Marine Suprintendent | HSEQ -Quality Assurance Manager | Oil & Gas Commercial Vessel Operator | Internal Auditor ISM ISPS MLC ISO| Port Operations & Ship Management|
Ensure crew competence through regular blackout testing. The ever-increasing complexity and level of system integration may challenge operators’ ability to understand in-depth how these systems work. This also makes troubleshooting and manual recovery more difficult. Hence, a highly competent and trained crew is more important than ever. Adequate and extensive blackout testing should be arranged regularly to verify the system responses to different blackout failures and to enhance crew competence on blackout scenarios, such as: Identify blackout conditions, observe power system automated actions, and troubleshoot problems if the sequence of blackout recovery fail. Learn what manual actions may be required for blackout restoration. Verify expected behaviour versus actual behaviour for: Power generation start-up Power generation connection to main switchboards and synchronization Propulsion recovery Identify areas for improvement. Become more confident with emergency response procedures and checklists. A proper blackout test involves both the main power system and the emergency generator start-up. This is because a blackout recovery sequence consists of these two parallel processes, which start up independently without any operational delays. It should be ensured that the blackout test is created by different conditions (i.e. different failures), to verify system response triggered by different circumstances and to prepare the crew for various scenarios. It is important that tests verify the functions of the blackout prevention and recovery measures (i.e. testing a full blackout). The emergency generator should also regularly be tested under realistic loads.
