Coast Guard: Fuel leak caused cruise ship fire
ATLANTA (AP) - A leak in a fuel oil return line caused the engine-room fire that disabled a Carnival cruise ship at sea, leaving 4,200 people without power or working toilets for five days, a Coast Guard official said Monday.
Cmdr. Teresa Hatfield addressed the finding in a conference call with reporters and estimated that the investigation of the disabled ship, the Carnival Triumph, would take six months.
Hatfield said the Bahamas -where the ship is registered, or flagged - is leading the investigation, with the Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board representing U.S. interests in the probe. The vessel was in international waters at the time of the incident.
She said investigators have been with the ship since it arrived Thursday in Mobile. Since then, she said, interviews have been conducted with passengers and crew and forensic analysis has been performed on the ship.
She said the crew responded appropriately to the fire. "They did a very good job," she said.
In an email after Monday's conference call, Coast Guard spokesman Carlos Diaz described the oil return line that leaked as stretching from the ship's No. 6 engine to the fuel tank.
A Carnival Cruise Lines spokesman said in an email Monday that the company agrees with the Coast Guard's findings about the fire source.
Andrew Coggins, a former Navy commander who was a chief engineer and is now a professor at Pace University in New York and an expert on the cruise industry, said the fire could potentially have been serious.
"The problem is the oil's under pressure," he said. "What happens in the case of a fuel oil leak where you have a fire like that is it leaks in such a way that it sprays out in a mist. In the engine room you have many hot surfaces, so once the mist hits a hot surface it will flash into flame."
If the crew hadn't reacted quickly and the fire suppression system hadn't worked properly, he said, "the fire from the engine room would have eventually burned through to other parts of the ship." Engine room fires that can't be suppressed generally result in the loss of the entire ship, he said.
The Triumph left Galveston, Texas, on Feb. 7 for a four-day trip to Mexico. The fire paralyzed the ship early Feb. 10, leaving it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico until tugboats towed it to Mobile. Passengers described harsh conditions on board: overflowing toilets, long lines for food, foul odors and tent cities for sleeping on deck.
Hatfield said investigators from the Coast Guard and NTSB would stay with the ship until about the end of the week, then continue work at their respective offices. She said the investigation will look further at the cause of the fire and the crew's response, as well as why the ship was disabled for so long.
Last week, a team of six NTSB investigators were in Mobile trying to determine the cause of the fire. An NTSB spokesman said then that the agency could take information developed from the probe and use it to make recommendations for improving cruise ship safety.
Passengers interviewed after the cruise complained about confusion in the immediate aftermath of the fire about whether to evacuate their rooms as well as poor communication about what was happening.
Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill apologized to passengers late last week.
Cmdr. Teresa Hatfield addressed the finding in a conference call with reporters and estimated that the investigation of the disabled ship, the Carnival Triumph, would take six months.
Hatfield said the Bahamas -where the ship is registered, or flagged - is leading the investigation, with the Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board representing U.S. interests in the probe. The vessel was in international waters at the time of the incident.
She said investigators have been with the ship since it arrived Thursday in Mobile. Since then, she said, interviews have been conducted with passengers and crew and forensic analysis has been performed on the ship.
She said the crew responded appropriately to the fire. "They did a very good job," she said.
In an email after Monday's conference call, Coast Guard spokesman Carlos Diaz described the oil return line that leaked as stretching from the ship's No. 6 engine to the fuel tank.
A Carnival Cruise Lines spokesman said in an email Monday that the company agrees with the Coast Guard's findings about the fire source.
Andrew Coggins, a former Navy commander who was a chief engineer and is now a professor at Pace University in New York and an expert on the cruise industry, said the fire could potentially have been serious.
"The problem is the oil's under pressure," he said. "What happens in the case of a fuel oil leak where you have a fire like that is it leaks in such a way that it sprays out in a mist. In the engine room you have many hot surfaces, so once the mist hits a hot surface it will flash into flame."
If the crew hadn't reacted quickly and the fire suppression system hadn't worked properly, he said, "the fire from the engine room would have eventually burned through to other parts of the ship." Engine room fires that can't be suppressed generally result in the loss of the entire ship, he said.
