Originally Posted by bigbill
Lots of whizzing in the wind on this thread.
I was an Officer of the Deck on a Nimitz Class carrier during OIF and OEF. We were doing combat ops, so the 1100-foot ship routinely weighed 104,000 tons with a full weapons and aviation fuel load. There are minimum speeds for steerage, usually around five knots. Below that speed, the rudder is not effective. There are no brakes, only astern propulsion, which further takes the rudders out of play. I drove the ship into Souda Bay, Crete, Koper, Slovenia, and anchored off Cartagena (the original one in Spain. I also drove in and out of Norfolk several times.
In my submarine days, once I was selected for commissioning, the Captain would let me connect the sub on the surface, including the Hood Canal Bridge, a few times, as mentioned by Fly.
It appears from the video and reports that the ship lost power and went dead in the water, which means they had no propulsion, steering, or instrumentation. The radios would have batteries which is why they could broadcast a mayday. Dropping the anchor is an action in narrow channels to avoid a collision or groundings. The ship still have forward way and no means to steer. I doubt the approach to the bridge is a straight line and there might have been tides or winds in play. A container ship is a big sail and at slow speeds, can get pushed around. In the Mediterranean, we backed down and stopped the carrier to recover a man overboard. I turned the ship to create a lee to launch a RHIB (rigid hull inflatable boat) to recover the guy about a mile away. By the time the RHIB reached the guy, we were only about 500 yards away due to the wind pushing the 104K ton carrier sideways.
There is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going around, but the NTSB, Coast Guard, and other organizations will investigate the incident which will likely come down a root cause for the loss of power. It could be human error, material failure, sucking a bunch of crap into the seawater system, or lack of supervision. No one here is an expert on modern container ships. I know they have small crews and quite a bit of automation, but not when transiting in and out of port, everyone is on the job.
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