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On the afternoon of January 10, 1988, the port engine on the M/V Valley Transporter exploded due to a stuck piston
in # 11 cylinder while we were northbound about fifteen miles above Natchez, MS, while pushing 30 empty barges. The resulting
fire did about $300,000 damage to the engine room. Valley Line never ran the boat again; it sat in Greenville, Mississippi
for years. ACBL sold the boat to American Boat, who repaired it and put it back in service. The boat is still in service on
a seven year lease to AEP / Memco. I was the engineer at the time of the fire; here are some photos of the aftermath.
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My relief (John Sayres; in front) and I in happier times, standing on the starboard engine's inboard catwalk.
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The # 11 cylinder area of the port engine. The handhole doors were blown off, and there was a blast of fire
coming out of the airbox handhole (The upper round opening.) five feet long. It took us five tries to shut down the engine.
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Here's the cause of the fire. The #11 piston stuck in it's cylinder due to scuffing.
That's a piston in good shape on the left, and the "culprit" on the right.
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This was all we could find of the handhole doors.
The airbox door is the one on the left.
What the upper engine room looked like the next morning.
This is the ventilation hatch at the rear of the port engine. There were spare oxygen and acetylene cylinders
stored here; the fusible plug of one of the acetylene melted, and the tank then caught fire. Two crewmembers with fire hoses
could not put this out, it took a third man with a CO2 extinguisher to finish it off. The fire from the acetylene bottle
was four feet in diameter and ten feet tall, and the heat from it was what warped the hatch, and burned off the paint.
This is the upper deck area forward of the port engine. A large part of the fire here was cardboard
that we had stored to cover the decks when we did engine work.
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