The Engine Room

July 25, 2010

Today our group leaders arranged for us to have a private tour of the Engine Room. We spent the next hour exploring the bowels of the ship. The Mercy, and it's sister ship the Comfort, were commissioned by Congress in the 1976 when the hospital ship used in the Vietnam war was old and needed to be replaced. The Mercy was created from an old oil tanker. This was more cost effective than building a ship from the ground up. All the work was done in San Diego and was not finished til the early 1990's. The oil tanker, SS Worth, was gutted except for the engine parts and then the hospital modules and all the berthing areas were built on shore and then placed in the existing compartments. It is 894 feet long and 105 feet abreast. The tour was super cool, but very hot and loud. We all had our ear plugs. Some of the rooms were over 118 degrees. We even got to see the rod that the propeller is attached to. I really enjoyed this tour as I love to explore and experience new things. He gave us some stats that were interesting. The fuel for this trip cost $8,000,000 and the whole humanitarian project is costing $25,000,000. The Mercy's fuel tanks hold over 1 million gallons of diesel fuel and 789 barrels of Jet fuel. The ship actually runs on steam, and the diesel fuel runs the compression engine that creates steam with powers the ship. The ship distills it's own potable water through distilling sea water. They heat the sea water until steam is formed and then put it into a vacuum and the fresh water is taken from the steam and then the extra salty left over water not distilled is then put back into the ocean. The ship consumes 60,000 gallons of water each day and the boiler alone uses 7,000 gallons of water each day. The ship holds 356,000 gallons of fresh water. The ship has two separate piping systems for water. All the toilets use sea water and those pipes are 3 times as thick as the regular pipes and were designed for sea water. The other pipes have all the “gray” water from the showers, washing machines, dishwashers, sinks and this water can be put back into the sea as long as they are a certain distance from the shore. This ship fastest speed is 18 knots and it would take it 3 miles to stop if going at full speed. The Engineer said that we usually travel about 14 knots.