Posted by DamnInteresting 11/19/2025
Instant classic destined for the engineering-disasters-drilled-into-1st-year-engineers canon (or are the other swiss cheese holes too confounding)
Where do you think it would fit on the list?
Fucking hell.
That's everybody - captain, bridge crew, deck crew, cook, etc.
So - how many of those 22 will be your engineering crew? How many of those engineers would be on duty, when this incident happened? And once things start going wrong, and you're sending engineers off to "check why Pump #83, down on Deck H, shows as off-line" or whatever - how many people do you have left in the big, complex engineering control room - trying to figure out what's wrong and fix it, as multiple systems fail, in the maybe 3 1/2 minutes between the first failure and when collision becomes inevitable?
Insurance providers insuring ships in US waters should also be required to permanently deny insurance coverage to vessels found to be out of compliance, though I doubt the insurance companies would want to play ball.
[1] As it happens I open with an anecdote about steering redundancy on ships in this post: https://www.gkogan.co/simple-systems/
Seems to me the only effective and enforceable redundancy that can be easily be imposed by regulation would be mandatory tug boats.
Which there are in some places. Where I grew up I'd watch the ships sail into and out of the oil and gas terminals, always accompanied by tugs. More than one in case there's a tug failure.
Way it worked in Sydney harbour 20+ years ago when I briefly worked on the wharves/tugs, was that the big ships had to have both local tugs, and a local pilot who would come aboard and run the ship. Which seemed to me to be quite an expensive operation but I honestly cant recall any big nautical disasters in the habour so I guess it works.
From the report:
> The low-voltage bus powered the low-voltage switchboard, which supplied power to vessel lighting and other equipment, including steering gear pumps, the fuel oil flushing pump and the main engine cooling water pumps. We found that the loss of power to the low-voltage bus led to a loss of lighting and machinery (the initial underway blackout), including the main engine cooling water pump and the steering gear pumps, resulting in a loss of propulsion and steering.
...
> The second safety concern was the operation of the flushing pump as a service pump for supplying fuel to online diesel generators. The online diesel generators running before the initial underway blackout (diesel generators 3 and 4) depended on the vessel’s flushing pump for pressurized fuel to keep running. The flushing pump, which relied on the low-voltage switchboard for power, was a pump designed for flushing fuel out of fuel piping for maintenance purposes; however, the pump was being utilized as the pump to supply pressurized fuel to diesel generators 3 and 4\. Unlike the supply and booster pumps, which were designed for the purpose of supplying fuel to diesel generators, the flushing pump lacked redundancy. Essentially, there was no secondary pump to take over if the flushing pump turned off or failed. Furthermore, unlike the supply and booster pumps, the flushing pump was not designed to restart automatically after a loss of power. As a result, the flushing pump did not restart after the initial underway blackout and stopped supplying pressurized fuel to the diesel generators 3 and 4, thus causing the second underway blackout (lowvoltage and high-voltage).
If you read the report they were misusing this pump to do fuel supply when it wasn't for that. And it was non redundant when fuel supply pumps are.
Its like someone repurposing a husky air compressor to power a pneumatic fire suppression system and then saying the issue is someone tripping over the cord and knocking it out.