Thinking about what happened in Baltimore and wondered if huge ships have a way to rapidly deploy anchors if the ship becomes uncontrollable close to shore. Independent of engine power.
In: Engineering
On the bridge, there is an emergency anchor release. However, the release system runs on power (as does everything else nowadays). In the case of a blackout, there may be no ability for a bridge drop. To release the anchors without power, you would have manually open the brake at the anchor station. It is common for crew to standby the anchors when maneuvering in confined waters in case they need to manually drop the hooks.
However, ships have emergency generators which should kick in then event of a power loss. The anchor drop is usually on the emergency switchboard. The issue then becomes if you can fire up the emergency generator in time.
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