There is a fairly complete video already. I counted at least 2 times when all the lighting on the ship disappeared and, obviously, the main engines also turned off. It is strange that the emergency gensets did not at least provide lighting...
https://youtu.be/m3Sobolb6c4?si=IAX-Cyasu1ihKkBw
Thanks for that longer video. Couple of things stand out to me.
First, it's worth noting that the Main Engines don't shut off if you loose Ships Power. You may (depending on the boat) lose bridge controls of them, but there are required to be back up manual controls of the engines that work even if the genset goes down. You can tell if you watch the exhaust stack that she was idling along, they lost power the first time, then when the power came back the engines came up full, and stayed at full through the second power loss. If I had to guess the engineer(s) were more worried about getting power back than controlling the ship through the first black out. If that's true it'll come out when the bridge recorders are listened to, and is simple lack of training.
An emergency generator is required to automatically start and take the load within 45 seconds of loosing main ships power. That's the max allowable time, most of them are around 20 secsor so. Dali was dark ship for a full minute the first time, and when power came back it brought up everything including the sodium vapor deck lights. While not 100% those are not normally on the Emergency Switch Board, so if I had to guess that wasn't the E-Gen coming on, the crew got the Ships Service Diesel Generator back up, or started and switched to the other SSDG. The E-Gen should have been tested as part of the Presails and in Automatic mode before they sailed. Since they'd only been underway about an hour, that thing should have been good to go.
Right after power comes back the first time she starts a solid turn to starboard. That's weird because she was lined up with the bridge and channel before the turn, and had been drifting relatively straight for the minute the power was out (consistent with engine at idle or a little above, and rudder mid) so the power came on and someone gave her rudder input to leave the channel. You can see right around 2:30 in the vid Opportunity posted when the aspect change starts on Dali as rudder input is given. If they were trying to turn around they had nowhere near enough time.
Were it me, I would have left the Bow Thruster online until I cleared the river, just in case, but if they didn't have manual control of the engines, they probably didn't have manual control of the Bow Thruster, or they were using it in their ill-fated attempt to turn to Starboard.
Not to belittle the lost of life one thing to consider that along with the fact that this is going to create one heck of a traffic issue for a long time to come is that we now have a major port blocked and will remain block for some time.
I'd bet they have the pieces of that bridge out of the shipping channel and traffic restored this week or mid next week at the latest. We don't leave ports closed very long.
