The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has completed its report on last year’s fire on the ropax ‘Stena Europe’.
At 21.15 GMT on 11th February, 2023, a fire broke out in ‘Stena Europe’s’ engine room, while she was on passage from Rosslare, Ireland, to Fishguard, Wales.
The fire caused significant damage to the engine room but nobody was injured and there was no damage to the environment. It was extinguished by the crew.
It ignited on a main engine when pressurised fuel from a loose fuel pipe connection sprayed onto a high temperature exhaust pipe.
Neither of the designed protections against fuel fires (spray shielding on fuel pipes and insulation of hot surfaces) were effective, MAIB said.
The original fuel pipe connections had previously been identified as a system weakness, but the manufacturer’s recommended modifications had not been fitted to the engine.
In addition, the ship’s crew were insufficiently trained to inspect engine fuel systems. The temperature measuring equipment used by the crew to monitor the engine exhaust insulation did not effectively identify any hot spots, MAIB found.
As a result, a recommendation was made to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) to submit a paper to the IMO proposing the introduction of a requirement for the use of thermographic equipment to identify exposed high temperature surfaces.
Recommendations were also made to Stena Line to – review the existing defect reporting system, provide training to improve equipment inspections, promulgate details of this accident to the ships in its fleet and introduce the use of thermal imaging cameras for the identification of exposed high temperature surfaces.
