Shortly after midnight on Feb. 6, the Dali cargo ship spent five hours fueling up at the Port of Zhangzhou in China. It refueled in the Chinese city of Zhoushan three days later, and again in Busan, South Korea, on Feb. 20, according to transponder and satellite tracking data reviewed by NBC News.
Fuel is one of the areas of inquiry for investigators probing the cause of the power failure that preceded the Dali crashing into and toppling the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore this week, according to federal safety investigators.
Contaminated fuel is believed to cause scores of ships to lose power and propulsion every year, but the incidents rarely come to light, experts say. That’s because the ship malfunctions almost always occur in the open sea, where crews can deal with them without incident.
The data reviewed by NBC News provides a snapshot of the Dali’s fueling activity before it reached the East Coast. The data did not register any fuel stops on the boat’s journey through the Panama Canal, to New York, Virginia and Baltimore — though some experts who spoke to NBC News believed that it would have had to fuel in one of those places.
The Dali’s fuel stops in Asia were confirmed using data from the United Nations’ Long-Range Identification and Tracking system (LRIT), which tracks ships based on satellites and other reports. That data, restricted from release to the public, was provided by a source with access to the system who shared it on the condition that they not be identified. NBC News also confirmed the Dali’s route and fueling stops using Automatic Identification System data reported by the ship and provided by MarineTraffic, a maritime analytics company.
The LRIT and MarineTraffic data does not include details on the type of fuel the Dali received, its origins or its quality, but it does provide the first information on where the Dali picked up the fuel it may have been using as it left Baltimore, according to experts who reviewed the…
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