Emma's engine under water

[JollyJack]

I have talked the Engineers on my ship and we can not understand this, they must have had a series of Alarms, first for thruster failure, then all the tunnel well bilges would have filled and gone into alarm sequentially, then the ER bilges would have filled and alarmed sequentially and the Machinery spaces filled to a depth of 18 metres and nobody, either on the Bridge or MCR closed the WT door either remotely or locally. It is a basic requirement of SOLAS that a watertight door can be remotely operated from a safe position above any potential flooding and that the door will close against a flood of water coming through it. However large the hole in the thruster tunnel, the flooding rate would have been restricted by the water tight door opening, which is small in comparison to the size of the Engine Room which is literally Cathedral size on that sort of ship.
Maybe the Engineers were just overwhelmed by the number of alarms and assumed the Alarm system had failed?

BP

Or maybe they didn't have a clue what was happening? Leaving watertight doors open at sea displays a distinct lack of understanding that the Dragon can bite your arse hard whenever he wants to.

[Madzng]

I've watched this discussion and have not been able to say much about the incident. The immediate actions of the crew I don't know, but I will say that the water tight door was shut.

Sorry, cant/wont say any more.

[JK]

Madzng you must feel like that water is around your neck level. I am glad not to be having to figure out the myriad of details that have to dealt with in a pretty short time frame.

[Big Pete]

Very Interesting that Madzng says that the water tight door was shut. That raises a whole new question of how the water got into the Engine Room?
We can only assume that the aft ER Bulkhead was not watertight: - Design Fault?
Construction Fault?
Modifications in progress that breached the integrity of the Bulkhead?
(possibly installation of ballast Water Treatment system??)

The accident Investigation report will be very interesting.
The Super (Madzng?) certainly has his work cut out, if he can turn the ship round in a month as suggested in some of the earlier reports, he deserves a medal and will need a month's Holiday afterwards!

Good Luck to all involved.

BP

[offshoresnipe]

Could not down load, but just read from Maritime Denmark (21/03) that a installation error caused the flooding.

"Water went to the engine via holes around the massive wiring in the tunnel".

[JK]

http://www.maritimedenmark.dk/?Id=16746

It seems to be an installation error, made in connection with the construction of Emma Maersk, that 01 February was the cause of large quantities of water entering the ship's engine room, where it caused damage for up to a quarter of a billion kroner.

This has been assessed by Maersk Line Technical Vessel Operation.

"Although the watertight bulkheads in the propshaft tunnel acted as they should, the water went to the engine via holes around the massive wiring in the tunnel", says Fleet Group Manager Francis Sommer Reuss to maritimedanmark.dk.

Maersk Line thinks, according to Francis Reuss, that an installation error has been made compared to the original drawings for the ship.

The Company is in the process of reviewing all the ships in the series and have now rediscovered the same installation errors in other ships of the type. The errors are being immediately corrected.

Frants Reuss says to maritimdanmark.dk that they on Thursday were successful in removing the thruster which is believed to have forced water into the ship. The thruster will now be sent for examination by Rolls Royce who is the producer of the thruster.

A preliminary assessment says that it will cost up to a quarter of a billion kroner to replace and repair the equipment in the engine room.

Source: maritimedenmark.dk

[offshoresnipe]

Thanks JK for downloading it for me.

[JK]

It is very interesting, you could maybe see one ship having this problem, but several??

Built by a reputable company under Class rules. It really makes you wonder what the rest of the story is.

[Madzng]

Taken from Lloyds List 25th March 2013

The world’s largest boxship’s engineroom is stripped, dried and cleaned in Sicily

THE dramatic flooding of the world’s biggest boxship Emma Maersk is being blamed on badly installed cable penetrations between the engineroom and shaft tunnel, inspections have revealed.

Staff have confirmed that repair costs to the Maersk Line flagship vessel will likely be in the “two-digit million dollar figure”.

The 15,500 teu boxship is in Palermo for repairs after an incident with one of the vessel’s stern thrusters led to flooding of the vessel’s long shaft tunnel and then the engineroom.

The incident happened as the vessel was preparing to enter the Suez Canal. It was quickly taken to Suez Canal Container Terminal and the decision made to keep the engineroom flooded to prevent any corrosive damage to sensitive equipment.

Repair teams have now pumped 12,000 cu m of water out of the engineroom and the engine components have been stripped down. Inspection teams from Maersk, the underwriters and the vessel’s classification society, ABS, have had a chance to survey the damage.

Although the cause of the incident, the damaged stern thruster, remains unknown, Maersk Line now knows the flooding between the shaft tunnel and the engineroom occurred where cables pass through the engineroom space into the shaft tunnel.

Water-tight doors separate Emma Maersk’s engineroom and the shaft tunnel.

Maersk Line’s head of technical operations Ole Graa Jakobsen told Lloyd’s List the doors remained closed, indicating the crew did everything they should have done and were not at fault.

