Cruise Ship Passengers Return To San Diego Harbor

cbs ^ | November 11, 2010 10:55 AM

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

1,000-foot Carnival Splendor

Well, there's a ship that will be reflagged, rechristened, and embarking for its new home port in the Far East.

[ThirdMate]

Also the CO2 is discharged., smothering the fire, and leaving the ER inacessibile. I can’t claim as much sea time as you, but know that even a small ER fire is crippling.

Frgds,
3/M

[Oil_Mist_Expert]

Hi EngineDad,

The Carnival Splendor is diesel-electric powered using six Wartsila 12V46C diesel engines which are protected by Schaller Visatron oil mist detectors.

BR

Oil_Mist_Expert

[EngineDad]

Oil Mist Expert

Thanks for the info. Visatron makes decent units. I currently have them installed on my CAT generators on my ship now. As long as they are kept clean and calibrated they do OK. The CATS are 3608’s.

Unfortunately, the equipment is only as good as the maintenance and repair of it gets. I know a lot of guys that think Oil Nist Detectors are just a pain in the neck.

Wartsillas are decnt engines too. Sailed with them on a ship when I was a Second Assistant Engineer. They had a small vibration issue, but overall were decent engines.

[Oil_Mist_Expert]

Wartsila engines are very reliable and crankcase splits are fortunately very rare. But it can happen, and for this reason the engine is protected by an oil mist detector.

I don’t know why the oil mist detector has given no alarm. I can’t imagine that on a cruise liner with nearly 4 500 passengers and crew the maintenance is poor. An investigation will clarify this.

There are a lot of guys who think pipeless and suction free oil mist detectors with single compartment localization are better than the Schaller Visatron.

But you are right, e.g. Schaller Visatron oil mist detectors make no problems. It seems that the suction points are not well choosen or the Schaller Visatron is simply to slow to detect an extremely fast occurring oil mist.

[EngineDad]

As you said - the suction points are not always the the best I have found that on my CATS, we have to clean the units often. However, that is the price you pay for the protection.

In this case, one possibility is that the detector was in an alarm state, but the alarm was either ignored or disabled.

On a slow speed engine, I demand that the detectors are operational. It took us a while to determine how to care for the ones on the CATs. Alot of us had not seen oil mist detectors on a medium speed engine before and thought it was odd. After messing with them, learning how to clean them and calibrate them, they are not bad units. I just changed two crankshafts - bad bearings installed at ovehaul and the oil mist detectors worked. One engine had 4 hours on it. CAT paid thruogh the nose on those overhauls since it was their new hardened bearings that caused the failures.

But, as you previously said, only the investigation will tell what really happened. I don’t want to judge the engineers on there without the facts. It is not fair or professional. Most Marine Engineers are pretty good and thing do happen. Not everything can be prevented. I’m just happy no one got hurt.