A shipboard fire scenario
February 14th 2007 02:11
A shipboard fire scenario.
Possibly not a scenario you can play out on board your own boat, but recently I was lucky enough to join a team on the Bell Bay site of the Australian Maritime College during a ships fire fighting course. Some of the lessons may be useful to you on your boat anyway.
The fire siren rings, seven short blasts and one long blast. We race to our muster point and are told there is a fire on board. It has taken over in three adjoining cabins. Two of us race off to don our breathing apparatus along with boots, gloves, helmets and the rest of the crew set up fire hoses. Two start cooling the outside of the cabin walls which in turn will make it cooler inside the cabins where the fires have taken hold. The fires have been burning for some minutes now and three of the crew are missing.
With compressed air cylinders on our backs and holding our face masks we race back to the scene and our controller checks our air gauges. 120 bar each which gives us about twelve minutes of fire fighting time with about a ten minute safety margin to get out. We don our masks take a hose and disdain from using a message string relying on using the hose instead. We enter the first cabin and immediately the heat is at us like a thick gooey wall. Protected with helmets, thick gloves boots and coats, the ears and back of the neck start to sear with the heat. Smoke is filling the space and it is dark and hard to see. We have our torches on and shuffle our feet feeling our way across the floor. We spot a fire and turn the hose toward it, just a stream of spray and soon steam and smoke is pouring off the fire but the flames are dwindling to nothing. My buddy suddenly turns off the hose and reaches with a hand to the floor. I shine my torch to his hand and see that he has his hand on a mannequin which is one body we have found. We know it has to be a body as we have been in this cabin for several minutes and the thick smoke would have overcome any one well before the fire even got under way. We move on to the adjoining cabin and the smoke is so thick and the air so hot we decide to try and vent some off. My partner aims a fine spray of water from his hose through an open port hole and soon we feel the cool air drafting from the open door which we used to enter. Seeing the spray the fire teams outside realise we need more barrier cooling and they also spray down the walls of the cabin.
Searching, crouched down low to be out of the smoke we find a second body tucked under a desk. Nothing we can do here. Shining our torches onto our air gauges we see that we are down to eighty bar. We need to be out by the time we are on fifty bar. We have several more precious minutes of fire fighting time left. In the next cabin another fire is burning fiercely. The hose is turned on to it and soon it is just smouldering. Both fires are damped down but not entirely out. The cabins are cooler, around three hundred degrees near the floor but we are almost out of air and quickly depart the way we came in, leaving the hose nozzle near the first fire. We report to the controller who looks at our gauges just as the ten minute alarm on our sets, starts to whistle. It is an agreed fact that you have to be out or almost out by the time that whistle sounds. We report the two body whereabouts to the fire chief, the condition we left the fires in and he sends us to get out of our gear as the turns to send the next two recruits in.
The next team in to the cabins manages to get the fires out. “Cold and black” they report and also manage to drag out the two bodies. A third team enters and finds a third body in a stair way where the person had apparently been trying to get out through a ceiling hatch. A stretcher is called for and the body is strapped to this and hauled out through the roof hatch by a winch.
This was a professionally run part, of a ship board fire fighting course. The fires were real and the smoke and high temperatures in the cabins were real. The bodies were mannequins. From the time the fire alarm was sounded and we made our entry to the cabins, about six minutes had elapsed. We were twelve minutes in the cabin and the next crew managed just nine minutes as their air was low. The third crew had eighteen minutes but had less heat, fire fighting and smoke to deal with. In all forty five minutes from alarm to “all clear and victims recovered”. And this was with a semi professional team under close supervision in a staged scenario. The heat of the fires was not enough to do damage to real victims but they certainly would not have survived the smoke.
For me it was a great opportunity to learn about shipboard firefighting. I can’t say that the lessons learnt could be turned to advantage on a small recreational vessel but certainly the need for smoke detectors on board seem to be paramount. I also strongly suggest that skippers think about how they are going to deal with fire on board their vessel.
