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Fuel contamination is typical of Democrat union run operations.

Democrats hate anything using petroleum based fuels.

Shortly after midnight on Feb. 6, the Dali cargo ship spent five hours
fueling up at the Port of Zhangzhou in China. It refueled in the Chinese
city of Zhoushan three days later, and again in Busan, South Korea, on
Feb. 20, according to transponder and satellite tracking data reviewed
by NBC News.

Fuel is one of the areas of inquiry for investigators probing the cause
of the power failure that preceded the Dali crashing into and toppling
the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore this week, according to
federal safety investigators.

Contaminated fuel is believed to cause scores of ships to lose power and propulsion every year, but the incidents rarely come to light, experts
say. That’s because the ship malfunctions almost always occur in the
open sea, where crews can deal with them without incident.

The data reviewed by NBC News provides a snapshot of the Dali’s fueling activity before it reached the East Coast. The data did not register any
fuel stops on the boat’s journey through the Panama Canal, to New York, Virginia and Baltimore — though some experts who spoke to NBC News
believed that it would have had to fuel in one of those places.

The Dali’s fuel stops in Asia were confirmed using data from the United Nations’ Long-Range Identification and Tracking system (LRIT), which
tracks ships based on satellites and other reports. That data,
restricted from release to the public, was provided by a source with
access to the system who shared it on the condition that they not be identified. NBC News also confirmed the Dali’s route and fueling stops
using Automatic Identification System data reported by the ship and
provided by MarineTraffic, a maritime analytics company.

The LRIT and MarineTraffic data does not include details on the type of
fuel the Dali received, its origins or its quality, but it does provide
the first information on where the Dali picked up the fuel it may have
been using as it left Baltimore, according to experts who reviewed the
data on NBC News’ behalf. The fuel it received before February likely
would have been gone by the time it reached Baltimore, the experts said.

Dali’s fuel stops
Records tracking Dali’s movements since early February show it refueled
at ports in China and South Korea before heading to Baltimore. Click or
tap on each dot to see more info.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/

To be sure, other factors could have caused the system failures ahead of
the March 26 crash, and the National Transportation Safety Board has
said it’s just beginning its investigation. But the incident has in
general focused attention on a little-known problem that falls into a
gray area where oversight is limited and the purveyors of faulty fuel
rarely face accountability, legal and maritime experts say.

“It’s an open secret that fuel contamination issues plague the industry with most of the incidents going unreported or not resulting in any
substantial damage to the vessel or property or life,” said James Power,
a New York maritime lawyer and former merchant marine and engineering
officer on American ships.

Power has represented several ship owners whose vessels were damaged by contaminated fuel. The vast majority of such incidents don’t result in catastrophic harm to property or the vessel itself, he noted.

“Those situations are rare, but are foreseeable results when an industry lacks self-regulating mechanisms to identify contaminated fuel before it
is sold, put on board the vessel and consumed in the vessel’s engines,” Power said.

Fuel contamination not only puts ship crew members at risk, but also can
cause pollution and damage the reputations of shipping companies, said
Steve Bee, group commercial and business development director for VPS, a testing service that provides information to more than 12,000 vessels
around the world and issues alerts on contaminated fuel. The Dali, he
said, was not a client.


He said VPS hadn’t issued any recent fuel contamination alerts in China
or South Korea.

A spokesman for the Danish shipping giant Maersk, which chartered the
Dali, declined to comment on whether fuel may have been a factor in the accident.

“Regarding fueling, we are closely following the investigations
conducted by authorities and the vessel operator as well as conducting
our own investigation,” the spokesperson, Kevin Doell, said in an email.

Synergy Marine Group, which operates and manages the ship, and Grace
Ocean Private, which owns it, did not immediately respond to requests
for comment.

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB, said at a news conference Wednesday
that investigators would take a sample of the fuel and test it for contaminants, as authorities work to determine the cause of the crash.

The U.S. Coast Guard referred questions to the group of agencies
handling the response to the crash, which did not respond.

Port officials in Zhangzhou and Zhoushan did not immediately respond to questions.

Busan port authorities said they wouldn’t have information about issues
with fuel. The Korea Coast Guard’s Southern Sea Division told NBC News
it had received no reports of fueling-related incidents this year.

