This is one of the most dangerous situations imaginable at sea.
>> 1. When you have a fire aboard ship, there is no good escape. It's very fortunate that the crew was able to put out the fire.
>> 2. But the fire left the ship "dead in the water," adrift, completely at the mercy of the tides, the currents, the winds, and the shoals.
And if the fire had forced the passengers to abandon ship, I wonder if the crew would have been able to lower the ship's lifeboats. The lifeboat davits normally operate on the ship's electrical power, which apparently was out completely during the fire.
The complete loss of electrical power also does not make sense to me. Most ships of any size have generators and main distribution buses located both forward and aft, so it's possible to open the cross-connect breakers very quickly to isolate the buses affected by the fire and then to restore normal electricity to the rest of the ship. They also supply power to vital equipment, such as the ship's navigation systems, from two vital buses equipped with automatic bus transfers connected to different pairs of distribution buses in a manner that minimizes the probability of an interruption in a casualty. The fact that so many systems were down for so long is really beyond belief.