So, I'm no expert on shipping and large ships, so hopefully someone can help me here. Apparently the ship lost power at a terrible moment for such to happen, then drifted into the bridge while trying to regain power and control. I'm a little surprised that total propulsion loss would even be a thing short of a major explosion in the engine room. How does the entire propulsion system go down at once. Aren't there backup systems in place to supply at least enough power to avoid what happened? Surely this ship has more than just one engine. What am I missing?
It is true that the ship lost power at an incredibly in opportune time. Total propulsion failures do happen frequently, just not at absolutely critical times. I don’t think the issue is as simple as “bad gas”. What happened was MARPOL VI which was an international agreement formed in 2020 where nations agreed to limit the sulphur and nitrogen emissions from ships that typically burned what was called “heavy fuel”. So this agreement allows the ships to burn the heavy caloric fuel with all of its additional lubricants that get in all the component parts of these large ship engines as long as they are out at sea, but when they get close to ports they must switch to low sulphur diesel fuel, which has much less caloric benefit for not only power but also for lubrication. Most of these vessels were designed to run on the ’heavy fuel’. Every engineering department on every ship has had to learn how to properly maintain their engine plant given these new leaner fuels. As this ship was just entering the port she had probably not long been on the high sulphur diesel and frequently there are issues while the engine is in a ‘transition” from one fuel to the other.
Since probably 95% of the ships time is at sea getting from one port to another and a relatively small amount of time is spent in port, the policy seems more symbolic than substantive, with the added issues of less power in narrow channels and while maneuvering around high density populations, and potentially critical/strategic sometimes explosive/toxic infrastructure.
Now the ides that a ship like that could have a totally redundant propulsion mechanism Isn’t practical either. A very few do, mostly passenger vessels. Neither is requiring these ships to burn low sulphur diesel at all times. Most simply don’t have large enough tanks to support that and it is WAY more expensive than the ”heavy fuel”.
This is a very sad and tragic accident, from what I am seeing so far, everybody did the very best they could given the hand they were dealt that night. As these vessels which cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars phase out and new ones are built and designed to burn the fuels required in the treaty of 2020 this will happen less. But then again there will probably be some new more efficient innovation then that will have to be adjusted to on the fly. But no matter what machines will break. Unfortunately this one “broke” at a bad time.