The LRIT system that showed the Dali’s movements tracks all commercial vessels over 3,000 gross tons. The details on fuel delivery come from a
report that is signed by both the delivery ship and the receiving ship,
which goes to the government of the country where the transfer took
place, as well as the flag state of the ship that received the fuel, and
is then automatically added to the LRIT system.

A spokeswoman for the International Maritime Organization, the United
Nations agency that regulates international shipping and runs the LRIT, declined to comment on specifics of the Dali investigation.

She said fuel oil quality is regulated under the International
Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, also known as
MARPOL, which states that fuel should not include harmful added
substances or chemical waste. It also covers fuel oil sampling, she
added.

Member states are required to notify the International Maritime
Organization of incidents, she said.

But the system has major gaps, experts say.

“What constitutes an incident is murky,” said Jonathan Arneault, the CEO
of FuelTrust, a Houston-based company that uses artificial intelligence
to trace the provenance of marine fuel.

“It’s usually defined as harm or risk to safety or environment,” he
said. “If the ship doesn’t meet that threshold, it’s not reported. So
the member state has nothing to report.”

Arneault said the supply chain for ship fuel, also known as bunker fuel,
is maddeningly opaque and few countries have strong laws on fuel
management.

While water is a common contaminant in fuel, it is rarely enough to
cause a major system failure. Heavier, more corrosive particulates are a
more likely culprit, experts say.

Fuel contamination is often unintentional, but there have been cases of unscrupulous fuel providers diluting their product with cheaper
substances to increase supply and maximize profits.

“They can do a lot of weird things for money,” said Thomas Roth-Roffy, a former NTSB marine investigator who retired in 2016.

But he said the power failure on the Dali could very well have had
nothing to do with the fuel or fuel system.

“As the diesel engine has hundreds of components subject to failure,
there are many possible scenarios that could cause the engine to malfunction,” he said.

Arneault suspects that the Dali may have been running on fuel at the
bottom of its tank — where a heavier contaminant would have settled —
when the power went out. He believes the fuel is to blame because
security video captured the lights on the Dali flicking off and on a
couple of times, and black smoke billowing from its stack, or chimney,
before the Singaporean vessel slammed into a bridge support.

“It’s likely not just an engine problem because the generators go out,” Arneault said, noting that the generators likely would have been using
the same fuel. “That indicates it’s probably a fuel issue.”

What caused the ship to lose power isn’t the only open question.
According to some experts, the Dali would have needed more fuel to make
it to Sri Lanka, its planned destination when it hit the Key Bridge, but
the available tracking data does not confirm any fuel deliveries in New
York or Baltimore.

When fuel is delivered to a ship, a sample is sent for lab testing
before it is supposed to be used to fire an engine. However, those tests don’t examine all of the possible contaminants. Arneault said he thinks
the tests should be expanded, but they are already costly and there is
little enthusiasm among ship operators for such a change.

Although most incidents involving bad fuel go unreported, they do
occasionally spark industry warnings, investigations and legal battles.

In 2018, about 200 ships were affected by fuel contaminated with a
chemical used to make epoxy. Some experienced power loss. Testing
companies traced the fuel to Houston, Panama and Singapore. Researchers
said at the time that the contamination was a symptom of an opaque
supply chain that allowed a “witch’s brew” of additives — a sign of a looming crisis.

Four years later, in 2022, Singapore authorities reported an outbreak
that affected nearly three dozen ships, 14 of which suffered loss of
power and engine problems, according to researchers. An investigation
later named two suppliers, one in Singapore and the other in China, as
the source. One had its license suspended.

Last year, the U.S. Gulf Coast was stricken with contaminated fuel that disrupted the engines of 14 vessels, some of which lost power and
propulsion while at sea. VPS traced the dirty fuel to Houston and
Singapore.

Arneault said the contaminated fuel incidents that get media attention represent only a fraction of those that actually occur. He tallied more
than 120 such cases last year and at least 460 in 2022 based on private incident databases and information he received from fleet managers.

“For more than 50 years, people in the ship fuel market have tolerated
small losses,” Arneault said, “or even small-scale fraud, thinking these issues were too minor to worry about. But the last five years have
taught us that even these ‘minor’ problems can lead to huge risks and
big costs.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dali-contaminated-fuel-scrutiny- baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-rcna145478

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