Thursday, April 9, 2020

A big ship's throttle gets stuck wide open?

(Update: looks like the lawyers purged all of the videos of the allision. Now I wish I had taken a snapshot of at least the huge propwash when it got stuck against another ship. And a couple of snapshots of the container crane going down would have been interesting.)

<update> Per Crazy Ivan's comment below:
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Screenshot
</update>

If you look at the size of the prop wash, it appears the throttle is stuck open. One reason it is throwing water so high, especially after it got stuck behind another ship, is that it was empty and riding high. But even if you are running light, you don't normally through that big of a propwash when docking. Don't ships have a clutch? How do they start the engines if they can't disengage them from the propshaft? Couldn't they manually shut off the fuel to the engine to stop it before they approached the dock? The 13,860 TEU ship was built in 2018, so it is scary to think the controls could fail so seriously on a rather new ship.

Clarance Cunningham shared
Kye Allain The crane operator rode it down fine but then broke his ankle when he jumped from 15ft to get down after the collapse.

The ship it ran into was not significantly harmed. It was able to continue with its trip.
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In this view I noticed it started emitting a lot of black smoke just before it allided with the crane. Did it have a turbocharger failure? But that would not explain why it was running so fast on the way to the dock.
(new window)   A comment notes that it had no cargo so that means she was there for loading after some repairs. So are they still debugging the control software for this newer ship?


1 comment:

  1. https://youtu.be/Uh-TVULTWus

    I believe this is the video of the impact you are speaking of

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