Draco Dwarf i

The hollow click and the dancing red light on the bilge alarm panel should have caught George’s attention, but fatigue will do amazing things to a person. As he sat there in the control booth staring blankly into the abyss that was the Dwarfs engine room, icy salt water from the sea began seeping into the compartment through the port shaft seal. Being a new addition to the crew, George, like many others on that trip, was still learning his way round the ship and wasn’t too sure about all of the bells and whistles on the aging control panels. Still the water continued to seep into the engine room and splash around in the bilges.

            The Draco Dwarf had left port yesterday morning, from what was anything but a normal stop for fuel and cargo. Shortly after the crew moored the ship up at the Hamilton Cargo Pier there was a hurricane. Now this wasn’t a hurricane in the physical sense, there were no winds, there was no rain, but there was a storm. In a quiet, but no so subtle manner government agents boarded the ship at the cargo pier and ushered off the majority of her regular crew. From what could be gathered in a third person perspective and through the chaos of the moment, there was nearly a complete transfer of hands onboard the ship. Albeit Captain B. Younger remained in command of his vessel, he knew it wouldn’t be long before they started to look at him through the same microscope that they were using to examine his crew.

As the water level in the bilges continued to rise and the leak in the port shaft seal worsened, more lights began to dance on the bilge alarm panel in the control booth. Grabbing a grimy old flashlight from the shelf next to the door, George quickly put in some ear-plugs and headed out into the deafening engine room. The Draco Dwarf was a moderately sized oceangoing freighter, which routinely brought supplies to and from a long chain of jagged snowcapped islands in the turbulent Bearing Sea. Totaling just shy of five hundred feet in length and seventy feet across the beam, the ship was well capable of handling the harsh and unpredictable conditions often present in the frigid waters. Although the ship was advanced in years it was well known and passed along to the new crew, George included, that she was in good condition.

            So as George quickly made his way into the hot, cramped and loud environment that was the engine room, he had no reason to expect anything more than a faulty alarm panel. It is a common, although unintelligent, practice onboard many vessels to assume that any sort of an alarm is general a fault of the system itself and not a true indication of danger. George, in keeping with that practice, was completely unprepared for what he was about to find sloshing around throughout the bilges. As he quickly rounded the corner, hugging the outside bulkhead as to avoid the hot exhaust piping coming off of the back of the port diesel engine, George grabbed his light and started to shine it haphazardly into the space below the deck plates.

The engine room, situated well aft in the ship, was comprised of three levels above the lowest deck. Considering that oil and grime are of an unavoidable nature, for the most part onboard ships, the space around and below the two main propulsion engines on the Dwarf was relatively clean. So as George shined his light through the grating below his feet, he well knew that he should b able to see clear to the bottom of the deepest bilge. What he knew should be true and what he actually saw, it turns out, were completely different. Merely inches below the level he was actually standing on freezing cold salt water was quickly shifting from side to side between the frames, which wrapped the outer layer of the engine room like a set of metal ribs.

            A mind numbing panic seemed to be the first reaction that came to George as he blankly stared down into the lower parts of the engine room in disbelief. How’d this happen, he thought to himself as he began searching through his brain for answers.

“This certainly must have been here the whole time. They must have forgotten to pass along this bit of useful information!” He shouted aloud.

Being a relatively seasoned mariner and shipboard engineer his first instinct was to check the various sea chests located throughout the engine room. Darting forward towards the front of the mains, where he thought the saltwater inlets to be, he slowly realized that the water in the bilge was too deep to see the sea chests or any of the associated valves.  At this realization and wasting no additional time he rushed back aft towards the shaft seals, the only other possible cause of this amount of flooding.