The Dali container ship experienced a near-perfect storm of calamities before it struck Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge in March, killing six people.
The Dali container ship experienced a near-perfect storm of calamities before it struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in March, killing six people. But Tuesday’s preliminary report by federal safety investigators leaves many questions unanswered.
The first came after a crew member mistakenly closed an exhaust damper during maintenance, causing one of the ship’s diesel engines to stall, according to the safety report. A backup generator came on, but insufficient fuel pressure soon caused that generator to kick off, resulting in a second blackout. It’s unclear why the fuel pressure dropped.
The pilot’s dispatcher called police and notified the Coast Guard of the power loss. Crew members momentarily restored electricity by manually closing the breakers. Then more breakers tripped, causing another outage as the ship approached the bridge. The crew restored power, but it was too late. She said switching out the breakers following the first two outages “may have affected operations the very next day on the accident voyage.”
But changing up a ship’s power configuration is fairly routine, even if it’s been several months, said Neil J. Gallagher, a professor at the Webb Institute, a school that teaches naval architecture and marine engineering. Bradley Martin, a former U.S. Navy captain and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, said the limited space in many ports increases the risks of these type of disasters.
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