Perhaps the best news for the stranded passengers on the disabled cruise ship, Carnival Splendor, is that the flush toilets aboard are back in service and that the ship is proceeding slowly under tow to the mainland. Still lacking refrigeration on the ship, the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy have delivered, by helicopter cases, Spam, boxes of croissants and other easy-to-transport food and supplies. The supplies are being airlifted to the ship on a Navy Seahawk helicopter from the aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan, which arrived on the scene on Tuesday.
Two tugs are now towing the ship with a third as escort. A statement by Carnival announced, “Given the ship’s speed and current position, we have decided to take the vessel to San Diego where it is expected to arrive late Thursday. Additionally, we are in the process of making all the necessary hotel and flight arrangements for our guests. If the ship is unable to maintain sufficient speed under tow, it is possible that we could revert to the previous plan and dock in Ensenada.”
This might be another case of “unintended consequences”. Making cruise ships electric drive has efficiency advantages becasue the prime movers driving the generators can be loaded up to their most efficient power level for both transits and times when the ship is just docked or anchored and only hotel loads are required. However, it appears all the generators are in one room! This is one of the design problems that afflicted the Andrea Doria if I remember right. Had Carnival Splendor been equipped with old fashioned propulsion engines plus ship service generators, she might have been dead in the water but the passengers would be idling in air conditioned comfort with food as good as the normal menu.
In modern cruise ship design, accommodations volume is king. It trumps seaworthiness, speed, and apparently systems redundancy too. But why there aren’t multiple generator rooms, isolated suitably from each other, is a mystery. Suppose the generator room flooded in a collision, as apparently happened with Andrea Doria? Wouldn’t it be easier to evacuate if the other generator room could take up the load, instead of relying solely on the emergency equipment?
It will be interesting to find out more about the fire, assuming that we ever do. I would think that multiple generator spaces would make sense for many reasons. On the other hand, if a fire takes out a key switchboard, it could have the same effect regardless of how the gen sets were arranged, assuming that sufficient redundancy was not designed in.
Maritime construction rules require the emergency generators to be seperate from the main plant. However these have a limited capacity therefore the power generated by them is directed to key emergency locales. In 62F weather lack of A/C is not a great discomfort. One of the many points raised over the years by cruise ship Safety Officer (such as myself) is aas Steven Toby says -redundancy. Perhaps after the passengers, USN, CG and everyone else has been repaid the insurance companies will review and require changes. Money talks!
Good Watch.
Great post , I’m going to spend more time reading about this subject