The water is breaking gently around the hull of the crew boat Miss Emerson, as if she were puttering across a muddy lake. Instead she is tied at the dock of Port Ship Service, straining at her bowline as a supercharged Mississippi River rushes beneath. On the bank of a levee just over the parish line from New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, Capt. Charles Crawford is preparing to take control of the Valle Azzurra, a big ship coming down the river in a hurry. The Miss Emerson is a transport boat. She will pull alongside the Malta-flagged tanker, and Crawford will board the larger vessel as the ships run momentarily together. He will climb a ladder that hangs over the ship’s port side, whose paint is scraped from a recent trip through the Panama Canal. His assignment: steer the Valle Azzurra safely to Pilottown, where the river meets the sea.
“Where’s mine?” Crawford asks Timmy Lopez, the drawling, tattooed dispatcher, his eyes as blue as the river is brown.
“Coming up on Perry Street,” responds Lopez with a glance at a monitor, as if we were waiting for an Uber instead of a 200-foot ship carrying 10,000 gallons of God knows what around the bend at Algiers Point.….