Another Carnival Triumph

[The Dieselduck]

Another Carnival story, perhaps they should call their next ship Carnival Calamity. I still don't understand how this can occur in this day and age of cruise ship design - you should not lose power. We might be able to get some insight, if the proper accident reports were done and released on the Carnival Splendor. I wonder if they have an account code for keeping governments in line - if they do, must have a pretty high budget. Of course probably the biggest part of corporate response to this event will be the public whitewashing. You cant even access their press release section on their website. Sad, very sad.

Martin


Carnival Triumph Loses Propulsion After Engine Room Fire

By Theresa Norton Masek
February 10, 2013 4:05 PM

Carnival Cruise Lines’ Carnival Triumph lost propulsion and was operating on emergency generator power after an engine room fire the morning of Feb. 10. The ship’s automatic fire extinguishing systems put the fire out, keeping it contained to the aft engine room, Carnival said. No injuries were reported.

The 3,143 guests have been asked to stay in the ship’s public areas and open decks “for their comfort,” Carnival said. They are being given food and refreshments. All guests will receive a full refund, including gratuities and transportation expenses.

Guests booked on the next voyage, scheduled to depart Feb. 11, were contacted by Carnival and advised that the cruise will not depart as scheduled. Guests can cancel and receive a full refund or wait to see if a shortened voyage will operate.

The fire broke out while the ship was sailing about 150 miles off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. Carnival Triumph is currently on a four-day cruise that departed Galveston on Feb. 7. The ship’s technical crew is assessing damage and trying to restore power. In the meantime, a tugboat is being dispatched in case it is needed. All appropriate authorities, including the U.S. Coast Guard, have been notified.

The incident calls to mind the Nov. 8, 2010, fire on the Carnival Splendor. In that case, the Splendor floated for several days without power after a fire in the aft engine room and drew widespread media attention when non-perishable food was airlifted to the ship by the U.S. Navy. The ship was towed to San Diego by six tug boats and did not return to service until Feb. 20.

Carnival said it spent about $65 million to repair the ship and compensate affected passengers, which included refunds and a free future cruise, among other things. The amount also takes into account lost revenue from the cancelled cruises. In all, about 47,000 guests were affected. At the time, Carnival said it had formed a Fire Safety Task Force consisting of shore-side and onboard employees, who are charged with detecting and preventing any future incidents fleetwide.

[Big Pete]

Yes Martin, it does appear to be very strange that Diesel Electric ship, with two seperate, Engine Rooms can have a total power failure. Design fault or operator error, it would be very interesting to hear, but I don't suppose there will be any whistleblowers.
BP

[al2207]

if there are 2 separate compartment it is not possible to have both fails at same time . How many Switchboard ?? , was there a electrical eng. ? too many engine room fire without any investigation ?

[JK]

Raw sewage and fighting over food. A true dream cruise!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2277323/Carnival-Triumph-Disabled-vessel-wont-reach-land-Thursday.html#axzz2KhLYfRH4

[jimmys]

The latest is that the vessel is developing a list. Passengers have to walk sideways to cross the deck. I wonder if they can pump the bilges. Very worrying for passengers and relatives.

[JK]

I found on the Cruisejunkie.com site that on January 27,2013 Carnival Triumph experienced a technical problem with the ship's propulsion system. The ship seems to be well run with no other reports on the site from 2012- to the fire.

[JK]

A funny from George Takei:

[Wyatt]

Fuel supply line??? Smells fishy to me. http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nati ... 5819.story

[Big Pete]

With the modern Diesel Electric systems the engine and alternator are usually both mounted on a flexible raft to minimise noise vibration being transmitted to the hull. This means that all the Fuel, L.O., Cooling Water pipes, exhaust pipes and crankcase breathers have to be highly flexible.
I have experienced cooling water flexible pipe blow out, one time the Second and myself did a round of the Engine Room before going UMS and looked at these flexible connections, while we were in the control room changing over the alarms to UMS n the header tank low level alarm went off, the 2E ran up to check it (it was a supply boat and the header tanks were in a deck house) we thought it was a false alarm, but he found the tank really was empty so we had to shut down the engine and change the coupling before going for our evening meal. Absolutely no warning at all. The inside of the rubber had rotted out but the outside looked fine.
I would recommend internal inspection of these pipes every drydock or replacement every 5 years.

BP

[The Dieselduck]

Yeah, that LA Times article certainly leaves much to be desired for information. But, it's quite probable that happened. Unfortunately I don't see how that can get so out of control as to cause a debilitating fire as it did, disabling the entire ship's power system.

The low fuel pressure alarm would have gone off in the ECR for that (those) engine(s), probably a stand by start alarm, on the booster or feed pump, the EOOW should have picked it up right away. On the Wartsila, these flex couplings are usually on the lower part of the engine, forward or aft, not typically near a hot surface - which any should be insulated anyways, on a properly maintained engine. With Royal Caribbean, these bellows were identified as problematic, if I remember correctly, its a diesel engine - it vibrate lots, and they were replaced routinely under PM.

