The stories I read say that there was a separate room with a different set of engines that weren't touched by the fire. And were those engines also incapacitated? It just seems to me that it's remarkable that so much of the life support system of an ocean liner could go off-line through the loss of one of several power plants. No sewage treatment, no air conditioning, no power for cooking? No power for propulsion? Seems like a ship of that size should have enough redundancy and isolation built into its power plants that losing one would only be a minor inconvenience, not a crippling failure.
I mean, this was a fairly bad situation in the Gulf of Mexico. What if it had been on a trans-Atlantic passage, and went off-line 1000 miles from anywhere? This is a relatively modern ship, only 14 years old and built to handle problems like this... one would think. Eventually, the government will have to step in and investigate this industry. Something is wrong here, and the industry has appeared rather reluctant to fix itself.
