WAMBUI KAMAU, BYLINE: The lawsuit seeks over $100 million to recoup the costs of reopening the Fort McHenry Federal Channel and the Port of Baltimore, following the collapse. Benjamin Mizer is with the U.S. Department of Justice. He says the Singapore-based Grace Ocean, which owns the ship, and Synergy Marine, which operates it, are financially responsible for the cleanup - not U.S. taxpayers. Mizer says they knew of vibration problems on the ship that could lead to blackouts, and didn't fix them.
As with most disasters which have at their core human action (or inaction) there's more than one thing that has to be compromised due to stupidity or the disaster does not occur.
The usual count is three, but two sometimes suffice. That's because engineers typically will try to mitigate faults and thus one fault does not lead to a disaster because the mitigations are there to avoid a failure (which can always happen) turning into a disaster. It is thus typically the second or even third act of stupidity that results in the serious "oops."
We know the basic timeline -- the ship left dock, it was steaming toward the bridge, it lost all electrical power, recovered it for a brief time before losing power again and, by the time power came back on the second time it didn't matter as collision was inevitable. It also appears that at no time after the first power loss was main propulsion restored (only electrical power), but that's not established.
A few things to note here, most of which I've covered before. Modern ships all have computer-controlled engines for emissions reasons. Old ocean-going (and even recreational) diesels, from pretty-small (e.g. truck engine size) to huge (train, ship, etc.) were mechanical and once started (which frequently could be done with a reservoir of compressed air rather than electrical power) they'd continue to run provided they had air, fuel and lubricating oil. Meeting modern emission standards this way is impossible, thus now they're all electronically controlled and that in turn means they require electrical power all the time. That, in turn, means such a ship is engineered with two electrical buses, transformers and similar to provide full redundancy since its essential that you not lose the portion of the electrical system required for propulsion and steering to work at minimum.
If you recall it was discovered that the crew had some sort of problem with electrical power loss while at the dock. The presumption was that they had found the cause and fixed it, never mind that due to the critical nature of electrical power for modern ships you have two redundant systems such that losing one does not screw you.
What was found is that the power loss at the dock wasn't actually from the same cause that led to the collision; that was an error on the part of one of the crew members. However, that event led the crew to switch to the second set of switchgear and transformer which was the one active when the Dali left.
During the local repairs and inspection investigators found a loose connection on that second control system for the transformer bank that provided main power to the Dali and were able to reproduce the condition by messing with it. This would cause that transformer to trip but there is an automatic fail-over to the other one so that event should not have caused the extended and dual outage. It did because, it appears from reports, the crew had the selector for said automated fail-over shut off!
Worse is that they apparently had the generator fuel system automated change-over turned off as well! You see the fuel pumps of course require some sort of power and thus you have a chicken and egg problem; if you want to start up the ship with nothing running (thus batteries and/or stored air for pneumatics only -- note that pneumatics also run things like the ship's horn) something has to pressurize the fuel system so the generator can start. That system is typically pneumatically driven and is also used to polish the fuel -- but it is not capable of operating for an extended period of time (since it will run out of air in the tank!) nor can it supply enough flow for full operational power. It doesn't have to since once there is electrical power you've got plenty for the normal fuel system to run and recharge the pneumatics. The fuel system is quite complex because, among other things, once again for emissions when in and near port the main engine runs on diesel but because it runs at a very low (by our standards with trucks and such) RPM it also is perfectly capable of operating on bunker fuel, which is much cheaper (but dirtier) and thus once out of the EEZ of nations who care that's what they use. That fuel has to be both heated and scrupulously cleaned because it is extremely thick at ordinary temperatures and in any event diesels are extremely intolerant of contaminants in their fuel; water in even tiny amounts will destroy the injectors and any sort of contamination can stick them open which on modern engines will almost-immediately cause them to self-destruct. Since the fuel tanks on a ship of that size are huge and ships float on water (and get rained on) which could conceivably find its way into the fill or vent pipes the potential for contamination is always there and thus the fuel system is both quite-complex and needs a lot of power to operate normally.
So they take the first fault and are dark for a fairly extended period of time because the automated switch-over has been disabled. Then, when they get the power up again it fails a second time either due to the same fault or because the generator's fuel flow is insufficient to carry the load. By the second time they get power back its too late and they hit the bridge.
Admiralty law is very different than what you're used to in the world of car accidents and similar and covers a lot of incidents that occur with ships (more than you'd think), but this looks an awful lot like they believe they can go after various entities under US domestic law, which if true could turn this into a fairly-basic negligence claim.
The obvious question here is that there should be a pre-departure checklist for the entire engineering space on the vessel so why did they leave the dock configured as they were?
This will be interesting to follow as it winds its way through the judicial system and more facts come to light.