As UK MAIB reports in its most recent Safety Digest, an oil tanker was anchored off the south coast of the UK when an auxiliary room fire alarm activated.
The incident
The ship’s firefighting team went to the engine room to investigate and discovered smoke emanating from an overheating sea water pump, they stopped the pump, allowed it to cool down and found that there was little damage.
The pump supplied cooling water to several items of machinery. Three days before the incident, one of the ship’s engineers had closed the valves to one piece of the machinery in preparation for planned maintenance but did not know that all of the other pieces of equipment were also isolated.
The cooling water had nowhere to go when the valves were closed and there was no flow through the cooling pump, which caused its mechanical seal to gradually overheat and generate smoke.
Lessons learned
- Communicate: Maintenance should be effectively planned and communicated. It is vital to consider the effects of isolation on running equipment that may not be directly related to the job in hand. The use of isolation logs and lock-out/tag-out notices can help engineers monitor the status of their systems and prevent mishaps.
- Aware: All of the human senses play a part in the detection of issues that electronic or mechanical sensors may fail to pick up. The application of touch, smell, sight and sound while moving through a space are powerful tools in the armoury of a watchkeeping engineer and provide early warning of a developing problem.
