With a length of 232 meters overall, breadth of 32 meters and gross tonnage of 77,000 tonnes, the mighty Tijuca laughs at your puny ro-ro freight ferry! We'd have ended up in the town center if we did that.
I dunno about the engines being out of control, if it happened on here we could stop the engine by simply opening the breakers for the main engine fuel circulating and booster pumps. That'd kill the engine almost instantaneously (the fuel requires 350 bar of pressure behind it to get through the injector nozzles. Fuel going into the cylinder would stop pretty much straight away) However, our is a single low speed 2-stroke cross-head engine driving the prop shaft directly from the crankshaft.
Most of these ferries have multiple 4 stroke medium speed engines driving multiple props through a reduction gearbox. I suppose you'd need to know which engines were operating, which was at fault and so forth to stop it. Although you could just clutch it out instead I suppose.
Another likely candidate in my opinion however's telegraph failure, the system that transmits commands from the bridge to the engine room. If it's not a human failing that is.