The fuel shut down valve(s) - in case of emergency, was also a high priority maintenance target, tested weekly; they were located before the flex coupling if I remember correctly. The idea is that any fuel related mishaps, which was not uncommon with Wartsilas, you could quickly bring it under control by shutting down the engine, via governor, and, more importantly, fuel supply piping.

The series of event - in my opinion, from past experience - should be a low fuel alarm, a cursory evaluation of the running parameters while dispatching the motor man to the scene. It would have been pretty obvious that you have a fuel related problem. Which I would have pressed the emergency stop of the engine, tripping the breaker, shutting down the engine, shutting down fuel supply and return.

If you had properly functioning CCTV, you would have seen whats going on in that engine room, perhaps with even enough details on cctv to tell whats going on with the particular engine itself. Any sign of smoke or fire, I would have manually activated the HiFog system without hesitation, and alerted the bridge OOW for muster alarm, then alerted ER senior staff via pager system of status.

With RCCL I did these things above, in some form or another over my time there, and we were encourage to take these initiative to prevent an escalating catastrophe. A bonus is that I had great confidence in the machinery because I knew the maintenance was being done by competent peers. The systems were easy to operate, with predictable results. I knew that tripping an engine right away would not impact the safety of the vessel, and the system was robust and responsive enough to handle it.

Of course this a Monday morning quarterback scenario, but this is twice that its happened on an Italian design / built passenger vessel where this stuff is not suppose to cause a total blackout, but there is no accident report to go on. So we must play detective ourselves so as to concentrate on these failure points, and hopefully not have the same occur on our ship.

[al2207]

Unlike the carnival Splendor they were not able to re-start the system for toilet : the engine room was entirely destroy or the electrical chef was not able to figure out something .
On the Splendor the solution may had been to use the normal feeder cable to the emergency switchboard disconnected at both end and re-connected to the sanitary pump system via an existing emergency breaker .
What do you think ??

[JK]

Not being knowledgeable about the ships's plant, I find it rather amazing that they couldn't split the bus somehow to give limited power to essentials. I understand about the AC, that is fed off of the main bus, but for water and sewage for 4000 people, you'd think there would be a fall back. But that costs an extra few bucks.

[al2207]

they should be able to have split bus but it is only required by LLyods but if i remember some front view you have the 10 KV in line with the 440V via transformer . the best layout should be to have 2 separate compartment completely isolated with tie breaker ; there is only a small problem to redesing completely the engine room

[JK]

I agree with the tie breaker between the engineroom

[The Dieselduck]

On the Fincantieri built ships I worked on, which I don't believe there is anything different or unusual about them from Carnival's, except maybe a little bit of the layout, the power system / propulsion system consisted of 5 Zulzer medium speed engines (12.6 MW each) as generators sets, producing 6600 vac. The engine and alternator were in the same compartment, located in two separate engine rooms (2 in aft er, 3 in fwd).

Power develop from one engine room went into one switchboard room (two main switchboards in two separate rooms). Each switchboard fed, primarily, the propulsion motors and hotel load, the propulsion motors were in another separate compartment. Each propulsion motor (~20MW) has two sets of windings; if you were to lose a component, you could still get half motor power. Plus each winding was driven by a separate switchboard - winding one of each propulsion motor - fwd switchboard, winding two - aft switchboard. Being a variable speed propulsion motors, each winding was driven by its own SCR driver (frequency drive) and its own propulsion transformer.

Like all propulsion systems, the controls would be from various WH locations, ECR, or in the ER (local). This is not an abnormal system from what I have seen and heard, it is a very common design with lots of redundancy built in. I found the system properly illustrated on SAM electronics website, attached below. To have a view of the engine room I describe above, head over to the video page, where you find two tours, one for Disney ship built in Italy, and one for the Royal Caribbean ship, built in France. The french built ones, had even more separation of compartment, but the power plant was nearly identical in scope and operation.

SAM Electronics has some good information on these systems. http://www.sam-electronics.de/dateien/pad/prop.html
The Disney ER Tour is here - http://www.dieselduck.ca/videos/01%20dd ... 20tour.wmv
The Royal Caribbean tour is here - http://www.dieselduck.ca/videos/01%20dd ... s%20er.wmv
More videos - http://www.dieselduck.ca/videos/index.html

To have two accident occur in short time frame, that disabled two passenger ships of this age and size is quite worrisome, due to the fact that passenger vessels now, are mostly identical in power plant package. To not issue proper accident report is extremely worrisome, as we may have major design issues, or operational vulnerabilities underlying both casualties (that we know of) that are not being addressed.