The video was something you’d expect from AI, not real life.
In the early morning darkness of March 26, the horizon aglow with the floodlights of commerce, the MV Dali, a container ship stretching nearly three football fields long and moving at a speed of about 10 mph, struck a pier supporting the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore. Within seconds, the steel truss bridge collapsed, pinning the Dali in place. While a Mayday call from the ship helped ensure vehicle traffic cleared the bridge in time, six construction workers died in the collapse. The Dali’s 21 crew members remained on board for close to three months throughout efforts to remove the wrecked bridge from the ship channel and from atop the ship itself.
The video of the collision and collapse is haunting, disturbing, searing. And for a time, the Dali disaster pulled back the curtain on an industry often unseen, one that makes the world go round.
INVISIBLE, YET CRITICAL
When was the last time you stopped to consider where some thing in your house or car came from?
Not the HECHO EN MÉXICO stamp on some candies and electronics or the MADE IN CHINA tag on most shoes or the 100% U.S. GROWN logo on a bag of rice. A product’s country of origin is easy enough to spot, thanks in part to labeling laws and politics.
What I mean is the route or mode of transportation goods and commodities take to get from point A to point B. How that gasoline got from a well in the Gulf of Mexico to your tank. Or how that Zatarain’s parboiled rice got from a flooded field in Louisiana to your boxed jambalaya mix.
Almost all of the foods, raw materials, manufactured products and fuels we depend on (and enjoy) every day have been transported by vessel.
By some counts, there are around 5,000 container ships working around the world today. The Dali, technically classified as a Neopanamax container ship, has a deadweight tonnage of more than 116,000 tons and can carry close to 10,000 TEUs, the unit of measure for shipping containers. “Neopanamax” refers to ships designed to traverse the newer locks at the Panama Canal, which opened in 2016.
As big as the Dali is, it’s nowhere near the largest container ship in the world. That title goes to the MSC Irina, which is more than 300 feet longer than the Dali and can carry 24,346 TEUs, more than 2.4 times the Dali.
In addition to container ships, there are around 8,700 crude oil tankers with a deadweight tonnage above 10,000, and more than 12,800 dry bulk ships (those that carry commodities like grains and fertilizers).
On the rivers and canals of the United States alone, close to 5,000 towboats are at work, pushing barges on the Mississippi River and its tributaries; on smaller rivers like the Red, Atchafalaya, and Black Warrior; and on canals like the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, all at speeds of 2 to 5 mph.
All those vessels are crewed by mariners who either work months at a time (ocean-going ships) or about a month at a time (inland towboats), in shifts around the clock. Two federal agencies, the U.S. Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers, support the commercial marine industry.
The workforce is massive, and the logistics are mind-blowing.
Take just one example: A chemical plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, produces plastic resins (small pellets that are used to make anything from bags to phones and phone cases). Some of those resins are loaded into giant sacks, then into containers, and trucked to a terminal in Port Allen, Louisiana. From there, the containers are loaded into hopper barges and moved by towboat to the Port of New Orleans, where they’re stacked onto a container ship. That container ship may eventually travel through the Panama Canal to Asia, where those same resins are used to manufacture phones, which are later boxed into different containers, shipped to a port on the West Coast, and eventually trucked to, say, an Amazon distribution center. That entire process has to take place in order for you to click “Buy Now” and have a new phone delivered to your house in two days or less.
And yet, absent a catastrophe like the Dali striking the Francis Scott Key Bridge, shipping in the United States — whether ocean-going ships calling on seaports or inland towing vessels pushing barges on the nation’s rivers and canals — is an afterthought, if it’s even a thought at all.
In her book Ninety Percent of Everything, Rose George put it this way: Who “looks behind a television now and sees the ship that brought it? Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms?”
People in the towboat and barge industry often refer to this invisibility as working “between the levees.” They realize that to be between the levees is to be unseen and unacknowledged.
