Photo: Washburn, Alex / The Chronicle

The Carnival Splendor, which was crippled by an engine room fire on November 8th, leaving it drifting for days off the coast of Mexico with nearly 4,500 crew members and passengers aboard, is expected to sail from San Francisco on Friday following dry docking and the completion of major repairs.  Two generators and a diesel engine were replaced.   The dry dock in San Francisco was the only dock on the West coast large enough to handle the 113,300 GRT  cruise ship.

The new diesel engine, weighing close to 100 tonnes,  was taken from another Carnival ship now under construction in Italy and flown to San Francisco aboard an Antonov 21, one of the largest cargo planes in the world.

Previous posts about the Carnival Splendor