Carnival Splendor stranding baffles marine experts

[nadinbrzezinski]

By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY
Marine experts are questioning whether there was a design flaw in the Carnival Splendor cruise ship, which lost power after an engine fire and was towed to San Diego on Thursday with nearly 4,500 people aboard.

A generator for an engine caught fire in the aft engine room 6 a.m. Monday, damaging a switchboard and "preventing the transmission of electricity to other machinery, including the propulsion motors," said Carnival spokeswoman Joyce Oliva.

The cause of the fire, which was put out by the crew and the ship's automatic fire-suppression system, is unknown.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/cruises/2010-11-12-cruise-inside_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Well I am not a marine expert, but I asked if this was a design flaw oh two days ago when I found this bucket of bolts was two years old... WOW... this means the Naval Engineers in Italy are also responsible...

This is definitely going to be fun... and LONG... on the bright side the Captain might keep his job. The Chief Engineer, not so much.

[azurnoir]

1. To be honest I don't know but

I sure do see a made for TV drama here

[Mimosa]

2. *LOL!!! at the stranded Love Boat miniseries* LOL!!!!!!n/t

[lpbk2713]

3. Was Halliburton involved in the design of this vessel?

:sarcasm:

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Actually no

[pipoman]

11. Toyota..

[haele]

5. Fires in electronic switchboards are not unusual - and if you have a manned engine room, usually

can be contained early and relatively painlessly by cutting the power and switching over to auxiliaries. Every ship I'd ever been on has had at least one small engine fire that was put out within 5 minutes without calling a fire party.
However, stakeholders want cost cutting and automated systems for engine rooms that serve that cost cutting purpose have been being built into ships over the past 10 to 15 years. That's how you can get these big trans-ocean-going supertankers and freighters with crews of only eight to ten people to run the ship when 20 years ago, they'd need a crew of around thirty to handle the 8-on/16 off watch-standing duties to ensure that circuits don't get overloaded and switchboards don't start burning un-noticed.

Chances are, as this is a new ship, the engine room is pretty much an automated monitoring network - a localized "smart grid", with an alarm board on the bridge or a network server that sends an alert message to the Chief Engineer's blackberry if anything slips out of the operating margins.
If the network has a problem, or if equipment was added to it after the initial design as "plug and play" components, there might have been induced problems or outages that could have gone un-noticed by the monitoring systems, and a fire could have been sparked and spread as a smoldering fire for close to an hour before it got noticed.
Smolder fires are nasty - A team and I were pulling cable through a ship's space that had insulated overhead and bulkheads; someone had been welding on the deck above three hours previously and didn't have a fire-watch clear the insulation below in that space; the "fireproof" lagging was still burning; smoldering to an area radiating a good five feet from the original bead, spreading smoke and heat throughout the small room as soon as we opened the hatch to get into that space to pull our cable through.
It took the ship three hours to get that fire out. And that was just insulation. Electric wires in a switchboard, with plastic and teflon coating that control critical valves and pumps, as well as the engine rotation and directions; well, once you have a small failure in the control wiring, it can cascades rapidly.

I suspect there's going to be a long, microscopic investigation of what failures caused the chain of events, and why the critical responses that could have halted that chain did not happen in time.

Haele

[Skink]

6. That kind of cost cutting probably has to do with cabin space.

they could pay a larger crew but if they can get a few more passenger cabins in the deal then there really are some increased earnings. I remember when they down sized the orchestra. It was because the youth program was expanding so much they needed cabins for the staff.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. Here is from the crews director POV

http://johnhealdsblog.com/2010/11/12/smoke-on-the-water-part-3/comment-page-3/#comment-88264

yep, it sounds like partly that is what happened. They used a CO2 system... I was kind of expecting Halon, but that is just me... or CO2, Halon, he is the cruise director, not a firefighter.

I did ask him when exactly they called the Mexican Navy... I am really tired of this crap.

Also the blog is great CYA and corporate atta boy. To his credit he did his job, perfectly well.

[Sirveri]

8. We never touched Halon while I was in the Navy.

Submarines, self contained environment. Better to just have arc fault detectors in the panels and CO2 fire extinguishers in the space. Not sure why the engineers aren't trained in shipboard firefighting though. It's not like they've got a DC crew running around the boat.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. See I am thinking Halon in industrial settings

we all learn something. And from what that thing reads, they do have DC crews. Which was kind of surprising.

I did ask though when exactly did that other navy show up. The raw footage from the AP is hilarious from that POV and when did they call?

According to his account they only called the USCG... and if they did, I guess the USCG called them.

Somehow a general SOS closer to somebody else's coast would make sense, but that is just me.

I don't expect an answer either.

[Blue_Tires]

10. do you have a link for the raw AP footage?

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Looking for it

I could call it up yesterday... but 24 hours have passed.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Here

http://video.ap.org/?f=AP&pid=FFam_LA4L2lQeatTCC83GWaY4QmFKlOD

You will see a guy in a red helmet that says Marina on it, and a life jacket. That is the Mexican Navy Crew member coming onto the port of San Diego...

It is harder to find it now.