What caused the Power Failure : The Dali Incident

On March 26, 2024, at around 01:29 a.m., the container ship Dolly collided with one of the pillars of the Francis Cot Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing the bridge to collapse. According to reports in recent days, this tragic

incident

has already

caused

at least six deaths and, according to some analysts, could generate total losses of between two and four billion dollars. I'm pretty sure many of you have already seen various videos, comments and reactions to this

incident

. We have seen images of the ship moments before. she hit the bridge, we already know that a blackout occurred which

caused

the loss of propulsion.

I'm pretty sure many of you have been wondering

what

could have caused this

failure

which in turn led to this catastrophe, we'll dive into that. but before we make a disclaimer, the actual sequence of events in the engine room has not yet been made public. We only saw part of the timeline of

what

was recovered from The Voyage's data logger, so I will analyze this based solely on what I see in this video and try to make sense of it based on my knowledge and experience as a Chief Marine Engineer. It is like doing incident investigation and root CA analysis which we as onboard management team normally do whenever incidents occur.

On board, let's take a look at the CCTV footage and check the timestamp so we can analyze the sequence of events, so here we can see the ship approaching the bridge based on Tim's stamp from the video. The blackout occurred at 32 seconds after 124. Different source anyway when a blackout occurs on board a Send all machinery to inside the engine room, the noise decreases rapidly, except for the very loud and sometimes panic-inducing audible alarms, which will be persistent for about one minute because all the systems will be detected as abnormal and also the engine room Suddenly it gets dark now as a ship engineer, those are the two things you don't want in the engine room, especially during maneuvers, darkness and silence because that It means the ship is dead in the water every time I am on board a ship when I am sleeping.

In fact, they wake me up if everything suddenly goes quiet. Noise and vibration from running engines are actually normal background. Now, isn't there a backup generator or something? Well, yes, but it's a little more complicated than that, I need to do it first. Explain a little about the marine

power

plant, so basically we have the main engine, which is the huge engine that provides propulsion

power

, in short, it is the engine that turns the propeller and makes the ship move. Now the main engine requires multiple auxiliaries. The machinery must work like fuel pumps, Lu boiling pumps, cooling water pumps and others before it can work, and those pumps, those systems need electricity to work, for that we have the generator engines that provide electricity to the entire boat for the purpose of this video.

I will refer to them as large generators. There are usually three generator engines on board, but for a container ship of this size you probably even have four. I'm not sure for this boat, but what is certain is the total electrical load requirement. The entire ship can easily be driven by at least two generators with an additional generator on standby ready to take over in the event of a

failure

, so there is usually no shortage of redundancies when it comes to electrical power and then there is the emergency generator that works automatically. Starts in case of a blackout Sola requires it to start automatically within 45 seconds of a power outage.

It is located outside the engine room and has its own fuel tank; However, it is driven by a smaller motor and is dedicated to providing power only to a select group of machinery and lighting, all of which are powered through the emergency panel which automatically disconnects from the main panel in the event of a blackout. Now the equipment connected to the emergency panel they served to restart the larger generators while maintaining the operation of the radar and navigation equipment emergency lights and navigation and of course firefighting, the emergency generator does not generate enough power to restart the main engine and restore The propulsion, however, provides power to the ship's steering mechanism.

Yes once the emergency generator kicks in the boat should be able to use the rudder you know to steer the boat but we'll talk about that later and then there are also some batteries that automatically connect to radios and other small equipment emergency, some battery operated lights, as well as ups for computing devices like the Eis, is fine. Now that we have the basic idea of ​​a marine power plant, let's look at the images again, as we saw earlier, the blackout occurred at 32 seconds after 124, so as I mentioned, the emergency generator should activate in 45 seconds according to Sola requirements here.

We see that the power was restored at 31 seconds after 125 i.e. 59 seconds, wait a minute, does that mean the emergency generator did not work and automatically connected in time? Well, there were signs that it didn't connect within the required time if you look. closely the entire time the lights were off, the navigation lights were also off and never came on until all the other lights were on. The navigation lights are powered through the emergency distribution board, which is also supposed to run the emergency generator during blackouts. According to the initial timeline transcript, the VDR stopped recording ship data except for audio in the wheelhouse, which resumed just over a minute later.

