Entry & progression
An unattended machinery space is not an unwatched one. The watch moves from your eyes to the alarm system, and you become the response. That is a change in the nature of the job, not a reduction in it.
Most modern vessels in the EC3's range run periodically unattended machinery spaces. The engine room runs without a person in it, monitored by an extension alarm system that calls the duty engineer. It works. It works because three things are true at once: the alarms are complete, the alarms are believed, and somebody is genuinely on call.
Before you leave the space unattended
Setting the plant up for unattended running
- Test the extension alarm to the cabin, the mess and the bridge. Actually make it sound.
- Confirm no alarm is inhibited — or that every inhibit is logged, tagged and known to the bridge.
- Confirm standby machinery is on standby: standby generator ready to auto-start, standby lube pump ready to cut in.
- Confirm the bilge is dry and the high-level alarm works.
- Confirm the fire detection system is set and no zone is isolated.
- Walk the space once with your hands and your nose, not just the screens.
- Log the time you left it, and inform the bridge.
Rounds
The alarm system tells you what it is instrumented for. Your rounds tell you everything else. No sensor smells a hot bearing, hears a slack chain, sees a weeping flange or feels the change in a pump that is starting to cavitate. Rounds are how a plant is actually kept — the alarms are only how it is caught.
- Look — for oil where there was none, for water tracks, for salt trails, for rust weeping from a joint.
- Listen — for a knock, a rattle, a whine that was not there yesterday.
- Feel — the back of the hand on bearing housings, on flanges, on the casing. Temperature by comparison.
- Smell — hot oil, hot metal, burning insulation, exhaust in the space.
- Read the local gauges, not just the remote ones. Divergence between the two is itself a finding.
WARNING — Alarm fatigue kills unattended machinery spaces A system that cries wolf gets ignored, and a system that gets ignored is not a system. If an alarm is nuisance-tripping, the answer is to fix the cause or the setpoint — through the proper process, with the chief's knowledge and a log entry. The answer is never to cut it out and get on with the trip. Every serious engine room casualty investigation eventually finds the alarm that somebody had silenced for a fortnight.
Being on call
On call means clothed, sober, reachable and within a response time that actually works. It means you know, before the alarm sounds, what your route to the space is and where the lights are. It means the duty engineer's phone is not on silent, and it means somebody knows which engineer is duty tonight — because in a real casualty the bridge does not want to work that out.
And it means going down. Every time. An alarm you clear from a repeater panel without physically looking is a decision you are making on incomplete information. If you are wrong, you were asleep in your bunk while the space filled with smoke.