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When you shut an engine down using the spar valves it runs for 30-50secs on the fuel in the pylon, so from the boost pimps it will probably run for about 2 minutes.
I fully disagree with this. As I stated previously in my post 378, the main tanks have fuel pump bypass valves which you will find on any Boeing aircraft if anyone has access to schematics. The engine driven pumps are capable of suctioning fuel out of the tanks. Shutting off the fuel tank pumps will not shutdown the engines. Furthermore, the scavenge pumps take forever to move the fuel. They hardly would have created a problem of flooding the tanks with water and not only that, jet engines are capable of operating with a certain percentage of water in the fuel at the optimum icing conditions. The airframe side of the fuel system must supply 100% of the required fuel flow(vapour free) to a gas turbine engine under all normal operating attitudes. These are legal requirements in the engine and aircraft design. Additionally, as I stated before, there would have been several cockpit warnings related to the fuel system that may have given the crew notice that there was a fuel problem. Surely these faults would have appeared in the central maintenance computers but not necessarily the DFDR or QAR.