Flushing pumps were mentioned a couple time before the NTSB preliminary report was released:
Were they blowing 5 short on the whistle and were the guys on the bridge trained to recognize that signal? Seemed like they maybe could have had time to jump in a car and floor it.
After the first blackout recovery they had 30+ more seconds of power then blacked out again. Sounds like about the amount of main generator time you’d get out of a full skid & fuel header with no electric feed pumps replenishing it. Did maybe someone have something lined up onto a flushing pump as a backup and forgot…
A sudden stoppage of the fuel supply would explain why both generators would shut down at the same time, as they share a common fuel line, and also prevent the standby generator from starting automatically. But since the ship was presumably using LSMGO, they might have been using the small flushing pump instead of the dedicated fuel oil booster pumps for the generators.
Also discussed after the report:
Here is the report’s explanation for using the flushing pump to supply fuel to the ship’s service diesel generators (DG)
According to the chief engineer and previous chief engineer, for at least 7 months leading up to the accident, the crew exclusively used the flushing pump to supply fuel to DG3 and DG4. The crew believed that the DG supply and booster pumps and the associated piping contained other fuel (VLSFO or HFO) that was not compliant with emissions regulations in certain geographic ar…
