Just minutes before the cargo ship Dali was set to glide under Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the ship’s alarms began to blare. The lights went out. The engine halted. Even the rudder, which the crew uses to maneuver the vessel, was frozen.
As a frantic effort to restore the ship was underway, the pilot soon recognized that the aimless vessel was drifting toward disaster, and called for help.
The cascading collapse of the vessel’s most crucial operating systems left the Dali adrift until it ultimately collided with the Key bridge, knocking the span into the river and killing six people. But as crews this week were still sorting out how to disentangle the ship and recover the bodies of those who died, investigators were also turning to the most central question: What could have caused such a catastrophic failure at the worst possible moment?
Engineers, captains and shipping officials around the world are waiting for that answer in an era when the industry’s largest ships can carry four times as much cargo as those just a few decades ago, navigating through congested urban ports under bridges that may carry tens of thousands of people a day,
Already, a few key questions are emerging, according to engineers and shipping experts monitoring the investigation, and most of them point to the electrical generators that power nearly every system on the 984-foot vessel, not only the lights, navigation and steering, but the pumps that provide fuel, oil and water to the massive diesel engine.
The “complete blackout” reported by the pilot is hard to explain in today’s shipping world, in which large commercial vessels now operate with a range of automation, computerized monitoring, and built-in redundancies and backup systems designed to avert just such a calamity.
“In the last 30 to 40 years, the level of that redundancy has been increasing quite considerably,” said John Carlton, a professor of marine engineering at City, University of London. “The ship of today is so very different to the one of 30 years ago.”
Yet there is a wide range of possible factors contributing to the failure that investigators will have to sift through as they interview crew members, examine fuel supplies and scrutinize the ship systems that broke down that night.
If there was faulty maintenance, it could have caused a delay in starting the emergency backup generator, or an electrical fault could have prevented it from remaining engaged. Contaminated fuel or an inadvertently closed valve could have fouled or starved the main generators. Human error could have set off problems or failed to overcome them. The ship’s own automation could have led to equipment glitches. Or a fire could have broken out and damaged crucial equipment.
The answers will have implications not only for international shipping but also for who is liable for damages that S&P Global Ratings estimated at more than $2 billion.
Grace Ocean Private, the Singapore-based company that owns the Dali, said it was “fully cooperating with federal and state government agencies.” Grace Ocean’s owner is Yoshimasa Abe, a Japanese citizen who owns at least two shipping lines and more than 50 vessels, including some of the world’s biggest container ships. While the Dali was insured, Mr. Abe’s company potentially faces large claims against it, depending on the findings of the accident investigators.
Given the scope of the failure, it is possible that there were multiple problems. Timothy McCoy, a professor specializing in marine engineering at the University of Michigan, said that much like a plane crash, an extensive breakdown of a ship’s systems typically involve a sequence of events.
A close look at the potential factors involves many of the most essential elements in the operation of a modern cargo vessel — including the fuel that feeds the ship’s 55,000-horsepower diesel engine that in turn powers the ship’s propeller.
Fuel also powers the huge generators…
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