Those are telltale signs that not even the emergency power came on in 45 seconds. What I'm seeing here when the lights came back on was probably just the emergency generators. I may be wrong, but I am very familiar with the sequence when power is restored after a blackout, so I say there is a good chance that is the case, however, it is also possible that they managed to restart the large generators and putting them on load, which could also happen even without waiting for the emergency generator to turn on anyway. A few seconds later, after the lights came back on, black smoke can initially be seen coming from the chimney.

I thought this was from the main engine. I thought they were trying to do rear end crash maneuvers and the black smoke was the result of a poor fuel ratio because they canceled the load limits of the main engine, you know, to quickly increase speed. however, it was only 13 seconds after the H lights came on. I doubt they managed to restart the main engine that quickly. There are many things to reset before the main engine can be ready to run. Well, it's not impossible, but I seriously doubt they could have. Anyway the black smoke is more likely coming from the large generators, assuming they were able to start the large generators and charge them, this means they should have had the ability to restart the main engine, the problem is at about speed 8 knots, it is very likely that the propeller was still rotating in the forward direction due to the momentum that caused the main engine to crash, since the direction of rotation would be a bit complicated and there will definitely be some failures in starting, before start the engine.

It's a matter of technique, but I've done it many times, as part of the testing procedure years before the ship enters port, it should work as long as there is nothing wrong with its main engine or fuel, however, if we look AIS tracking, no I don't think they could get the main engine running. Here's why at that point the steering gear should be functional even if they were still in emergency power mode, one of the steering gear motors would have already been running because it is connected to the emergency system. control panel we can also see in the vdr timeline transcript that the pilot gave several rudder commands at around this time, meaning that the rudder was responding to rudder commands.

Okay, so the steering gear was working at this point, though, assuming they had any use. of the rudder why the ship did not turn to safety this confirms that they could not restart the main engine because without propulsion power the rudder will not be able to turn a ship of this size effectively to explain it simply The rudder makes the ship turn to the divert the water current generated by the propeller. The force of that deflection creates a turning or torsional moment about the center of gravity of the ship, so that, in combination with inertia, it causes the ship to begin to turn in the direction determined by it. rudder position, the fact that they couldn't turn the ship is an indication that there was no propulsion, so why was black smoke coming out of the chimney?

Where he came from? Since the smoke appeared about 13 seconds after the lights came on. I can assume it came from the large generators. I'm ruling out the auxiliary boiler turning on automatically in this case because it takes about a minute of pre-purge before it can turn on. Presumably they were trying to restore main electrical power, which makes sense because that's the only way they can restart the main engine, but normally there shouldn't be black smoke in US waters, ships must use LS smgo or low sulfur marine diesel oil, so it is relatively cleaner compared to the black stuff we normally use when the ship is in open sea and even when ships use heavy fuel, black smoke is not supposed to be present in conditions normal operation, so why was there black smoke?

This could be one of the clues to find out the root cause of the blackout, whenever ships maneuver to or from ports, there are usually two generators in service and at least one on standby. Normally, one generator is capable of handling the essential electrical loads necessary to operate the main engine, but for safety, two. of these are put into service to ensure that there is more than enough power available and that no blackouts occur during maneuvers, so that in the event that one of the generators in service trips, the one on standby should be able to start and take control, but in case Won't preferential travel be activated in the main switchboard?

This will turn off non-essential machinery, you know, the ones that are not necessary to maneuver, such as refrigeration, air conditioning purifiers, blowers and other machinery, so this preferential travel should be able to be reduced. the load is enough for one generator to be more than enough to maneuver the ship now for a ship to go into blackout while two generators are running means they both malfunctioned at the same time or around the same time the two most likely reasons for this happens are either fuel related or switchboard related, either reason can explain why the standby generator did not start or take load automatically.

A distribution board malfunction, although possible, is quite unlikely, but it is still possible, but it will involve quite a bit of malfunction. parts or even human intervention like someone doing electrical repairs on the main switchboard, which is a bit unthinkable while the boat is maneuvering. I don't rule it out, although it is bad practice, but I have seen it happen before and it might explain why we couldn't re-charge the generators, but it can't explain the black smoke. Now the fuel-related reason seems to be more plausible. In this case, simply, the fuel supply was suddenly cut off.

