If it was bad fuel then all would stop less the EDG
Thats what happened to a few ships here in asia a few years back.
All got towed back into port
I read the fuel went like glue
You might be right, now that I think about it we did switch to diesel when arriving from outside. Someone with more recent experience would know for sure.
I don’t think fuel is the issue if they were under major electrical repairs at the dock for two days because of refer containers continuously tripping breakers , and experiencing loss of power days prior at the dock
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Baltimore is like a 6 hour pilotage.
Cargo Ship
Emergency generator shall be automatically started and connected within 45 sec
Emergency power source, Emergency generator must be sufficient to operate certain essential services at least for the period of 18 hours .
- Emergency lightening (at alley way, stairways and exits, muster and embarkation stations, machinery space, control room, main and emergency switchboard, firemen’s outfits storage positions, steering gear room)
- Fire detecting and alarming system
- Internal communication equipment
- Daylight signaling lamp and ship’s whistle
- Navigation equipment
- Navigation lights
- Radio installations, (VHF, MF, MF/HF)
- One of the fire pumps, emergency bilge pump
- one steering gear pump ( mainly port side)
And seeing above is a good moment to listen to another Dr.Sal video clips (last one) . Minute 6:18 to 10:20 . Interesting conclusions regarding forward mast light flicking and what it meant.
I may be wrong of course but may be Dr.Sal should consult Engineers on this forum instead of asking somewhere else in order to maintain better credibility.
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Not to the bridge, even rowing that isn’t six hours, more like 30-45 minutes or less.
Of course this raises the issue of freaking refrigerators taking out main propulsion in the first place.
The standards for what is called “maneuvering” is from the berth till after the pilot is dropped off and back up to full sea speed.
In our case this included manned engine room, two SSG on line, one SSG on standby, anchor(s) ready to let go and so forth.
Be all the way down the Bay to somewhere around the sea buoy.
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seems like the gCapt knowledge pool on slow speeds is much shallower than I realized.
You must cut us a break because this forum is mostly populated by US mariners and our deepsea fleet is painfully small with a very good percentage of those ships being medium speed propelled. I do not know when the last slowspeed diesel was made in the US, but I believe that industry collapsed in the 50’s not long after WWII.
Someone mentioned turning off the fridge breakers until past the Key Bridge, which isn’t far. As of now we don’t seem to have any idea if that would have helped, except for local talk on the AM radio here from dockworkers saying the ship kept losing power in port while they were loading her.
Here’s the NTSB’s rundown of what they found on the VDR:
At about 0039 hours the vessel got under way from Baltimore’s Seagirt Terminal.
At 0124 hours the vessel was making eight knots and steering 141 degrees.
At about 0125, multiple alarms went off, and the VDR ceased recording the ship’s electronic system data. Using backup power, the VDR kept recording bridge audio, and it captured the pilot’s verbal rudder commands.
At 0126 the VDR was able to resume recording the ship’s electronic data.
At 0126:39 - the pilot made a general VHF call for tug assistance. This was the first distress call from the vessel and caused the dispatcher at the pilot’s association to alert the MDTA. This gave the MDTA enough early warning to begin shutting down the bridge to vehicle traffic.
At 0127:04 the pilot gave the order to drop Dali’s port anchor. He also gave additional steering commands.
At 0127:25 the pilot made a general radio call over VHF to warn that the Dali had lost all power and was approaching the Key Bridge.
At 0129:00 the VDR began recording the audible sounds of the allision. The noise continued until 01:29:33.
Moments later the pilot made a VHF call to report the bridge’s collapse.
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A minute of blackout is odd. Then the lights on after a minute of blackout, steering should auto start seconds later if this is the case and they crash started the main but maybe the blowers are waiting to cycle on given the smokeshow? 30 seconds on then out & on again shortly thereafter. It looked like they started the main engine again after the second recovery and then got some air through it and started making power less than a half a minute before impact, too late.
