It's been three months since the cargo ship El Faro was sunk in the midst of the powerful Hurricane Joaquin and the National Transportation Safety Board has finally released photos and video showing the vessel at its final resting place somewhere northeast of the Bahamas.
The photos were released Sunday evening as federal investigators mulled another mission to attempt to recover the ship's "black box." The El Faro sank Oct. 1 as it traversed the Atlantic Ocean en route from Jacksonville to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
There were 33 crew members aboard the boat, including 28 American and five Polish citizens. The Coast Guard searched over 70,000 square miles of the Atlantic before finding the ship's debris field on Sunday near the Crooked Island in the Bahamas.
Tom Roth-Roffy, the lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said that a weeks-long search found one of the El Faro's missing decks.
After suspending their search for the data recorder in November, Roth-Roffy says they may go back to search again. The recorder was attached to the ship's main mast, a 35-foot tall structure that crews haven't yet located.
Roth-Roffy said the NTSB would need to launch a second search of the wreckage, 15,000 feet below the surface, if it wants to find the recorder, which would have recorded the captain's final transmissions. They are still determining if and when such a search would occur.
Investigators are still piecing events of the sinking together, but at this point NTSB has ruled out a major structure failure as a cause of the El Faro's sinking, Roth-Roffy said.
"The issue with the detachment of the upper two decks, we're looking at that carefully," he said.
Several lawsuits have been filed by victims' families, claiming that setting off despite the impending storm was reckless and pointing to what they say was a shoddy maintenance history of the ship. Tote Maritime, the owner of El Faro, has filed a motion to block these lawsuits.