200235 Engine room Flooded

04 Feb 2002 MARS

Engine room Flooded
Report No. 200235

A vessel under my command was carrying a cargo of vegetable oil from South America to the Caribbean. On arrival we were obliged to drop anchor to wait for a berth. After dealing with the required paper work, I decided to take a Sunday afternoon rest. After a short while, an alarm sounded and the Duty Officer informed me that the engine room was flooding.

All available personnel proceeded to the engine room to check what was happening. There was a rapid ingress of water. The crew were advised to close all sea valves and the flooding was stopped 2.8m from the bottom. A salvage agreement was arranged by the owners and the engine room was pumped out. After drying out, we found that the flooding was caused by the collapse of an emergency suction valve due to graphitic corrosion. It is very hard to detect this type of corrosion which only occurs in cast iron. The valve looked like new from the outside and there was no sign of deterioration.

After the incident, it was discovered that the first bilge alarm had been acknowledged by the Duty Oiler whilst the Duty Engineer was engaged in checking the monthly inventory for chemicals.

The Company's Policy on watchkeeping had thus not been correctly followed.

Key Lessons

  1. Give extra attention to all valves, especially those made of cast iron.
  2. Alarms should not be just acknowledged by Engine Ratings until the Duty Engineer has confirmed and checked the alarm visually.

As a result of this incident the Port State Control detained the vessel because the Chief Engineer had not filled in the Oil Record Book during the transfer of the flood water to slop tanks. Do you think that it is right for the Port State Control to detain a ship which had suffered an incident just for not filling in the ORB? This was in spite of the fact that the personnel were under stress dealing with the incident and the transfer had not been completed at that time.

This seems somewhat unfair. Are Port State Control Officers being over-zealous at times? Let me have your experiences in this field please.

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