Incorrectly installed section of main engine fuel oil return tubing determined to be fault of 2021 container ship fire off Santa Barbara coast

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday released the details of an investigation into a 2021 fire aboard a containership off of the Santa Barbara coast, revealing that an incorrectly installed section of main engine fuel oil return tubing caused the engine room fire.

The engine room of the President Eisenhower containership caught fire on April 28, 2021 as the boat was transitioning to Oakland through the Santa Barbara Channel, about 24 miles offshore.

Crews were able to extinguish the fire using the engine room's fixed carbon dioxide fire-extinguishing system, but the fire caused the vessel to lose propulsion and drift for several hours before it was towed to the Port of Los Angeles, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

There were no pollution impacts or injuries reported, but damage from the fire totaled an estimated $8.22 million, the NTSB said.

The day before the ship's departure, an engineer installed a new section of steel fuel oil return tubing for the main engine, and the NTSB investigation showed that a compression fitting on the end of the new tubing had disconnected, causing the ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel oil the engine was burning to spray.

Footage from the ship showed that the diesel oil was sprayed about 30 minutes before the fire started, and within one minute after the fire started, cardboard and wooden boxes of spare parts stored on deck caught on fire, according to the NTSB.

"Investigators found that an unshielded and uninsulated exhaust valve compensator flange acted as an ignition source for the spraying diesel fuel," the NTSB said. "An examination of the disconnected fuel oil return tubing and failed compression fitting revealed that the compression fitting’s sealing ferrule was not sufficiently swaged to the steel tubing."

The NTSB determined that the probable cause of the fire was a crewmember insufficiently swaging a compression fitting ferrule during the installation of the fuel oil return tubing for a main engine's cylinder, "allowing an end of the tubing to disconnect and spray fuel oil onto a nearby unshielded and uninsulated cylinder exhaust component."

The NTSB investigation did say that the crew on board the President Eisenhower ship effectively contained the spread of the main engine room fire by removing fuel and oxygen sources, cooling boundaries, and communicating effectively.