Mr Jakobsen confirmed that cables penetrate into the shaft tunnel in several places. In some cases they were wrongly constructed or were the wrong type, made of a type of plastic rather than steel, and therefore capable of withstanding only one bar of water pressure.

Riding crews have now been dispatched on board Maersk’s other E-class vessels to remedy any such faults and ABS has been verifying that the new penetration blocks are up to standard.

The construction fault could embarrass Maersk as Emma Maersk and the other vessels in the class were built at Odense shipyard in Denmark, owned by parent company AP Moller-Maersk.

The shipyard has now ceased building ships, converted into an industrial area and shiprepair facility.

A team of more than 100 engineers from various equipment makers and yard staff have been swarming over Emma Maersk’s engineroom, stripping down components and, in some cases, taking them out through a hole cut through the engineroom deckhead for that purpose.

Mr Jakobsen said the four 2.5-tonne ABB TPL-85 turbochargers on Emma Maersk have been removed and sent for inspection and repair.

The huge 2,300-tonne Wärtsilä RTA96-C engine is being stripped down, with the 14 pistons, cylinder liners and crossheads sent ashore to be cleaned, and checked, before being returned and reassembled. The steam turbine is being removed and repaired and all the vessel’s generators have been opened.

The decision has also been made to replace all affected electrical cabling and electronics in the engineroom.

One of the limiting factors in getting all this done is scheduling the work, given there is limited access in the engineroom for a small army of engineers.

Maersk Line hopes the vessel will return to service within three to four months.

The damaged Rolls-Royce stern thruster that caused the problems is to be removed and will be sent to Force Technology in Denmark for inspection to investigate the cause of the accident.

Mr Jakobsen said it is far too early to say what happened to cause the damage to the thruster that led to the flooding, but indicated the damage had nothing to do with the vessel’s construction.

All the other vessels in the Emma Maersk class have been told not to use their stern thrusters until further notice.

[JK]

interesting that the yard is brought up, but none of the surveyors and inspectors in attendance are mentioned.

[The Dieselduck]

With these persistent issues at Carnival, and these issues at Odense; perhaps we are finding out that too much faith is being placed on the designers, builders, and those related and overseeing, and blaming accidents on operational issues prematurely.

[Brad]

That report sure makes my day...not.

I'm currently in China building ships, and the amount of times I've thought to myself "I'm signing this acceptance report?" worries me to no end. We are using DNV which are on site and short handed with one maybe two at times, inspectors for three ships. My go to question to the inspector is "Are you happy with that?" which always gets him to look a bit closer. For the most part the relationship with class is good, as we're both fighting the common enemy. The Yard.
The difficulty is supervision of the yards work and having enough experience to know what to look for during inspections. Instead of them showing you shiny new gauges, one needs to actually see that you can't remove two of the four bolts in a flange because it is in conflict with another pipe, or, that while they may have gotten the required pressure on that shiny new gauge the insert plate they snuck in to do so has reduced the required flow rate for designed cooling effect. Yesterdays rant over.

It has made me even more vigilant in inspections, and I've shared this thread with all those on site.

Thanks again Martin and everybody for the great contributions.

Off to work I go! Hi Ho Hi Ho.

[Big Pete]

Just read Madzng's post again. I was thinking 12,000 cubic metres of oily Bilges pumped ashore, that must be some sort of Record! If I was on board I think I would have had a copy of the oil record book entry framed for the Bar. I wonder if it was entered under " I " for special operations. I dread to think how much it cost for environmentally friendly disposal. I suppose everything on such a huge job will be expensive.
They are doing great work in that shipyard to get so far so quickly, recommissioning everything is going to be very interesting.

Brad's comments are also very interesting, I was on one ship where the cable penetrations were just loosely packed with strips of sponge, I was assured that they were intumescent and would swell and and make a complete seal if exposed to heat or water. If something like the flood in the Emma M happened I imagine they would have been blown out of place by the air pressure before they got wet, and they wouldn't have stopped the spread of smoke in a fire, but they were accepted by Class and the Super.

BP

[jimmys]

My experience is it depends on the degree of protection IP. For a number of these ships there has been an improvement and above the norm IP44 is in place. If it is IP57 then we would expect the enclosure to resist water under defined conditions of pressure and time. There will be no great pressure and the time will be reasonably short. They know something we don't. Not enough water inside the breaker carcase for permanent damage maybe.
The insulation will probably be Class F for higher temperatures on world wide trader. If it is bonded or impregnated and coated, I would expect it to clean well.
I think Pete is maybe correct a lot salvageable if carefully managed.

regards

[JK]

I just checked the cost for environmentally friendly disposal in our office. At $0.08/ liter... 12,000m3 would be a shade under a $ 1million, if I got my zeros correct and that is on the East coast of Canada. That doesn't include the cost of the tanker they took out of service to pump off the water.