Relying on the media for detailed information about a situation is never a really good idea, but I’m amazed at the problems this ship has had. Although admittedly a fire in the engine room is a big deal, it was rapidly extinguished, and freshwater service (including toilet) was restored in the front half of the ship, apparently.
Why, then, they severe problems on Board? People are sleeping on the decks because the air is so foul down below, I gather. They report sewage on some floors, and having to poop in plastic bags. And I gather there’s no ventilation.
Moreover, the ship is listing by several degreesm, which supposedly has something to do with systems knocked out by the loss of power.
Is this all accurate? If so, the ship seems to be phenomenally ill-designed. Even with partial power restored there’s no ventilation? Is power required for all flushing? Is active attitude control needed for a ship, like on the B-2 bomber? Do all systems require electrical-power monitor, boost, or control, that even an incomplete power loss can so thoroughly disable a ship, rather than merely inconveniencing it?
These big ships are purely sail-by-wire, just like a B2 is purely fly-by-wire. If something’s not driven directly by electric motors, it’s driven by hydraulics, which are in turn powered by electric motors. The ship’s engines drive generators - there’s no directly engine-driven propulsion. Often no rudder either - the typical design now is two azipods or rotating propellor units aft, and two or three bow thrusters up front.
I don’t know this particular ship’s design, but usually, all of the generators’ power is brought together into one power distribution systems. The “hotel” power is standard 120/240, and there’s a high voltage system for propulsion. (IIRC, about 15,000 volts DC.) A typical azipod runs at about 24,000 horsepower or 17 megawatts. If the fire damaged the central switching and distribution, I could easily imagine a catastrophe like what happened to the Triumph. I haven’t been following this closely, but I saw a note that she had electrical problems not long ago, so my guess is that something may have been in marginal condition.
As for flushing, there’s no water tower to create water pressure, so pumps are needed to make water pressure.
The ship is freakin’ huge and tall. It would make a lot of sense to pump some water up to a high reservoir (not enough to make it top-heavy, a la poseidon) so that you always had some for flushing, rather than having to pump up for a flush every time.
Air conditioning a cruise ship is not trivial. I imagine the backup generators were designed to power lights and navigation equipment, not air conditioning the entire ship.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
The ship is freakin’ huge and tall. It would make a lot of sense to pump some water up to a high reservoir (not enough to make it top-heavy, a la poseidon) so that you always had some for flushing, rather than having to pump up for a flush every time.
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Nice idea. How do you get the water up there? To have a useful pressure, it will need to be at least the equivalent of three decks above the top deck. How much mass do you want up there?
How long do you think that water reservoir would last? You think they are going to put a 100,000 gallon tank up high? No. It makes sense to keep the water tank close to the reverse osmosis system and store like 30,000 gallons or so as they will always be making water in the open-seas. It’s only when you get close to port that the water gets “dirty” and it’s better to not make water.
But, yes, as gotpasswords stated, this whole ship is probably electronic. With a digital bridge system that takes three people to pilot the ship with an auto-pilot so at night all you need is one person. Older ships had a combination of steam and electrical power but that gave way to purely electrical as there is more maintenance involved in steam. Also, you can switch to gas powered turbines instead of a boiler powering a turbine with steam going everywhere else. And, that’s why the fire was so bad. Probably an electrical fire when something shorted in the generator and it took out whatever initial power distribution existed.
I would have to say though, why did they not pull in a fuel barge with diesel and another with gennies and power the ship enough to keep it sanitary. The ship was not that far out.
ISTM if the main electrical distribution bus was physically crippled beyond being repaired at sea, plugging into the external-power ports would be useless: the power would still have to go through that now-disabled system to get to other parts of the ship. The cruise ship is probably nowhere near as robust as a warship when it comes to systems redundancy.
Putting some generators on a barge and hot-wiring them into Triumph’s power system would be risky, if not impossible, just for the massive amount of power involved, even if the power system was intact. Newer ships have connections for what’s called cold-ironing so they can run the hotel load on shore power with the engines off, but you can’t run propulsion through this. The needed amount of power is just far too much, and the dockside power cables aren’t very long.