Extended time away from home means missing out on soccer games, anniversaries, crises, and first steps. Digital connectivity has eased that distance in a way, yet enhanced it as well. The stress and danger of the job — barges are secured to towboats with wires, after all, and crews operate in all kinds of weather and river conditions and in crowded and remote waterways — coupled with separation from family and friends takes its toll.
For the mariner, the job is often lonely, even though he or she is surrounded by crew mates.
This is one reason why chaplains, when praying over a new vessel during a christening ceremony, will often invoke the image of Jesus in the stern of the boat in the middle of a storm on the sea of Galilee.
God, give us the strength and patience we need as we navigate through the whirlpools of life. When we’re headed upstream and can’t seem to find slack water, replenish our spirit with new strength. When we’re sliding deep in the bends, prepare us to meet the constant struggles of daily life with a renewed sense of hope and joy. May the currents and winds of our lives be always fair and favorable. This we ask in the name of Jesus, our brother mariner, who calmed the waters and quieted the storms.
One chaplain to inland mariners and a trailblazing towboat and riverboat captain, Joy Manthey, shared that prayer at a christening I attended a few years ago. The imagery of Jesus in the boat with mariners has always stuck with me.
Over the years, through my work as a reporter, I’ve interviewed hundreds of mariners and others in the maritime industry. Some are fellow Christians, and a few have shared stories of how they’ve experienced God’s presence in the midst of their work. These are their stories.
PULLED FROM THE WATER
Captain Richard Boudreaux was on watch shortly before 10 p.m. on April 25, 2020, guiding his towboat, the Rhonda Lamulle, and a pair of tank barges west on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway near the Pensacola ship channel when he spotted something unusual off his bow: an unmanned jet ski.
Boudreaux stopped his tow and radioed the U.S. Coast Guard. A nearby fishing boat and a Florida Wildlife Conservation patrol boat heard the radio call and responded, towing the jet ski back to shore.
With the Rhonda Lamulle back underway, Boudreaux posted one of his crew members on the bow of his lead barge to keep watch as the tow crossed the ship channel, which was standard operating procedure, according to Boudreaux.
Now, keep in mind this is no quiet, placid environment. The Rhonda Lamulle’s 2,400 horsepower engines were roaring, seagulls were cutting up on the barges, the tide was ebbing, and the wind was blowing. What’s more, it was a moonless night.
Just a few miles west of where he came upon the jet ski, Boudreaux told me, his crew member out on the front of the lead barge radioed back to him.
“He says, ‘Cap, can you shine your light to the starboard side? I thought I heard voices,’” Boudreaux recalled. “We had a ton of seagulls on the barges, the waves, the wind was blowing 20 or 25 mph, the barges were creaking, and he heard voices. When I shined it to my starboard side, about 75 feet off the side of our barges, there were two people in the water.”
The crew dove into action. Boudreaux sounded the general alarm and radioed the Coast Guard. Two of his crew members launched the Rhonda Lamulle’s skiff. Boudreaux saw the Florida Wildlife Conservation boat in the distance and shined a spotlight in its direction as a signal.
“He knew what I was getting his attention for,” Boudreaux said. “That man, I guarantee you he had that boat on full throttle getting to us. It took him maybe three minutes to get to my guys.”
Boudreaux said his two crew mates in the skiff eased up to two young women in the water, securing them to the side of the skiff, then helping them aboard the Florida Wildlife Conservation boat. The women said they had been knocked off their watercraft several hours earlier and had been adrift ever since. They were exhausted, and with the wind and ebbing tide, the women were close to drifting out to sea.
“The sea conditions that night, a couple more hours and I don’t think those girls would’ve survived,” Boudreaux said. “They were in a bad spot.”
Speaking after the rescue, Boudreaux said he was proud of his crew for their quick action that night.
