RESTART:
I make a basic and simple statement below with the purpose of providing a foundation to reiteration of my original point, which I still see as important to bring to light, and as I would like to hear it discussed, in moderation by, hopefully, older professionals and younger career engineers and inspectors, and also to realign this discussion, from petty sneering contradiction, to the positive. Consider this investigative.
Statement: “Were a marine superintendent to build, say, a new 80m passenger carrying commercial vessel, fitted with forced inward E.R. ventilation feeding onto the main engines where parts of the engine were electronically activated, or controlled, instead of extracting and expelling hot air from those areas, it would be considered extremely poor engineering and he’d certainly be told to re-design and replace the entire system.
Were he to present that same vessel with the main engines and critical generators lifting their fuel from below, and without the use of a fully operational and practical ‘day tanks’, one for each power producing unit, that vessel, however beautifully faired and expensive, could not, and would not, be passed by any competent inspector, as seaworthy.” End of statement.
In my experience, however limited, these two factors in E.R. design are so fundamental and necessary that shipbuilders ( M.Sup'nts.s and specialist propulsion engineers etc.) from ALL corners of the world (Scotland, Ireland, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea, Brazil, Burma, China, Chile, Normandy ....anywhere you like to look.), NEVER even have to be asked to fit these basic essentials as stated, and also, generally, because they so well understand the reasons for their necessity, they fit them in such a fashion, and with such redundancy, that they do their job very robustly.
My original thread, so derided and sneered at by some, was to make this point by asking the question. 'What happened to these BASIC fundamental rules of construction in the yacht industry?'.. ‘Why is it now almost ubiquitously acceptable NOT to use these BASIC safety systems on many yachts? Does anyone care any longer, or even understand how important they are to the fundamental safety of a power driven vessel? Or that the lack of them renders such a vessel, certainly if viewed from the commercial passenger world, ‘fundamentally unseaworthy’? And, oh yes, that ‘fundamental seaworthiness’ is actually a basic requirement of insurance syndicates.
Finally, and please just assume for a moment that I’m old and hairy enough, and within my professional rights, to ask this embarrassed question; Why do I find more and more ‘vessels’, some of a not inconsiderable size, totally bereft of these fundamentals (and worse!), yet with glossy and extremely expensive certification confirming they are built to some class or other?
Is this such an unworthy question to ask? Are our regulations now SO complex, so political and so turgid that inspectors have forgotten the old fundamentals, or is there another, more cynical, reason?
(any daft or insulting comments suggesting that such systems are not a requirement on power driven vessels will be assumed to have come from another planet.)
