How common is that? Again I know nothing about shipping but is it common to have one of these bajillion dollar ships just have the electrics go off. And on. And off again. Without storm damage or heavy seas? Maybe this happens a lot and it was just the worst possible place.
It actually happens a lot more often than people think. It's not always negligence, either. Sometimes, no matter how much preventative maintenance you do, shit just breaks. Sometimes, all it takes for a ship to lose the plant is for one knock-off, made-of-Chinesium part to decide to snap in half at just the wrong time.
These massive container ships pretty much always have a huge Wartsila diesel the size of a house, or something comparable, for main propulsion power. They'll also have smaller electrical diesel generators for the ship service loads, as well as E-gens that are armed to kick on if there is a loss of electrical power. The lights flickering off and on could mean a number of things. It may be that there was an initial ship service power loss that kicked off the lights, and then the emergency generator kicked them back on, and them flickering off and back on a second time might have been the engineers trying to transfer the power back to a ship service generator. It depends on the layout and equipment in the plant. A lot of newer ships have fairly sophisticated power management systems, but generally speaking, they'll usually have a control panel where you can manipulate various breakers for routing electrical loads throughout the vessel.
There are tons of things that can go wrong that can cause a loss of the plant on a vessel like this. First off, if you lose propulsion and/or the rudder, you lose basically all steering, with the exception of bow and stern thrusters (which aren't very useful at speed on a vessel this size). The rudder on a large motor vessel is not like the rudder on a sailing boat. Most of the steering power doesn't come from the rudder moving through the water, but from it actually vectoring the thrust from the propeller. If there is a loss of propulsion on a big motor vessel, that's pretty much the same thing as losing steering, no matter what, and you're just going to drift around in circles.
It could have been a mechanical problem, such as a generator suffering a casualty. Lots of different ways that can happen. Sometimes, they do something dramatic, like just plain blowing up, tossing a rod through the crankcase or something. A really "fun" diesel failure is when an oil cooler shits itself and you have a crankcase full of water and oil emulsion. Usually, that doesn't lead to a catastrophic failure unless the loss of lubrication is so great (and prolonged) that something in the engine shits itself. Sometimes, the issue is not in the actual diesel engine part of the generator at all, but in the electronics that control the generator, or the electrical switchgear coming off the generator itself.
These ships have tons of PLCs to control everything, and a failure or loss of power in control electronics can make a generator go haywire. Usually, there will be some redundancy in the form of a second, offline ship service generator that can be brought online and take over from the E-gen if the main ship service generator has a failure. It's very difficult to totally black out a ship like this, because even before the E-gen kicks on, there is usually also a battery bank to keep some critical electronics running.
Loss of electrical power doesn't always entail a loss of the control electronics themselves. Usually, when you lose the steering gear, it's because you don't have a generator online that provides enough power to run the pumps which provide pressurized fluid to the hydraulic rams that move the rudder. Those pumps will typically be beefy 480v, 3-phase industrial TEFCs that have a lot of power draw. If an E-gen is sized appropriately, and if the steering gear is on the same circuit, it should be able to handle the current.
If someone actually wanted to electronically hack a ship like this, Watch Dogs style, and force it to turn into a bridge (the Alex Jones hypothesis, in this case), their primary target would be the various shipboard control PLCs (Siemens, Fanuc, Allen-Bradley, etc.), using something similar in nature to the Stuxnet worm. Usually, the control PLCs on a ship are not programmed by PCs with internet access, so the attacker would likely need to have physical access to the hardware. It's not as simple as carrying out some sort of "cyber-attack" through the ether. It doesn't work that way.
Controls on large vessels are usually air-gapped from the internet to some degree. Typically, on a ship, PCs with internet access (let's say the company splurged on satellite internet) are basically ordinary office computers that don't have direct access to the controls. It's all on a separate network from the actual SCADA/alarm and monitoring machines. I say "usually" because for all I know, this ship did not have any such air gap and everything was wired into a single network, pants-on-head retarded style, which may have created some theoretical vulnerability to an outside attack. This is why I seriously doubt it actually was a cyber-attack.
Based on what I'm seeing (lights flicking on and off), my first thought would be that a ship service gen shit the bed, leading to a loss of control, panic, pants-shitting, and so on. I would
love to see the Coast Guard's writeup on this. They're not going to be happy. The wreckage of a multi-million dollar bridge is blocking the port and people are dead.
To quote an old, satirical Duffel Blog article:
“I joined the Coast Guard because it seemed like we were the only military service operating even when we weren’t fighting in some war,” said Operations Spc. Bill Horvath, of Sector Humboldt Bay. “But then you realize we are at war, against an army of dipshits with boats.”