“I am personally very proud of my crew and their calmness and alertness to be able to come together to let these young ladies go home to their families,” Boudreaux said. “This was the perfect ‘needle in a haystack’ rescue. When God shows us his presence, it is up to us to step up and do our part as his children.”
Amazingly, this wasn’t Boudreaux and crew’s first rescue. As we talked, Boudreaux recounted three other times he and his crew had rendered aid to people in distress. The way he described those rescues echoed the second commandment.
“It’s part of our job to be vigilant, to be alert and watch our surroundings,” he said. “If we can help anybody, as mariners or as human beings, it’s our job to help. It’s our responsibility to try to help, no matter who it is, no matter where it is.”
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
The year was 1989, and Martha Burnett’s sixth grade class in Oxford, Mississippi, wrote letters, stuffed them into glass bottles, sealed them with wax, and field-tripped from Oxford to below Sardis Lake to toss the bottles into the Tallahatchie River.
More than 30 years later and a few hundred miles downstream, one of those letters turned up, intact, on April 5, 2022, atop a dredge float in the Yazoo River Diversion Canal in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
A team from Big River Shipbuilders in Vicksburg was working on salvaging the dredge float. Billy Mitchell, a salvage diver and surveyor who was working on that project, told me something drew him to the bright green bottle.
“I’m always looking for stuff like that,” Mitchell said. “I said, ‘This has a message or something inside it,’ so I reached and grabbed it. You could see the writing on the letter through the bottle. My buddy said, ‘Man, I almost kicked that back in the water.’ I’m sure glad he didn’t. I mean, who finds a message in a bottle?”
Mitchell brought the bottle aboard the towboat working that job, grabbed some kabob skewers and carefully worked the weathered and fragmented letter out of the bottle.
“We stuck it in the microwave and dried it out just a bit,” Mitchell said. “We could make out 1989 and saw it was a kid’s handwriting.”
Mitchell took the letter and bottle up to the Big River Shipbuilders office, where he and Brad Babb pieced together more of the letter, revealing part of an address and phone number, the date (August 30, 1989), the word “please” used twice, a reference to calling collect, and the writer’s hometown, “Oxford.” Mitchell and Babb also spotted what they thought was the kid’s last name, “Tahl.”
“We asked ourselves, ‘How far do we take this?’” Babb said. “And we said, ‘Well, what would we want?’ This was just us doing what we’d want someone else to do.”
When a call to the Oxford school district proved fruitless, Babb turned to Facebook, posting a call for help and pictures at 4:41 p.m. on April 5. In short order, the post garnered hundreds of reactions, comments and shares.
Fast forward 48 hours, and Eric Dahl, a medical doctor in Oxford, got a call while he was sitting in church waiting for his granddaughter’s choir to sing. On the line was a local attorney who told him, “I think I found something online that involves your family.” Dahl’s wife, Melanie, immediately pulled up the post on Big River Shipbuilders’ Facebook page. There, sitting in church, Melanie Dahl wrote in a comment: “This was my son!”
The next day, Eric Dahl called Babb to tell him the rest of the story.
The Dahls have two sons: Chris, who is still living, and Brian, their older son, who died in 2007 just before his 30th birthday. Brian was in Burnett’s 1989 sixth grade class when he was just 11 years old.
In his 20s, Brian got into bike racing and was a champion in that sport. Then, in 2005, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He fought through two years of treatment, receiving a clean bill of health in 2007. Tragically, he died August 10, 2007, in an accident at home.
“We cried, talked and cried again,” Babb said. “Being a Christian and faith-driven in his life and the way I am in mine, we just took it as a message that ‘Dad, I’m still here, and I’m watching over you.’”
In July of that year, the Dahls traveled to Vicksburg where they met the shipyard crew at the Big River Shipbuilders’ office, which is just uphill from the Yazoo River Diversion Canal. The gathering in Vicksburg fell just weeks before the 15th anniversary of Brian’s death.