Possibly not a scenario you can play out on board your own boat, but recently I was lucky enough to join a team on the Bell Bay site of the Australian Maritime College during a ships fire fighting course. Some of the lessons may be useful to you on your boat anyway.
The fire siren rings, seven short blasts and one long blast. We race to our muster point and are told there is a fire on board. It has taken over in three adjoining cabins. Two of us race off to don our breathing apparatus along with boots, gloves, helmets and the rest of the crew set up fire hoses. Two start cooling the outside of the cabin walls which in turn will make it cooler inside the cabins where the fires have taken hold. The fires have been burning for some minutes now and three of the crew are missing.
With compressed air cylinders on our backs and holding our face masks we race back to the scene and our controller checks our air gauges. 120 bar each which gives us about twelve minutes of fire fighting time with about a ten minute safety margin to get out. We don our masks take a hose and disdain from using a message string relying on using the hose instead. We enter the first cabin and immediately the heat is at us like a thick gooey wall. Protected with helmets, thick gloves boots and coats, the ears and back of the neck start to sear with the heat. Smoke is filling the space and it is dark and hard to see. We have our torches on and shuffle our feet feeling our way across the floor. We spot a fire and turn the hose toward it, just a stream of spray and soon steam and smoke is pouring off the fire but the flames are dwindling to nothing. My buddy suddenly turns off the hose and reaches with a hand to the floor. I shine my torch to his hand and see that he has his hand on a mannequin which is one body we have found. We know it has to be a body as we have been in this cabin for several minutes and the thick smoke would have overcome any one well before the fire even got under way. We move on to the adjoining cabin and the smoke is so thick and the air so hot we decide to try and vent some off. My partner aims a fine spray of water from his hose through an open port hole and soon we feel the cool air drafting from the open door which we used to enter. Seeing the spray the fire teams outside realise we need more barrier cooling and they also spray down the walls of the cabin.
Searching, crouched down low to be out of the smoke we find a second body tucked under a desk. Nothing we can do here. Shining our torches onto our air gauges we see that we are down to eighty bar. We need to be out by the time we are on fifty bar. We have several more precious minutes of fire fighting time left. In the next cabin another fire is burning fiercely. The hose is turned on to it and soon it is just smouldering. Both fires are damped down but not entirely out. The cabins are cooler, around three hundred degrees near the floor but we are almost out of air and quickly depart the way we came in, leaving the hose nozzle near the first fire. We report to the controller who looks at our gauges just as the ten minute alarm on our sets, starts to whistle. It is an agreed fact that you have to be out or almost out by the time that whistle sounds. We report the two body whereabouts to the fire chief, the condition we left the fires in and he sends us to get out of our gear as the turns to send the next two recruits in.
The next team in to the cabins manages to get the fires out. “Cold and black” they report and also manage to drag out the two bodies. A third team enters and finds a third body in a stair way where the person had apparently been trying to get out through a ceiling hatch. A stretcher is called for and the body is strapped to this and hauled out through the roof hatch by a winch.
This was a professionally run part, of a ship board fire fighting course. The fires were real and the smoke and high temperatures in the cabins were real. The bodies were mannequins. From the time the fire alarm was sounded and we made our entry to the cabins, about six minutes had elapsed. We were twelve minutes in the cabin and the next crew managed just nine minutes as their air was low. The third crew had eighteen minutes but had less heat, fire fighting and smoke to deal with. In all forty five minutes from alarm to “all clear and victims recovered”. And this was with a semi professional team under close supervision in a staged scenario. The heat of the fires was not enough to do damage to real victims but they certainly would not have survived the smoke.
For me it was a great opportunity to learn about shipboard firefighting. I can’t say that the lessons learnt could be turned to advantage on a small recreational vessel but certainly the need for smoke detectors on board seem to be paramount. I also strongly suggest that skippers think about how they are going to deal with fire on board their vessel.
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