Posted March 17, 2020
Letter from San Francisco: When the virus ship sails in
From my San Francisco fire escape I saw it coming: The Grand Princess cruise ship, notorious for its freight of people diagnosed with coronavirus. I zoomed in, snapped a photo, and texted my husband, David: It’s here.
He works as a tugboat engineer, and his boat was one of the two tugs that would help the ship dock in Oakland. The Grand Princess had been at sea for 17 days, circling off the coast for almost a week, after the governor said the ship couldn’t dock in California until they figured out what to do with it.
The ship was denied a port when it was discovered that 62 passengers onboard had also been onboard at the same time as a man who eventually died of the virus. Of the current passengers, 21 had tested positive for the virus. But only 46 of the more than 3600 people onboard had been tested.
I was worried about all of those onboard, including the father and stepmother of a friend, one of them frail, the other living with dementia. But now I was worried for David. I often worry about him, out on the water in all weather, pushing and pulling huge tankers and container ships around. But this was different.
“We’ll use gloves,” he assured me, “and we’ll treat the part of the line that comes into contact with the ship with bleach.”
The only connection between the tug and anyone on board the cruise ship was the line–a thick, strong rope–that connects the two vessels. Crew members on both sides touch the rope. It’s unlikely that the virus could be transmitted that way, but when I later told people my husband was on a tugboat that helped the Grand Princess dock, there was a slight moving away from me, even before David came home. We’re all worried about lines of transmissions, but I don’t think a phone line counts as a vector.
He said, “We’re probably at greater risk from jobs we did weeks ago,” back before ship traffic slowed when manufacturing in China all but ground to a halt. Crews on Chinese and other container ships, with no gloves or masks, were at least as likely to have been vectors of transmission than a high-profile cruise ship with cameras trained on its every move. And when the Grand Princess was about to dock, many Bay Area counties already had dozens of people who’d tested positive for the virus, and there had been a few deaths. The virus was already here.
“Also, we’ll have our bow mat on,” he joked. The bow mat is a canvas bib the tug drapes over its black rubber bumper when pushing cruise ships around. Cruise ships don’t want black marks on their pristine hulls. That the tug would have on a mask of sorts didn’t reassure me.
Still, it was thrilling to watch as a local news helicopter followed the Grand Princess’s progress. It was a beautiful day, and the ship gleamed white against the blue of the bay and the orange pilings of the Golden Gate Bridge. Six small boats accompanied the ship. Later I learned they were sheriffs’ boats, small coast guard vessels, and at least one Oakland police boat. Apparently cruise ships coming into port are always accompanied by two such vessels, but this ship warranted six, in part to keep other boat traffic away.
I also learned later from David that the Grand Princess was conspicuously absent from that day’s pilot list, a publicly accessible inventory of every ship that comes in to port. Speculation was that the cruise ship might spark protest or even a blockade from people who didn’t want a “virus-laden” ship anywhere near them. But whether or not the ship was on the pilot list, it has a tracker that lets anyone map where it is. Go to a ship traffic site like Marinetraffic.com, type in the name of the ship, and hit “show on live map.”
I didn’t need to follow along on Marine Traffic; I watched live helicopter footage as the ship sailed towards the Bay Bridge and two tugs approached, one taking its place at the stern. A newscaster said, “Look at all the boats around the cruise ship. Now one’s right behind it. That’s interesting.” Interesting, maybe, but also standard protocol. That was my husband’s tug, close enough to the stern (the back of the ship) that they could throw up the line, which lets the tug help the ship maneuver into dock. Boats that size (almost 1000 feet long) are unwieldy, though cruise ships have an abundance of powerful thrusters that make them more maneuverable than, say, an oil tanker.
It takes a while to dock a ship of that size, and the news helicopter kept circling the vessel, zooming in on passengers on their balconies. One woman waved a white handkerchief, as if in surrender.
David had a tug’s eye view.
“None of the passengers on the upper deck had masks on,” he noted. “But down below, there was an endless stream of masked people, probably those who were going to be first to depart. The crew had masks on, except for one officer. Stars on his shoulders –he doesn’t go below deck much.”
Passengers waved and blew David kisses. They’d been at sea for so long. He said that although he’d never understood why anyone would want to take a cruise, the experience was strangely moving. “I think they’re going to kiss the ground when they get off.” No doubt they would if virus protocol allowed.
About 2500 passengers were eventually let off the ship. The 1100 crew members remained–only those showing symptoms were allowed to disembark. It says a lot about who’s most at risk on a ship that of the 21 people who tested positive for the virus, 19 were crew.
So the passengers got relief, such as it was. The crew remained onboard, docked in Oakland for a week, not allowed to leave. Finally, more than half the crew was able to leave the ship; some will be flown home to the countries with so little economic opportunity that the low pay and long hours of below-deck work looks appealing. More than 600 of the crew members on the Grand Princess were from the Philippines.
On Monday morning (3/16), the ship left Oakland and is now anchored off Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, with 340 of the crew still onboard and, according to at least one news account, 6 foreign passengers as well.
It’s been quite a week. I worry about those still onboard the Grand Princess, in a floating quarantine that we don’t know much about. The crew has been on my radar at least a much as the passengers throughout this ordeal, maybe because my husband’s workplace is a boat. And I felt a special connection to the proceedings because David had a small role in helping the ship come in from the cold, so to speak.
The gleaming cruise ship with its not-so-gleaming cargo got a lot of press, but it’s already old news. It’s just one high-profile chapter in what is going to be a very long saga.
Though there were many who wanted to deny the ship the opportunity to dock in the Bay Area, the Grand Princess wasn’t the source of our problems. We already had many cases before anyone got wind of this 17-story behemoth bearing down on us. Some of the crew and passengers did carry the coronavirus, but into a place where it already existed, and they were spirited away from Oakland, to military bases and cordoned-off-hotels.
When I saw the ship sailing in from my sixth-floor fire escape, I’d texted my husband, “It’s here.” A more accurate message would have been, “It’s been here, here comes some more, and there’s plenty more to come.”
And just so you know — David and I are still healthy, fingers crossed, sheltering in place as per our mayor’s orders, in our sixth-floor studio apartment, watching out the window to see what the hell is going to sail in next.
First and last photos by Erin Van Rheenen. All others by David Webster Smith.
If you’re interested in ships and shipping, check out our collaboration, The Secret Language of Ships, which was Hakai Magazine’s most viewed article in 2018.