“Like Billy told me when he pulled back from giving me that big bear hug, ‘It’s a message from God that your son is all right and he’s looking in on you,’” Eric Dahl said. “It’s a God thing, and there’s a lot of mysteries about it, but it seems to be an evidence that there is a God who loves us and will use even the worst things in our lives to bless us. To have the greatest grief of your life comforted by such a thing is truly a blessing.”
Eric Dahl called it a “chain of kindness” that connected them to a letter their son wrote so many years ago. Burnett said it was her husband who encouraged her to take her students below the dam at Sardis Lake to toss the bottles into the river. Above the dam, and the bottles likely would’ve never left the lake. Then, the bottle spent 33 years traveling downstream, ultimately taking the unlikely turn into the Yazoo River Diversion Canal rather than into the Mississippi River. Finally, a crew of curious mariners found it and returned it to the Dahls.
Eric Dahl said, in a way, that chain of kindness fulfills what his son asked for in his letter.
“He was asking for a connection with a stranger,” he said. “I just couldn’t help but think, when I got the bottle and saw that — and with the instant connection I had with Brad and Billy and the crew and Mr. Smith — the good Lord gave Brian what he wanted.”
FAITHFUL IN THE FLOOD
Captain Robert Mueller was deputy commander of Coast Guard Sector New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina made landfall August 29, 2005, and flooded the city and neighboring St. Bernard Parish. Mueller directed the Coast Guard’s waterborne search and rescue efforts following the storm. Hurricane Katrina remains one of the Coast Guard’s largest ever search and rescue operations, with around 25,000 New Orleanians rescued by boat and another 8,500 by helicopter in the days after the storm. Mueller recorded his experience in a book titled Coast Guard Heroes of New Orleans.
Mueller, who is a Christian, recalled offering a simple prayer as he viewed the destruction in New Orleans from an MH-60 helicopter after the storm had passed.
“‘God, this is too much for me. You’ve got to make this work,’” Mueller recalled praying. “He was listening, because things kept happening. Really good things that enabled the operation to succeed. My faith was strengthened. All the Coasties there came away feeling they were part of something much bigger than a rescue operation.”
At one point in the book, Mueller recalls a private fuel truck arriving at the Coast Guard’s helicopter station near Lake Pontchartrain, without any request or forewarning, yet just in time to refuel the helicopters. Mueller said no one was ever able to track down that truck afterward.
In another episode, a crew in a Coast Guard boat came upon a pregnant woman stranded in the toxic, urban floodwater. Unable to get the woman in the boat, the crew members held her fast to the boat and towed her over to a submerged car.
“They used the car as a ladder to get her into the boat,” Mueller said. “When she hit the bottom of the boat, her water broke and she went into labor. Had that happened 10 seconds earlier, she would’ve died and the baby would’ve died, because that water was so toxic. She got into the boat just in time to deliver the baby.”
Another crew was in a different part of the city, looking for people stranded on their houses, when the coxswain driving the boat felt an overwhelming urge to go by one particular home. The team knocked on the house, but there was no answer. Still, the coxswain refused to give up. Ultimately, the crew cut a hole in the side of the house. Inside, they found a man with his 87-year-old mother in water up to her chest.
“I asked the coxswain, ‘What made you have to go to that house?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, captain, I just had to go to that house.’”
Mueller dedicates an entire chapter in his book to the ministry of chaplains to Coast Guard members doing search and rescue in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Rather than a traditional dedication page, Mueller instead quotes Isaiah 41:9-10 at the start of the book, “Don’t be afraid, for I am with you.”
“And so it was with the Coast Guard in New Orleans,” he writes.
Another flood story takes place 11 years later, beginning August 12, 2016, when parts of the Baton Rouge area received as much as 31 inches of rain over the course of a weekend. The stationary storm dropped an estimated rainfall total over 7 trillion gallons over a 21-parish area.
The flooding that followed covered Verret Shipyard in Plaquemine, Louisiana, with four feet of water, bringing work there to a halt.