Any newer switchboard should recover itself with a standby main generator in like 10 seconds and have at least two generators running during maneuvering anyway. Probably at 3 main generators aboard, maybe more. Maybe one or more out of order for maintenance or iffy, late for maintenance or continuing known issues.
If the Egen came on only would all the deck lights have come on like they did or just nav & boat / boarding lights? 3 Was the bow floodlight coming on shortly after the initial recovery a clue or just vapor light things?
They have big base load keeping the reefers cooling and I’m not sure, do they have someone out there plugging units in during maneuvering? Should that have load shed or ???
If it was a fuel problem it’d depend whether it’s a common or split skids feeding main & gens, common or split tanks. Everything should be on light oil anyway though. Not that there can’t be problems there.
Hope the Chief has his ORB in order. Hope those printers in the ECR console work, that’d be a bad look. I wonder if the NSA has been through all the networks on that thing yet.
That must have been terrifying to have been on the bow whether they escaped down the deck safety tunnels or ducked into the focsle or just dove for cover wherever they could. Angry shit flying everywhere, people running for cover.
Everyone on the ship was fine supposedly though, thankfully. Sad about the guys on the bridge.
Also what’s with trying to find just a raw video of something like this and getting nothing but news outlet clips with some ass trying to narrate or analyze or run their yap? Is there an audio recording of the VHF 16 traffic during the incident? All I get are news channel clips of city emergency response soundbites.
I always operated with the understanding that the PMS is working correctly following the various stages of testing it’s been through. However, I don’t assume input, output or control devices connected to it to work flawlessly that’s where careful attention to the automation and history helps one determine what is going on. Critical items are on the E-buss and loss of feed from the main bus will start the EDG. How is what you are proposing different? All critical loads on a separate bus with one DG in operation? So you mean if the engineers opened the bus tie and had the EDG start at the dock prior to departure and ran that way it would be safer? How does that not still result in the same thing, single gen fails, critical loads without power.
Will leave this for others but my brief and ancient experience was reefers was a premium cargo and was charged for appropriately. Can’t imagine operating this way. Especially if as explained above these sources/distribution are segregated and faults would clear in fractions of a second or be subject to automated load shedding commands.
This wait is seconds. A bus can generate stby starts for many reasons. Sometimes load will require it. Sometimes prime mover fault will require it. Sometimes generator fault will require it. Sometimes PMS detects a situation where paralleling a gen on would be impossible - you could be watching a running gen at synch speed just sitting there while all goes dim. In this case PMS might very well execute an e-start and perform a “blackout change over”. Where the man bus is deliberately blacked out so the healthy DG can be brought on line by closing its breaker. By “believing in the PMS” you will get in less trouble than trying to hand parallel a running DG to a bus in trouble. You will allow the system to make load dependent starts, fault driven starts, parallel executions, load shedding etc.
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What good is this going to do?
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I did read today that one of the ships crew was transported off the ship and received stitches, and has already been returned to the vessel. Indian consulate reports all crew is now well and remains on the vessel. So I guess there was at least some injury.
I heard that Seaward Construction in Norfolk had the contract, but they could have hired DonJon. In any case I’m not surprised that DonJon will be in the mix, they are the most experienced salvage company on the east coast
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Seward has their hands full these days, not surprised to hear about DonJon.
4 minutes between alarm and allison. take out 15-30 seconds to fiqure out what is happening, a minute to 90 seconds on the back end where no control input would make any differance - leaves the pilot/crew about 2 minutes of action/decision time.
just an awful place/time for this to happen
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Pilotage for ships is from when a pilot steps on to when they step off. The pilots do not get off the ship after they get under the bridge, they take her out to the sea buoy. Likewise, maneuvering for the engine room doesn’t end until the ship takes departure outside the sea buoy.
I hope you mean reefer containers, not actual refrigerators.
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For sure and for certain. Lots of us old Coasties have been talking it up big time on Coast Guard FB pages. The answer will most likely be found but will people believe the results. Knuckleheads still believe W. engineered 9/11 to get Arab oil.
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Man of the hour.
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