Photo: Mathieu Gesta, Ponant
The expedition cruise ship, Le Boreal, operated by French line Ponant, has been evacuated after a fire in the engine room. Fire broke out on the 264-passenger ship as she was sailing off the Falkland Islands early Wednesday. The passengers were transferred to a sister ship, L’Austral, which was nearby. They will be taken to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands to be sent home. The remainder of the cruise has been cancelled. Le Boreal was built in 2011 by Fincantieri.
This is only the latest in a series of engine room fires on modern diesel-electric powered cruise ships. In September, an engine room fire broke out on the Carnival Liberty after docking in St. Thomas. Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas experienced a machinery space fire while entering the Port of Falmouth, Jamaica in July. Another Royal Caribbean ship, Jewel of the Seas, had a small fire in February resulting in the ship having no air conditioning for 5 hours and no toilets for at least two.
The Carnival Triumph suffered an engine room fire in February 2013 in the Gulf of Mexico and had to be towed to Mobile, Alabama. On May 14, 2011, an electrical on failure on the cruise ship MSC Opera cruising in the Baltic, blacked out the ship leaving her drifting for almost three days before tugs arrived and towed her into the Swedish port of Nynashamn near Stockholm. On November 8, 2010, a fire in the engine room on the Carnival Splendor while cruising in the Pacific off Mexico blacked out the ship and left her drifting without power for four days until she could be towed to San Diego.
Each of theses ships were relatively new and modern designs, powered by diesel electric propulsion systems, with two engine rooms which should have provided significant redundancy to prevent a single fire from backing out a ship. Nevertheless, the ships were left blacked out and drifting at sea. Only following a fire on the MV Azamara Quest was the crew able to restore electricity and propulsion to the ship following an engine room fire.
For a more complete list of cruise ship fires, see Ship Detective’s Passenger Ship Fires 1979 to Current.
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And the Penguins are thinking, “Oh, not again”!
Common thread in incident reports re ER fires is that redundancy is there in the strict sense of the word but ECRs tend to lead cabling to converge, end up concentrated and thus vulnerable to being toasted by even a relatively small blaze brought under control with reasonable alacrity. (and after, the ECR needs to be the nexus of a lot of information and control but layout can offset this negative side-effect)
It’s a shame these reports don’t seem to get the uptake they should, or at least not enough.
Indeed “Phil” one sympathizes with the penguins which happen to be one of my favourite marine life.
I was recently consulted for an article in a prominent American maritime magazine on ER fires. It does seem that ship operators wait until forced to make corrections by the IMO. No doubt this is the result of so numerous Regulations that one trips over one to correct another. Result nothing gets done.
Good Watch.
Appears to have been worse than first appeared?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/12005648/RAF-and-Royal-Navy-rescue-347-people-from-burning-cruise-ship-near-Falklands.html
Thanks, David. It does appear that the initial reports downplayed the seriousness of the problem. On the carnival Splendor fire, a few years ago, the ship’s primary firefighting system failed, a detail that only came out several months after the fact.
Doug, I think you hit on the largest part of the problem. What should be a highly redundant design appears to be extremely vulnerable to lack of proper cable shielding.
I also wonder whether the layout of the engine rooms and relative segregation of the engine control room contributes to not catching small problems that can get out of control. Minor leaks can cause fires that are not caught early enough due to smaller engine room manning and the relative comfort of the air conditioned ECR. Any thoughts Captain?
Rick:
Good points all in your summation. There is a commonality of Fincantieri built ships amongst those mentioned having ER fires. It may be that the faults start in the Yard and then the ER watch walk-throughs are not strict enough. Indeed with the air-conditioned ER control rooms, as on the Bridge, the Officers are not in good contact with their work space and operating equipment. Remember Rule 5 of the International Rules includes sight and hearing.
Good Watch – and I mean keeping a “good watch” not just being “on watch”. There is quite a difference !!
Peter, I agree that Fincantieri built ships have had more than their share of engine room fires, although the problem seems to be more general. The MSC Opera, which was blacked out by an engine room fire, was built by Chantiers de l’Atlantique, for example. This may be a case where the classification societies and other regulators have some catching up to do.
I am not necessarily recommending the removal of air-conditioned control rooms. Nevertheless, the old operating platform on steam ships, just forward of the boilers and overlooking the turbines, gave the engineering officer on watch a much more direct sense of what was going on with the plant. (That being said, it also didn’t prevent the El Faro from losing power directly in the path of a hurricane.)
I ain’t a captain by any stretch but I’ll note another common feature of incident reports: let alone the picture of staff slouching in comfy ECR spaces, many vessels routinely operate with no crew at all in the engineering spaces, including the ECR. It’s all part of the competitive market in flags of extreme convenience, a race to the bottom.
Combine unmanned engineering spaces with faulty alarm systems causing mindless resets by afflicted personnel and one has yet another common feature of incident reports. “Just keep pushing the button until visible flames emerge or the ship blacks out.”