“A man can’t hardly stand and weld in four feet of water,” shipyard owner Ted Verret said.
Rather than send his workers home, though, Verret decided to help. Verret volunteers with his church’s ministry to widows and widowers, and through that, he was able to connect teams from the shipyard to people in need.
“We had to do something,” Verret said. “We had guys who couldn’t work. I said, ‘Look, I’ll pay you out of my pocket for at least a week or two. Let’s do what we can do to help this. I’m going to try to keep y’all employed, and we’re going to help some folks in the process.”
One such person was Lucille Ortiz, who was 89 at the time and whose husband had also been a boat builder. Verret recalled carrying box after box of shipbuilding mementos out of Ortiz’s house.
“Her life [was] piled up on the street out there,” he said. “That’s how the stories went.”
MINISTRY OF PRESENCE
Remember Captain Joy Manthey, the chaplain I quoted at the beginning? When she was 10 years old, her summer routine in New Orleans was to fill water balloons with her two next-door neighbors and lie in wait at the nearest bus stop. When the bus would arrive at their stop, the three friends would hurl the water balloons at the driver and run away.
“We never waited around long enough to see that our balloons would never break,” she told me.
On one particular Monday, although Manthey’s neighbors were out of town, she stuck to her routine. But rather than throwing water balloons, she struck up a conversation with the driver, who asked if she would like to pay the bus fare and ride downtown for a change. Manthey produced the dime for the fare and climbed aboard.
The year was 1968.
The end of the line was where Canal Street meets the Mississippi River. While she was waiting for her new bus driver friend to start his route over again, Manthey ambled down to the river. Moored there, near the Canal Street Ferry landing, was the steamer President. Two girls her age, who were playing on the dock, invited Manthey to join them. And one of the girls, who happened to be the captain’s daughter, invited her aboard the President for its afternoon cruise.
“She said they’d get me on the boat if I’d clean the popcorn machine,” Manthey said.
The churning of the paddlewheel, the chatter of the passengers, the way the President plied the river and slid past New Orleans landmarks she’d always only seen from shore — Manthey was hooked from the start.
By the end of the summer, she was steering the boat during the captain’s lunch break. At age 18, the day after she graduated from high school, Manthey went to St. Louis to spend the summer working on the steamer Admiral. Three years later, she earned her 100-ton license, and in 1980, she earned her first-class pilot license for New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
In the 1980s, Manthey owned and operated her own harbor cruises. Then, in the 1990s, she began piloting towing vessels on the Lower Mississippi River and Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.
“I was the only woman on the radio,” she said.
While working in a barge fleet in Houston, Manthey met a captain whose wife had recently died in a hit-and-run accident. Even though the man was back at work, Manthey could see he was still wrestling with the trauma of his wife’s sudden death.
Manthey, a devout Catholic, had already sensed a call to religious life. She entered a convent in 1998 and “made her vows” in 2000. Part of the process required her to either start or get involved with a ministry. Building on that dockside encounter with the grieving captain, Manthey decided to marry her faith and her passion for the river by serving mariners through chaplaincy.
In time, Manthey recognized serving as a sister wasn’t her ultimate calling.
“There was an emptiness in me, and the sisters knew it,” she said. “I’ve got the river in my blood.”
To this day, when she’s not piloting riverboats or towboats, Manthey spends much of her time driving River Road, visiting barge fleets and ministering to mariners.
“That’s near and dear to my heart,” she said. “It’s needed. Chaplaincy is a ministry of presence. To do the ministry right, you have to go on the boats.”
In doing so, Manthey and the other mariners described above embody the lyrics by brother mariner John Newton, who wrote in his hymn “Begone Unbelief,”
His love in time past
Forbids me to think
He’ll leave me at last
In trouble to sink
By prayer let me wrestle
Then he will perform
With Christ in the vessel
I smile at the storm
