Sailor here. I'm a certified master helmsman with lots of port transit time. Here's my take on what happened with the bridge incident:

Updated with new information.

The ship in question is the MV Dali. The ship has a fixed pitch prop that makes it difficult to reverse. She has an electric bow thruster, but that only really works at slow speeds and requires electrical power.

The videos show the ship losing power and engines as it approaches the bridge. When the power goes out on a ship like that, the hydraulics that control the rudder stop working.

After losing power, the ship begins to twist in the current, with the aft sliding out of position to port.

They managed to get an auxiliary generator going, which is when the lights came back on the first time, but this did not provide power to the rudder hydraulics.

Then suddenly the engine kicks back on, which is the cause of the black smoke you see. Once the engine kicks back on, the power to the hydraulics is restored and steering is restored, but it wasn't on long enough to maneuver the ship.

A second ill-timed power-outage seals the fate, not leaving enough time for the ship to swing to port after the current had caused it to twist.

You can seem him try to swing the rudder back over to the port side once he realizes the rudders are working again, but by then it is too late. The rudders on those ships are slow to respond. It can take over ten seconds for the rudders to swing all the way over from one side to the other.

It's possible they managed to put the engines in reverse which would also cause the her to straighten up down the channel to port.

I've had power-outages like this happen on a warship at sea with far more redundancy than this cargo ship has. Things like this can happen. Even with backup generators running, managing the electrical load on a ship like this is complex. It would have taken the engineers some time to figure out how to address an outage. As you can see from the video, the outages did not last long. They just happened at the worst possible time.

There is no conspiracy.

I would need to see some proof of sabotage before I believed this was planned. Killing the power also means killing the ability to steer. If the ship can't be steered, there's no way to intentionally aim it at the pier.

The new info comes from this analysis by the YouTuber "whatsgoingonwithshipping" - where he displays the actual track data as opposed to me just eyeballing it.

youtube.com/watch?v=DoPRz7wk3WY

Clarification for the nitpickers: my understanding of this ship is that to use reverse thrust, it would require that the engines be fully stopped, reverse gears to be engaged, and then the engine started back up again - which is obviously impossible to do if the engines aren't working. It can't just slam into reverse like ship with variable props can.

Further, this is not something you would want to do in transit because the wake of the props provides a large part of the rudder authority. Without forward power, the rudder is much less effective.

I also see lots of questions about anchors. Anchors on ships need to be manned. Dropping an anchor is a completely manual operation requiring no power. They typically can't just be dropped by the push of a button. Further, from what I see, it's unlikely that even if they did have the anchors manned and managed to drop them that it would have managed to stop the ship in time. Anchors are not designed to stop ships in motion.

Whatsgoingonwithshipping reports that the pilot did order the anchors to be dropped, but it's unclear if they were able to accomplish this before colliding with the bridge. I don't see anything in the video indicating this happened.

I also see lots of questions about tugs and a port pilot. Tugs were used just to pull her out of the pier. This is completely normal. Tugs typically do not follow a ship out of the harbor. In this case, the ship was already beyond the point where tugs were required. Two pilots were on board at the time. Whether or not there was port pilot onboard at the time really doesn't matter in this case since without steering there is nothing that can be done.

Whatsgoingonwithshipping reports that the pilot did call for emergency tugs, but it was too late for any tugs to get there before the ship collided with the bridge.

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