chengkp75

What do you mean by accountable? Will the shipowner and operator be on the hook for the lion's share of the cost? Sure. Just look at the Concordia, where the costs far exceeded both the hull insurance as well as the P&I insurance, and the company had to make up the difference. Is someone "to blame" for this? Likely not. As I've said in many posts here about cruise ship incidents, the maritime industry has pretty much gotten out of the "blame culture", at least as far as individuals are concerned, and even corporate is not "to blame", but the SMS system the company has is not adequate. The corporate entity will be held fiscally responsible, but unless you want to change every one of the 110,000 merchant ships currently operating, there isn't going to be anything that can prevent this from happening again, just making it less likely. How many levels of redundancy are you going to require? From my perspective, the fact that this bridge was not outfitted with adequate dolphins or fendering after Tampa's Sunshine Skyway bridge collapse is one of the glaring deficiencies.

And, again, I will state that the PVSA goes far beyond just cruise ships. It covers any vessel that carries more than 12 passengers. So, this would allow ferries, water taxis, commuter boats, dinner cruises, sightseeing boats, whale watching boats, casino boats, and large charter fishing boats to all hire foreign crew, and not pay any US taxes.

Though it is not technically the Jones Act, though they are in adjoining sections of the USC.

And that is fine in the US. Contractually, the crew know when they sign up to work on the ship that the vast majority of their compensation (about 90%) is made up of the DSC pool. Whether or not it is mandatory, the DSC is just that a "daily service charge", and not a gratuity. It is marketed this way simply for the cruise line's ability to post a lower fare.

There are also phrases in the NTSB report that really shouldn't be there, if they knew anything about maritime engineering, and had, at the very least USCG investigators on the board. NTSB is "investigating the ship's electrical configuration". The "configuration" of the electrical system is in accordance with SOLAS, and class rules for shipbuilding, as shown by the fact that the ship was approved by flag and class at the planning stage and during building and testing, and during subsequent annual surveys by class and by port state control in various nations. "The emergency generator was not configured to power the ship". No emergency generator, on any ship, is configured to power the ship. The systems that an emergency generator must power are specified in SOLAS, and are basically enough to allow an evacuation of the ship, nothing more, and in fact an emergency generator is limited from powering much more than what is mandated, simply to prevent overloading of the generator. The USCG and NTSB are looking into whether the crew reported the in port blackouts. From my experience, and reading the CFR's, there is some gray area as to whether a blackout, while the ship is at the dock, and which did not happen as a result of a failure of any equipment (except the human equipment), is a reportable marine incident or not. These kinds of statements, given out to a lay public, without supporting facts or context to maritime regulations, leads to a lot of things like people calling the ship unseaworthy. Could the ship have been considered unseaworthy? Perhaps, if there are other facts and conditions not mentioned. But given the statements in the NTSB report, no, but they don't say so.

But, there was no failure of any equipment, other than a possible failure of the transformer, and there is no requirement for periodic testing of the off line transformer, or for switching between on line and standby equipment. Many systems that have say two cooling water pumps, some engineers will run one pump until it either fails, or reaches its overhaul period, and then switch to the other pump and run it until it reaches overhaul. Other engineers will switch between pumps on a regular (like monthly) basis. Both practices have good and bad points, but there is no requirement to do it either way. Nothing from why the in port blackouts happened, nor what happened, would cause either a port state inspector (USCG) nor the class society to declare the ship "unseaworthy". And, had there not been any in port blackouts, but the Chief Engineer decided it was time to change over transformers, the underway blackouts could still have happened, with no warning. The public officials who have claimed the ship was unseaworthy, have no conception of what seaworthiness is.

Very, very often cruise line customer service agents will tell you either that your b2b is legal when it's not, or not legal when it is, without knowing the actual facts, and if you escalate (not to a call center supervisor) to the compliance department, that is when you will get the correct answer. This department is where the lawyers are, not customer service agents. A "side to side", even leaving the same day, but on two different ships is perfectly legal.

No, two ships of the same cruise line are not considered to be one voyage. The definition of what constitutes a "voyage" is when a passenger permanently disembarks (i.e. settles the bill and takes their luggage) the ship, the voyage is ended. Since, by definition, you permanently disembark one vessel to get on another, the first voyage ends, and a new voyage begins.