If the main buss has been badlydamaged then if shore power is brought aboard there would no way to distribute the power to axulary eqquipment.
As for the water systems putting a holding tank would not work well because of the volume necessary a few staterooms in size and it would need to go high up. Just guessing here but the system probably has a expansion tank that is less than 1000 gallons, probably around 150 gallons. the expansion tank function is to absorb sudden pressure drops. And the systemis fed by a pump with a freek drive that changes speed depending on load. That is how it is donein high rise buildings. Ours is only about 40 gallons in size for 14 stories.
The toilets may not be serviced with fresh water but either sea water or reclaimed water. Frresh water is very expensive.
A gallon of water weighs over eight pounds. Putting tens of thousands of gallons of water well over the top of the ship will make it very, very unstable. Not something you’re going to do in a “what if” scenario that you hope you’ll never have to execute.
There’s also the issue of space value - the higher up the superstructure, the more valuable the ‘real estate’ is for passenger accommodation and comforts. Other than the bridge and essential nav gear, there is next to zero large functional equipment above the mid decks. Giving up a dozen or two high-end accommodations for a water tank - all other problems aside - makes it an unlikely choice.
Remember, cruise ships aren’t ships, not even like liners used to be. They are a hotel with a barge squeezed under them. The bigger the hotel and the smaller the barge, the higher the potential profits. Which explains why the *Triumph *had essentially no backup systems.
I didn’t ignore what you quoted. I took exception to your caveat of
[bolding mine]
That high in the ship, any amount of water required to mitigate any of these problems would by definition make it too top heavy. Lowering the metacentric height further on a ship of that size isn’t something you want to do.
My family and I just took a cruise on the Carnival Elation over Christmas. The Elation is about a year older than the Triumph, so I am making the assumption they have a lot in common. (You know what they say about making assumptions - it makes an ass out of u and mption.)
On the last day of the cruise they offered a tour of the entire boat. While getting a behind the scenes look at the galley, laundry and bridge, we also got to check out the engine control room and talk to the chief engineer. (He had an Italian accent rather than a Scottish brogue.)
Basically the only mechanical work the engines do is run the propellers (screws) and the generators. If you lose the engines, the entire ship is pretty much dead. You can’t move, and couldn’t steer if you could move.
The don’t keep much fresh water on hand. Rather they have a desalinization plant on board to turn sea water into potable water. They also have a reverse osmosis filter to turn gray water (from showers and sinks) back into potable water. All of this needs power to run and I’m guessing this is where most of the power from their backup generator was directed.
The ships also have ballast tanks. If there is even a slight breeze coming from right to left (starboard to port) of the ship, the ship will lean to the left (list to port) so they add some sea water to the starboard ballast tank to keep the ship upright. They use pumps to add and remove water from the ballast tanks. In this case, once they lost power, they couldn’t steer and the wind pushed oriented the boat such that the wind was no longer from the side. They already had water in the ballast tank and couldn’t pump it out once they changed orientation to the wind, hence the list.
[slightly off topic]
It was interesting to find out that most of the kitchen (galley) staff was Indian, and most of the command staff was Italian. I would have expected more of a variety of nationalities like in all other areas that we saw. I guess at high stress moments (meal time in the galley or an emergency on ship) it would be better to have everyone communicating in their native tongue.
Well, people are finally realizing that these el cheapo mega-“cruise” ships are floating disasters- you put 5000 people into a floating hotel, and then the power goes out. Just like the ship that ran aground off Italy-only the closeness of the shore prevented a major tragedy. My question : are there cruise ships that have less than 500 passengers? I would like to cruise, but I would not want to be in one of these floating rabbit hutches.
There are cruise ships of all sizes. Typically, the smaller ones cost more per passenger, though.
I’ve been on a few large cruises and actually really enjoyed them. I’m going on a cruise through the Panama Canal later this year that I’m looking forward to. Not on Carnival, though.
Viking has cruises on smaller vessels that go on the major rivers of Europe. I’ve wanted to do one of those for a while now.
There also are cruises on way smaller vessels on the US Eastern “inshore” seaboard, places like the Outer Banks. They’ve advertised in the AAA magazine.