Guarding Against Fire Damage

摘要

What could have been a disastrous fire was averted when a 120 000dwt crude oil tanker, entered with the Gard P&I Club, suffered an engineroom explosion during discharge at a European port. The vessel was equipped with four auxiliary engines designed to run on HFO380cst. During discharge, the engine-room was manned as normal, with an engineer and a motorman on duty. All four generators were running to cope with the discharge rate, and the ballast pumps were also being used at the same time, imposing quite a heavy load on the generators. All four auxiliaries were located on the upper platform, above the engine control room. During a routine inspection, the duty engineer discovered a leak from one of the fuel pumps. But he judged the leak not to be very serious and decided to take the load off the generator from the main switchboard and carry out the normal stopping procedure.