Does the company tell the chief engineer to do this or is he just a company suck ass looking for brownie points?
Chief is a suckass trying to impress the 3 monkeys in the office.
Company is never telling you something like that because that makes them vulnerable.
Company is telling you how expensive the filter material for the OWS (oily water separator) is and that you are
in a bad budget position compared to sister vessels. Thats the way it goes and it makes a certain sense.
Water leaks from pumps, pipes and joints are accumulated in the ER bilges and turn automatically into oily bilge water.
Moist from ships inner hull accumulates to the bilges. Paint washing, daily floor moppings by the wipers, anything liquid
goes down into the bilges and turns to oily bilge water. Even if your bilges are really clean and freshly painted.
Only chance to compete is to reduce the ingress considerably. How, that makes the difference…
can’t the water from oily water not be boiled off leaving behind only oil residue.
I can dispose of 100% of oil waste by boiling / burning. Except when there is a screw up of some kind, either we can’t boil or we can’t burn or we convert a large quantity of good oil to waste oil, this conversion is done using a process called fucking up.
In our case we tell the company we need to have a waste oil barge arranged which means $$$ and quesitons. I can see in the case of FOC the crew might just want to pump it over the side.
In a way yes, but that’s what we use the OWS for. The contaminated water is pumped to the first chamber of the OWS and due to its design oil is separated from the water and flows to the sludge tank. The remaining water is passing filter cartridges and flows overboard. Before it’s discharged overboard it’s oil content is measured by sophisticated devices and once the final “sheen of oil” exceeds 15 ppm the water is recirculated to the bilge water holding/sump tank.
This is a normal procedure and quite clean water will be pumped overboard unless it’s tampered with in certain ways.
And don’t forget, every Gallon of water is counted. The content of the bilgewater Tank is measured daily, the beginning end end of pumping through the OWS is monitored etc. etc.
Only very stupid engineers would try to bypass controls with magic pipes nowadays, apart from the whistle blowers which I personally find a pain in the ass.
If your on a ship where they are using a magic pipe then it looks like it’s hitting the jackpot and it’s time to retire from the sea.
Retire? For a million bucks? Hardly. The guy was a new junior engineer. He definitely does have a head start on retirement, assuming that he hasn’t just made himself the least popular guy in the company. I’m not sure what kind of legal protection from retaliation he has on an FOC. I coulda sworn that the whistleblower was supposed to get 1/2.of the total fine.