Doug:
I would strongly disagree with your “flags of extreme convenience” comments. Having sailed in them for over 35 years they are amongst the best equipped and modern vessels all to international standards set by the IMO. As you have seen from the “El Faro” the U.S. vessels even with strong Unions are some of the worst vessels with propaganda from those Unions decrying so called “flags of convenience”.
All vessels of all Flags come under the control of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) which requires Officers to hold a Certificate of Competency/License from the Flag of Registry. As a result I held five Masters Unlimited one for each of the Flags flown by the cruise lines and others. In addition I have a Diploma in Maritime Law which I taught for two years after I retired from sea-going so know a little about that side of things.
However I would agree the response to an emergency is to “push the button” but remember that is the designed response when the vessel was designed and approved by IMO, and the Classification Society for service at sea. If you have not already done so organise a visit to a cruise ship’s Bridge, probably you will need to take a one week cruise !!
The “El Faro” was approved just this year (2015) by ABS and USCG for what that was worth, it appears rather meaningless. I can assure you it would not have been done for a non-U.S. Flag vessel having dealt with all the U.S. Authorities involving themselves with cruise ships of non-U.S. Registry.
Finally the U.S. does not have an Admiralty Court as maritime affairs are dealt with in Federal Courts. As a result the USCG becomes the licensing authority, judge and jury which does appear to violate the American concept of a fair, balanced and impartial judgement.
Good Watch.
I also take exception to comments about international crews. Having worked with both US and international crews, I have seen examples of good and bad in each. The main determinant of crew quality seems to be the ship owner or manager. Unfortunately, cruise lines, overall, have a better rep as hoteliers than ship operators.
I do agree that unmanned engine rooms are a problem that compounds the designs issues on these ships. Small leaks, leading to small fires can have big consequences.
Another related factor seems to me to be the shore-based scheduled maintenance done on many of these ships today. When the engine department crew size is cut, more maintenance is shifted to shore gangs who come aboard during port calls. This makes perfect sense to the accountants ashore and yet machinery does indeed fail while under way. Also, the lack of consistency in monitoring and maintenance doesn’t improve the chances of reliable operation.
A little late on return here, but let me make clear that I’m not criticizing crews of international composition, not at all. Human nature transcends borders– enough said on that.
It’s absolutely true as (actual) Captain Boucher remarks that modern vessels are technological marvels. Most of this technology is aimed at further reduction of crew sizes, with the assumption that (for instance) the statutory requirement for a ship to have sufficient crew to respond to emergencies is satisfied by an engineer having to dash in their skivvies from bunk to ECR in order to investigate an alarm. This may adhere to the letter of the law but in practice when fuel spews from a broken connection onto a hot surface and creates a raging fire, the 60 seconds or so required to wake and respond may make the difference between self-rescue of the ship versus more serious loss of various kinds
See the current front page of the MAIB site for yet another example of a ship meeting all IMO requirements becoming a total constructive loss due to impossibly scanty crewing. Yes, the CO was drunk and in an emotional state, but ultimately it was satisfied, box-ticked statutory and highly economical manning requirements leaving no check or balance in place to compensate for the CO’s incapacity. We also see in that incident the familiar gap between optimistic regulator and flag state views of navigation and what actually happens in the face of the various pressures confronting mariners.
There are other problems at work here; over and over again incident reports demonstrate how little understanding of the loads of shipborne technology crew have, operationally and technically. This is not a criticism of crew but again reflects the results of highly economical ship management. There are literally thousands of pages of technical documentation carried by modern vessels to accompany the complexity of systems designed to reduce manning requirements, but paradoxically there is thus no time left to become familiar with this information; there is no time during an emergency for a skeleton crew to learn their vessel’s systems. Again, this isn’t hypothesis but is borne out by incident reports. Fire management systems ignorance stands out.
Ignorance in this case is mostly innocent; looking at the schedule kept by mariners when they arrive on a fresh vessel with a fresh contract makes it plainly obvious that new crew must remain largely in the dark about the vessel they’re staffing.
Human nature dictates that the most possible money be extracted from the business of operating ships, that money then being unavailable for the purpose of safely arriving at the next port. The definition of “possible” seems highly elastic and appears to encompass the acceptance of a certain amount of mayhem and sadness. It’s a kind of fake austerity imposed on mariners.
I’ll just add that my only personal experience with this matter of choosing whether or not to operate vessels at the barebones level is to do with ownership of a very small vessel in commercial service. I’m not a “mariner” by any means; I can navigate, sort of, but I have an imagination. What I can imagine is how I would feel if I’d decided to take the last possible dollar out of my boat and thus caused irreparable harm to people and their families. Perhaps it’s an unavoidable fault of larger concerns that this level of direct culpability isn’t truly possible.
In the case of the El Faro, did anybody with an ownership stake in that vessel ever actually look at her lifeboats and try to imagine what would happen if they needed to be employed in any but the most favorable conditions? And that ship was slated for Alaskan waters in winter. It’s an astounding abdication of responsibility but all too easy in the world of financial abstractions.