Home > Freighter failed to communicate
Edito International Catastrophes
by ERIC NALDER
For hours last week, the crew of the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley repeatedly radioed the captain of the cargo ship Selendang Ayu, asking him what was wrong with his engines.
They never got a clear answer, said Coast Guard Capt. Jack Davin, who is in charge of marine safety in Alaska.
"It just seemed unusual we couldn’t get an answer," said Davin, who was among the officers at the Juneau command center last week who tried unsuccessfully to find out what was wrong with the 72,000-ton soybean-laden ship so they could help.
That communication failure — as well as the fact the Coast Guard first found out about the Selendang Ayu’s predicament indirectly, 13 hours after its troubles began — are two of the most puzzling aspects of Alaska’s deadly shipping disaster last week. Those questions must now be sorted out by the National Transportation Safety Board, whose investigators have been interviewing the captain.
The Selendang Ayu lies broken in two on rocky Alaskan shoals, and six men — including most of the engine room crew — are missing and presumed dead. Lost with them are important engine room records, according to the NTSB.
The Malaysian-flagged ship left Seattle on Nov. 28 carrying soybeans to Xiamen, China. The hull and the engine were both relatively new, having been built in 1997 and early 1998. During construction, they were inspected by a respected U.S.-based classification society, the American Bureau of Shipping.
But around noon on Dec. 6, chief engineer Narendra Yadav recommended to the captain that they stop the engine. The direct-drive two-stroke engine in the Selendang Ayu is about two stories high and is located inside a cavernous engine room. Each cylinder is about three feet across, and each piston weighs well over a ton. Experts said fixing such a beast in rolling seas can be tricky and hazardous.
A cylinder was cracked and cooling water would have been leaking into the engine and the lubricating oil would have been leaking out. Running the engine too long under those conditions risks seizing the engine, or even causing an explosion, said salvage consultant and former ship’s chief engineer Keith Rusby of Quebec.
When the engine stopped, the ship was rolling in seas as high as 30 feet, and in winds up to 60 mph, in a vulnerable position about 120 miles from Dutch Harbor, according to the NTSB.
Stopping engines in those conditions leaves a ship tossing helplessly in the violent swells, unable to keep a proper position in the seas and unable to stop a drift to shore, said Aloak Tewari, 51, a former chief engineer on similar ships who is now a marine safety investigator in British Columbia.
And if you do stop your engines like that, Tewari said, you would "definitely" radio your predicament and your position to surrounding ships and to the U.S. Coast Guard. The common practice, he said, is to send out a "Pan Pan" message which is a "security alert" letting others know that you have a problem. It is not a "Mayday," or even a request for assistance, but it lets others know you might need help.
The Selendang Ayu captain never sent out a "Pan Pan" message, according to Davin. Instead, after drifting for 13 hours, unable to fix the engine, the skipper called the harbormaster in Dutch Harbor to ask for tugboat assistance, said Davin. The Coast Guard safety chief wasn’t happy that his people learned of the Selendang Ayu’s plight secondhand.
Properly alerted, Davin said, the Coast Guard would have placed the Selendang Ayu on a "communications schedule," requesting that the captain check in every hour or two. The Coast Guard would have also offered immediate assistance. As it was, the first tugboat wouldn’t arrive at the Selendang Ayu until a day and a half after its engines were stopped, and by then the help was too little and too late.
Davin could not speculate why the captain never sent out a Pan Pan message. Others have.
Experts say a provision of maritime law could be a reason for the lack of notification: If a vessel calls for help, it can later be made to pay its rescuer, if the rescuer’s help was instrumental in saving the cargo.
Regardless, Richard Steiner, a University of Alaska marine safety expert, said the sailors should have found a protected anchorage first, where the ship could ride out the weather while repairs were made.
"You cannot, in a full-force gale, with the Aleutians just a few hours to the leeward side of the vessel, shut the vessel down and hope to get it started again," said Steiner.
The NTSB said the captain of the Selendang Ayu decided to stop the engine and disable the problematic cylinder. Then he planned to head for the shelter of Dutch Harbor, running on five rather than six cylinders. But his crew could never get the engine restarted.
Tewari said cracked cylinders aren’t common on the newer versions of the MAN B&W engines, which he described as very reliable. But he said he’s dealt with the problem before. He said temporarily disabling the broken cylinder is a common way to get to shelter.
Restarting it requires pumping compressed air into the cylinders to move the pistons, which weigh more than a ton apiece, against the resistance of a propeller shaft that is three feet in diameter, a propeller that is 30 feet in diameter and the ocean itself.
The MAN B&W is a slow-speed, direct-drive engine, meaning it cannot be disconnected from the propeller shaft or the propeller, even for restarting. There are no clutches or gears between the engine and the propeller. Rarely, the ocean currents are so bad, the engine cannot be turned fast enough to restart it, Tewari said.
Much more commonly, a failure to restart is due to other mechanical problems, such as a damaged piston that won’t move or a problem with the compressed-air starting system, he said.
Whatever the cause, the captain of the Selendang Ayu lost a day of rescue time by not calling for help.
When it got word, the Coast Guard rerouted the cutter Alex Haley from an ocean patrol to head for the Selendang Ayu. It took five hours to get there, said Davin.
On orders from headquarters in Juneau, the Alex Haley repeatedly radioed the captain, asking what was wrong in the engine room. Davin said the cutter’s crew never got an answer.
James Lawrence, a spokesman for IMC Group, owner of the freighter, said he doesn’t know what happened aboard the ship, but the company is cooperating with investigators from the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board.
"We’ve talked to the NTSB and we’ve decided that the best thing to do is refer the calls to them and to let you know that our guys are talking to them," Lawrence said. "We’re obviously working 100 percent with any investigation." He refused to discuss why the crew did not respond to repeated Coast Guard radio calls.
What happened on that Monday and Tuesday in the engine room may never be fully known, because when the Coast Guard tried to lift the last seven men from the ship — as it was hitting the rocks — the rescue chopper crashed. Lost in the seas, carrying records from the engine room, were the chief engineer Yadav, 52, and the second engineer Durg Vijai Singh, 54, according to the NTSB.
Also lost were chief deck officer Z.M. Vaz, 46, third officer Blaise Mascarenhas, 33, electrical officer Didlar Singh, 44 and boatswain Carlos Flores Santiago.
MAN B&W, the engine designer, is a Danish company. Reached by telephone at his Copenhagen home, the company official responsible for customer support with these engines said he could not comment without written permission from the owner of the Selendang Ayu.
"Such a matter as this is very delicate. We have not even discussed it with the owner yet," said the official, Uffe Mikkelsen, who added that his company’s engines have a good operating record.
Answering criticism that the crew should have sought a protected anchorage to perform the repairs, IMC’s Lawrence said:
"I wasn’t on board the vessel, so I wouldn’t know. We have the utmost confidence in the crew and the actions of the crew. We have the utmost respect for the tug that got there and was able to attach a line to the vessel. We have the utmost respect and appreciation for the Coast Guard. ... It was really just a tragic accident."
He added: "It was a horrendous environment out there and they all worked valiantly and truly heroically."
Steiner of the University of Alaska said all ships passing through the Aleutians should be required to report engine trouble. He also advocates installing a Vessel Traffic System or transponders so the Coast Guard can see for itself when a vessel has stopped making progress.
"They endangered their crew and they endangered the Alaska marine environment," Steiner said. "It’s absurd."