 side-scan sonar, located the hull; divers hired by the owner positively identified her on 13 February, in about 100 feet of water at 28°35'34".70 North, 94°48'44".22 West. She was lying on a heading of 131 degrees with her radar antenna projecting about two feet above the surface of the sea. Thirty-nine men died. Three bodies were recovered and two were identified: Captain John E. Christy and able seaman Mandell Barton of Texas City. The third was still unidentified when the Board signed its findings in August 1972. Among the missing were the chief mate Bodvar Gregersen, the chief engineer Douglas M. Bittick, the radio officer Sheridan R. King of Big Rapids, Michigan, the second mate Paul Joseph Gennusa of Seabrook, the chief pumpman Joseph Maguire of Harahan, Louisiana, the engineman Jose Antonio Alemany of Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and the ordinary seaman John M. Hellesford of Galveston, whose next of kin was his granddaughter. The five hired tank cleaners — Oscar B. Garza, Alfonso Ortiz, Oscar Peña Pérez, Juan T. Sierra and Héctor Zárate, all of Houston — appear in almost no account of the loss, because almost every account calls the dead "39 crew".

This is not a place anyone visits casually. The V. A. Fogg lies in about 30 metres (100 feet) of water in the open Gulf of Mexico, roughly 36 nautical miles from Freeport on a bearing of 122 degrees — an hour and a half or more of open water each way in a fast boat, out of sight of land. The wreck is nevertheless a known and officially charted destination. Texas Parks and Wildlife has folded it into the Freeport Liberty Ship Reef, one of the artificial reef sites on the Texas coast, where it sits alongside two Liberty ships, the William F. Allen and the B. F. Shaw, a cluster of six retired oil platforms arranged in a star, three hundred one-ton fly-ash blocks donated by Houston Lighting & Power and a welded pipe structure from Conoco and Galveston County. Texas Parks and Wildlife publishes the position of the Fogg as 28°35'36.600" N, 94°48'44.937" W, and the site is promoted to divers and anglers alike; the hull broke into sections, and dive operators generally list three of them. There is no shore access, no visitor centre and nothing to see from land. Reaching it means a charter out of Freeport or Galveston with a skipper who knows the numbers, and a dive well beyond recreational entry level: the bottom is at 30 metres, currents in the open Gulf can be strong, visibility varies enormously with the Brazos River outflow, and any penetration of a broken, explosion-shattered tanker is technical diving with a technical diver's training and gas. One thing is worth saying plainly. Thirty-six of the thirty-nine men who died aboard were never recovered. The site is not designated a war grave and carries no special legal protection that this article has been able to confirm, but it is a grave, and the courteous way to dive it is the way you would dive any other.