Oily Water Separators and Those Magic Pipes
Posted: Sunday, August 13, 2006
by Ieuan Dolby
The Mariners Articles
Surveyors and port state inspectors are forever highlighting the fact that they have "found yet another vessel with a supposed magic pipe fitted", another with "no functioning Oily Water Separator (OWS onboard" and yet another with no magic pipe but just the main bilge pump on direct discharge overboard. Engineers today are still bucking the law, bypassing and inventing forever fanciful methods to dispose of bilge matter to the sea but why are they doing this? By breaking this law they are placing themselves in-line for a heavy fine, a possible prison sentence and without doubt the loss of their job! Why would any engineer go to these lengths?
I have been at sea for twenty years and in that time have come across maybe one, possibly two Separators that actually work as they were designed to! For the most part they require constant attention, seriously under-perform and consist of endless retrofits that engineers and companies have made to try and improve there performance or bring them up to standard, re: new legal requirements or requirement for increased throughput! In my time at sea I have never been able to switch on an OWS and walk away, confident that it will perform correctly and do the task that it was designed to do! This in itself is a problem as an engineer is taken away from other tasks and maintenance goes downhill, especially on vessels that sail under minimum manning, have undersized units and excessive water/oil in their bilges.
On a par with other machinery found on vessels they are high-maintenance! Purifiers or clarifiers do a similar job, they separate two differing mixtures from each other (water and solids from oil) and for the most part once started they are left to their own devices! Separators though require constant adjustments, cleaning, filter changes, removal of air, clean water sampling adjustment, back pressure change, suction filters cleaned, lenses cleaned, oil tank emptied, control air adjusted, burst hoses, blocked hoses, solenoid valve failure, splattering of oil from test pipes all over the engine room and the engineer, lost suction, and so on and on and on. The list is endless and painful and leads to one end result, that of frustration and anger at the machine itself, the company and the law that binds!
Companies the world over have failed to appreciate and/or act upon the new regulations fully, often because of the additional cost involved but also because they feel that bilge matter and its disposal is a matter for the ship and its crew rather than the office staff. For the most part superintendents ashore have coped with the increase from 100ppm to 15ppm overboard limits by retrofitting a 15ppm meter on an existing unit. All that this has done in practical terms is to increase dramatically the work that engineers have to do to get the machine to work to this end! Many of these machines were not designed for 15ppm separation, the mere fitting of a device that checks the overboard discharge does not suddenly make the separator perform to a better degree than before it just makes it harder to achieve the end result!
I once had a long conversation with an ABS surveyor about oily water separators! He was of the same opinion as I, that the system and the whole arena surrounding oil and its separation had gone way out of control! He even dared to mention that 15ppm was an unrealistic figure, that laws and paperwork had overtaken common sense but ……….. it was certainly nice to know that I was not alone in the world. We also covered such topics as bilge holding tanks, tanks that are far too small for today's heightened regulations and how companies are unwilling to accede to larger holding tanks and more of them as it encroaches on cargo carrying/ballast/fuel capacity, and we arrived at a similar conclusion; that engineers are being forced into a corner!
Engineers are frustrated. They are being asked to spend hours every day with a machine that they know is inadequate for the job! They also know that complaining about it will achieve nothing apart from rubbing up the office staff the wrong way! On a ship were the engineers have spent days sifting the oil from water they now come to the equally 'gritty' task of asking the company for a sludge truck so that the cycle can be completed! This forever seems to be an issue with the office and increases the pain of the engineers involved! Companies typically ask "were did all the sludge/waste materialize from" and then progress to complaining volubly with frequent references to the cost of the waste removal!
Is it any wonder that some engineers might turn to "magic pipes" as the press like to call them? An engineer who feels insecure over his job, who might be new to the company or who is afraid of his superior (the third to the second, the second to the chief) would be unwilling to ask the company for a sludge truck and so a rules are broken for self-survival!
When surveyors inspect a vessel and find faults with the system it is the engineers onboard that are penalized or reprimanded! The company denies any knowledge of anything illegal being done and they typically set-up an investigation into 'who did it' and 'why'! The engineer meanwhile skulks off back home …………. the company have their scapegoat.
I am positive that if more effort was placed on research and development an OWS could be produced that is self-sufficient, that does not require endless pernickety maintenance and that just ticks away on its own doing the job that it was designed to. If such a separator was produced, if shipping managers and technical superintendents swallowed the costs of sludge disposal without murmur and if older OWS units were replaced in their entirety with new and larger models instead of inane retrofits then engineers onboard would not resort to tricks and illegal means to dispose of their bilge matter!
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