Nope. The first in port blackout was caused by a mechanical blockage of the generator engine's exhaust, which would have caused the engine to slow down due to high exhaust gas pressure (potato in exhaust pipe), and when the engine slows, the frequency of the generated power drops, and when the frequency drops too low, the circuit breaker for that generator will open (which is what happened). The second in port blackout was caused by "low fuel pressure" to the next diesel generator that came online after the first blackout. This was caused by either someone leaving a valve closed on the engine fuel system, or a clogged fuel filter, and again, when the fuel pressure drops, the engine slows down, and the same process as the first blackout happens (low speed equals low frequency results in breaker opening). These are totally normal safety features of the engines and their breakers, and there was no malfunction, other than human error or a blocked fuel filter. The first blackout under way, was caused by two totally different circuit breakers than those that were involved in the in port blackouts. So, the in port blackouts had nothing to do with the blackouts that caused the ship to hit the bridge. The HR2 and LR2 breakers are designed to trip on low voltage, which is what happened when the generators tripped in port, so again, this is normal operation of the breakers. Ships normally have two main power transformers, one in use and one in standby, as the Dali did. It is common to rotate between the two transformers periodically (I usually did it once a year), as the Dali crew did when restoring power after the second in port blackout. The breakers that tripped while the ship was heading towards the bridge, were the HR1 and LR1 breakers, which were in an open condition the entire time the ship was in port, and during the two in port blackouts, so again, not involved in the in port blackouts. While I understand that this is a preliminary report, I find that it suffers from a lack of maritime experience on the part of the NTSB investigators, in that nothing is said in the reports that everything that happened during the two in port blackouts was normal operation, with the exception of human error, or possibly a clogged fuel filter (which are the only two reasons for a "low fuel pressure" alarm). What I suspect is that the TR1 transformer, not having been in use for a while (undetermined at this point how long), likely developed a short, which tripped the HR1 and LR1 breakers (as it should). My thought is that this transformer developed a short from not having it's heater on while off line (the heater keeps the windings warm and stops condensation forming, which could degrade the insulation. It was 4 minutes from the time of the first blackout, and striking the pier. The NTSB says the VDR (voyage data recorder) stopped recording when the blackout happened, but restarted recording one minute later. The NTSB says they don't know when the emergency generator came online, but the restarting of the VDR gives that clue, within 1 minute. The second blackout was less than two minutes after the first, and power was restored using the standby main generator, which started itself and put itself online in less than a minute, and full power was restored just over two minutes after the first blackout. The engine crew were really jumping to get this done, and this is very good operational awareness and training. Why the DG3 and DG4 breakers tripped, causing the second blackout is unknown, but my thoughts are that the engine crew were trying to rapidly restore cooling, fuel and oil to the main engine so it could be restarted, and closed too many breakers for these pumps too quickly, causing a rapid increase in power demand, and this resulted in the generators slowing (heavy load bogs a diesel down, and until the governor and turbocharger can catch up, the engine slows, and just as in the in port blackouts, this causes low frequency, and trips the generators. The crew may also not have restarted the fuel pumps for the generators, thinking that since they were still running (but not connected to the electrical system), that the pumps were already running. At this time, I can't say which scenario happened, but the alarm system "data dump" should show the actual timeline and events. I would say that there was no forewarning of this incident, the blackouts the day prior had nothing to do with the blackouts approaching the bridge.

That is because Princess requires that the charter boat document the time of the catch, the time the catch reached 40*F in the boat's coolers, and that the fish maintained that temperature for the entire time from catch to delivery to ship. Those are the documentation requirements that the USPH/CDC VSP requires for fresh seafood to be brought onto the ship. Sources of "potentially hazardous food" have to be "verifiable" with records.

Nor were they there to vote, so their wishes were not represented in the vote, so their income or wealth had no bearing on the result of the vote.

Newer ships (under 15 years) will typically get a technical drydock done in 2 weeks. After the ship turns 15, there are vastly more, and costlier, inspections required, and these tend to lead to structural steel replacement, adding more time.

Yeah, we carried everything from POV's to Abrams tanks. Most likely they are using Baltimore or Norfolk for POV's to Europe.

Were you planning on settling the bill, and taking all your luggage with you when you disembarked in Seattle? If not, then they are correct. You must permanently disembark for one voyage to be declared ended, and then you can start another.

The real question is; does anyone remember what MOTBY was? I was in there every month for years carrying military vehicles to Europe.