The Triumph left Galveston, Texas, on Feb. 7 for a four-day trip to Mexico. The fire paralyzed the ship early Feb. 10, leaving it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico until tugboats towed it to Mobile. Passengers described harsh conditions on board: overflowing toilets, long lines for food, foul odors and tent cities for sleeping on deck.
Hatfield said investigators from the Coast Guard and NTSB would stay with the ship until about the end of the week, then continue work at their respective offices. She said the investigation will look further at the cause of the fire and the crew's response, as well as why the ship was disabled for so long.
Last week, a team of six NTSB investigators were in Mobile trying to determine the cause of the fire. An NTSB spokesman said then that the agency could take information developed from the probe and use it to make recommendations for improving cruise ship safety.
Passengers interviewed after the cruise complained about confusion in the immediate aftermath of the fire about whether to evacuate their rooms as well as poor communication about what was happening.
Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill apologized to passengers late last week.
Oh good grief. We need the Coast Guard AND the NTSB to both investigate? Is that really necessary? Seems to me the Coast Guard investigation should be more than sufficient.
@jimbob I think it is appropriate, actually. Wouldn't you want a thorough investigation if you had been aboard?
Seems to me the cruise ship industry needs to develop back up electrical power generation with enough power to run the water and sewer systems on board. The risk for disease from sewage is way to high to not have that. The only cruise I've been on was on a 60' vessel on the inland passage in Alaska and it was great. None of these 3,000 passenger floating cities for me.
@jcman I agree. It seems foolish to tie the entire health of the vessel into one engine compartment. Separate fuel systems and propulsion systems would make good sense. It seems that whenever any of these ships have an engine issue the whole thing falls apart.
Fire at sea. Scary. Kind of like Fire in the sky? Maybe Cruise ships should be grounded (so-to-speak) like the 787? A lot of questions remained unanswered. I don't recall hearing them addressed? Maybe someone could fill in the blanks? Where did the tug boats come from? How long did it take them to reach the disabled ship? Why wasn't another cruise ship sent to offload the passengers and bring them home while the disabled ship limped to port? Where was the Navy and Coast Guard...no help there either? Does a ship have to actually be sinking before it's abandoned?
@Joy JohnsonÂ
... Does a ship have to actually be sinking before it's abandoned?...
Basically, yes. Manning the lifeboats is dangerous - and they lifeboats themselves are not ideal in open ocean waters compared to a large ship, even a disabled large ship. Ship to ship transfers are dangerous for the trained, let alone up to 3,500 or 3,750 people when you consider passengers and non-essential crew. Infants, elderly, the disabled will not be transferable by standard means.
You're better off staying put until as you asked, you KNOW the ship is going to sink. Once you know the ship is lost or say in the event of a fire that the ship will almost be assuredly lost, then you abandon ship.
@Joy Johnson the tugs came from either mobile or Florida. And doing a passenger transfer at sea is dangerous even in relative calm waters. The coast guard was there they was monitoring them. and ship does have a ground system but it a lot different then the way you would a house. and a fire at sea is diffidently scary because you only have so far to run if things get out of hand.
@beetle73 @Joy Johnson Well, I guess it's a lucky thing this didn't turn out to be a modern day Titanic story. With the diseases associated with raw sewage, it will be a wonder if some of these folks, and I worry most about the children, don't come down with e. coli, typhoid fever or some other serious illness. Danger at sea or not, I think the prudent thing to do, when it was realized the ship was going be towed, at a snail's pace, to any port, that they filled up the lifeboats and transferred those people to other boats. I would have rather ridden on the tug boat than suffer what those passengers did on that cruise ship. So lesson learned I guess? If your ship is sinking, you can hope for rescue, if your ship is disabled, tough it out.
Passengers interviewed after the cruise complained about confusion in the immediate aftermath of the fire about whether to evacuate their rooms as well as poor communication about what was happening.
Thats because most of the People working on these Cruise Ships are from all over the world and most of them speak very limited  English. I went on a cruise to the Bahamas in 2007 and this was the case. The people doing the safety meetings spoke broken English also so I can understand the complaints about poor communication.Â