On one side of the door, fluorescent lights, bland office décor and a bank of computer screens. Inside, I was on a ship’s darkened bridge, listening to the deep throb of powerful engines, feeling their vibration through the floor, while a 360-degree panorama of Prince William Sound, Alaska, glided past in eerie photographic verisimilitude. Ahead, the lights of passenger ships and fishing boats twinkled in the dusk sky. On each side, brooding mountains flanked the channel.

I was on board Exxon Valdez, negotiating a narrow passage at the mouth of the sound. Two officers and a helmsman had control of the vessel. The officers spoke in clipped sentences and low voices, poring over charts and radar, taking compass bearings, listening to weather reports and monitoring ship traffic. The tension was palpable.

“Twenty minutes in here and they’re sweating,” whispered Captain Martin Burley, a lecturer at the New Zealand Maritime School. He had invited me to see the school’s multimillion-dollar ship’s bridge simulator in operation. Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound is one of dozens of scenarios the school uses to give its trainees the experience—and responsibility—of conning a ship.

Outside, at the control desk, lecturer Captain Roy Fernandes tweaked the position of a few fishing boats and dialled up a storm. Back on the bridge, I watched sheets of rain reduce visibility to near zero. The officers of the watch studied the blips on the radar screen, considered an urgent course change and projected a grid on the bridge windows to check and recheck distances. They were sweating all right.

It wasn’t memories of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that had brought me to the school’s premises in downtown Auckland, but questions about a vessel much closer to home: the MV Rena. I had been mentally putting myself on the container ship’s bridge on the night of October 4, trying to imagine the sequence of decisions and observations—and failed observations—that led to the catastrophic grounding and oil spill in the Bay of Plenty that had dominated the news for a month.