I do not think it is like that. something like clogged filters because that would happen gradually and there are numerous solutions to prevent failures and it is quite easy to rectify a sudden interruption of fuel supply which would explain why both generators would shut down at the same time since they share a common fuel line. and also prevent the standby generator from starting automatically, but as the ship was presumably using LSN MGO they may have been using the small washdown pump instead of the dedicated fuel oil booster pumps for the generators, it is possible that The small pumps may not have given enough pressure, you know? to hold the load on the generators or maybe someone mistakenly closed a valve or accidentally activated the quick-closing valves or maybe even forgot to refill the fuel tank.fuel, it could happen.

I've actually seen that before, there are a lot of Mayes, but the thing is at some point. Period, the fuel supply was cut off, however, a simple closed valve is easy enough to rectify and it shouldn't have been difficult to, you know, restart everything from there. Now there's also the contaminated fuel angle. Yes, that could happen too, in fact, black smoke. seems to be an indication that this could have been the case, there is a possibility that they switched to a different tank that had bad or contaminated fuel in it, which could have caused the generators to stop at the same time or and this is a bit controversial.

They tried to switch to heavy fuel oil too early and something went wrong, which could also explain why the standby generator didn't start and why there was black smoke afterwards. Now we can't know for sure how much it cost him specifically and I'm not accusing anyone of doing anything. I'm just trying to make sense of things because this could happen to any boater. It could happen to me anyway. At around 0126, the pilot called for tugs in the vicinity via VHF and now looks at the footage afterwards. More than 1 minute since the light came on it went dark again but interestingly the navigation lights did not go out this time.

This could have been an attempt to charge the large generators, although black smoke was still billowing from the chimney. It is not normal since it indicates a bad fuel/air ratio or incomplete combustion, so it is really strange since before the blackout there was no black smoke, so at that moment the pilot gave the order to descend. The anchor port side as the boat was not responding to the rudder movements, as we can see it did not have much effect about 25 seconds after 127, the pilot issued a radio call via VHF reporting that the boat had lost all power approaching to the wheelhouse, so Since the lights went out again, we assume that even the emergency generator was disconnected for some reason, meaning that they no longer have control of the rudder because there is no electricity supplying the steering gear.

Anyway, the engines after about 30 seconds, the lights came back on. Following the ship, the ship barely lost any speed and was already turning to starboard at this point. The collision was imminent at the beginning. I actually thought the main engine was running aft at this point because the boat suddenly turned to starboard. This phenomenon is known as a helix. we walked and the ship turned to starboard because it had a right propeller but of course after a thorough review of the footage we already know that they were unable to restart the main engine that brought us to this fateful moment around 129.

The container ship Dolly It collided with a key bridge at a speed of around seven knots, causing the bridge to collapse. After a major incident like this, we can easily assume that the crew's morale is very low since the captain is the one in command of the ship. Definitely in a very stressful situation, but since the immediate cause was a power outage, the chief engineer would be up to his neck in shit and would probably be feeling depressed right now. Even if they weren't directly responsible for anything, it's the command's responsibility unless it's undeniable. evidence that someone else did something wrong the captain will always be in the spotlight if it is related to the engine then the chief engineer will be too they will both spend the next few months writing statements explaining what happened how it happened why it happened and who did it, They will presumably be taken to court, so that is another grim prospect that they will not be happy to see this tragic incident.

We can expect that the reaction of ship owners will be to send their crew for additional training, but the point is that there are already training courses using simulators that address this particular scenario. In fact, I used to handle the engine side of those scenarios when I taught at maritime training centers. To be honest, what happened in Baltimore is almost exactly what happens every time you run those simulations where a blackout occurs in a high-traffic area and it almost always ends in a collision. Basically, Kobayashi Maru is a no-win scenario, but without Captain Kirk cheating because realistically, if something like that happens, there won't always be enough time.

To reset all systems and restore power and propulsion, our technology is not yet available, the best we can do is train the crew to maintain presence of mind and try to minimize damage by acting promptly when faced with a similar situation. They have done things differently to avoid a catastrophic outcome, perhaps if port regulations required tug assistance all the way to the end of the port that would definitely have made a difference, but it could have. One thing is for sure, although prevention is better than a cure no matter how much we want to spend this we cannot deny that there were lapses on board the ship I know it is a difficult pill to swallow but it is what it is sometimes even if you have been very meticulous In your job things have a way of going wrong, there will be times when you find yourself between a rock and a hard place and the decisions you make will determine whether you will emerge unscathed or not at all.

Thanks for watching and see you next time