A New View of Marine Firefighting

By George Collazo
2003 George Collazo

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: About the Galaxy Fire A Word of Explanation 1. Fire on a Frigid Sea 2. The Reality of Shipboard Firefighting 3. How We Attack Fires 4. Your Opponent 5. What is a Major Fire? 6. The Present System is Inadequate 7. Fundamentals of Tactical Training 8. Fundamental #1: Priority-Setting 9. Fundamental #2: Monitoring of Personnel 10. Fundamental #3: Command and Control 11. Fundamental #4: The Support Team 12. The Captain and Chief Engineer: The Person in the Wheelhouse 13. The Captain and Chief Engineer: The Role of the Chief Engineer 14. Organizing the Crew for Fire-Fighting 15. Training on Tactics vs. Contingencies 16. Tactics: Two-Team Rotation 17. When Things Go Wrong: Retreat Mode 18. Real Preparation for a Major Fire 19. Training: It Begins and Continues Aboard Ship 20. Training Aids 21. The Fallacy of Expensive Training 22. SCBAs and Air 23. A Primer on SCBA Bottles 24. Air Compressors 25. The Role of Marine Firefighting Training Facilities 26. "Practice Fields" 27. Conclusion

Preface: About the Galaxy Fire This article makes mention of the fire on the fishing vessel Galaxy, which occurred on October 20, 2002. Three dedicated, hard-working individuals died in the fire. Were it not for the Galaxy's captain and other brave individuals aboard, the loss of life would have been much greater.

It is not the intent of this article to criticize the actions of the Galaxy's officers and crew. Indeed, the author has nothing but admiration for the captain in particular, who acted selflessly in the best interests of the crew. I do not fault in any way the deceased. The chief mate and cook, in particular, responded to the emergency in the best traditions of the sea, with the welfare of the crew in mind, and paid for their dedication by making the ultimate sacrifice. I do not in any way impugn the reputation of the company which owned the Galaxy, which I personally know to be a business of the highest integrity; one that goes far beyond what is required in the interests of fishing vessel safety; and which takes a paternal interest in the welfare of its employees. I have no bones to pick with any safety agency or arm of the government. My sole purpose with this article is to advance the knowledge of marine firefighting, so that such tragedies are less likely to occur in the future. George Collazo, Seattle, 2003 A Word of Explanation This article concerns firefighting on uninspected vessels in the Alaskan Trade, though the conclusions drawn may apply equally well to any ship. In regards to firefighting equipment found aboard Alaskan fishing and freight vessels; the average boat might be said to carry 2 sets of firemen's turnouts (coat, pants, hood, boots, helmet, gloves), 2 SCBAs (self-contained breathing apparatus) units and 4 SCBA air bottles. Many vessels in the trade carry no firefighting gear whatsoever. Others carry much more than what is listed here.

F/V Galaxy on Fire, Bering Sea, 2002. (Photo: U.S. Coast Guard)

Fire on a Frigid Sea

The history of fire fighting in the Alaskan fishing trades is a fascinating mixture of heroism and unpreparedness, courage and incompetence. Which is odd, because the dangerous waters of the North Pacific and Bering Sea fosters tough, capable seamen. The nature of the Alaskan fishing industry, driven by technology and linked to worldwide markets, tends to place intelligent persons in the wheelhouse and engineroom. When the subject of fires on Alaskan ships is studied, one is struck not by the inexperience or foolishness of the officers involved but rather their experience and resilience under stress. None of that means anything to a fire, of course. Fire is the ultimate maneater. Once released it consumes food and oxygen like any other living thing, albeit at a hyperkinetic rate at odds with the organic world. We look at a forest fire on TV and marvel how even a thousand firefighters could hope to contain it, never stopping to consider that a shipboard fire will spread just as quickly; is, in fact, the same animal bottled up in the metal oven that is your ship. The purpose of this series of articles is not to preach again the need for fire safety and firefighting training. The entire maritime industry is well beyond that. What I hope to alert readers to is just how inadequate their level of preparation likely is. To alert them to the fact that there are no half measures in firefighting--either your crew is truly prepared or you might as well as abandon ship before someone gets hurt. This article will also detail low-cost ways of training your crewmembers aboard ship to prepare for firefighting. Real preparation for firefighting does not take tens of thousands of dollars worth of annual training budget. What it takes is something harder to come by: a mindset and willingness on the part of management and crews to actually face reality when it comes to themselves and their shortcomings.

The Reality of Shipboard Firefighting This article concerns itself with vessels in the Alaskan trade--fishing boats (from the 90' crabber to the 270' factory trawler), fish processors, tenders, coastal freighters and tugs. Hold and superstructure fires are more of a danger to uninspected vessels such as these, than to inspected vessels. Most of these vessels have sizeable amounts of plywood and foam insulation in their construction; an excellent fuel source. Processing vessels, especially, are subdivided into a warren of factory and living spaces on separate decks, joined by vertical shafts such as fidleys and elevator shafts. As is the case on most merchant vessels, firefighters on uninspected vessels are short-handed. In addition to this, those on uninspected vessels must also fight fires in a fuelrich environment, one in which a raging fire can break out on different decks at once, spreading through vertical shafts.

Crews contemplating a direct attack on a fire must be trained in excess of the present norm in the Alaskan fishing industry.

How We Attack Fires There are two options for fighting a fire on a ship: indirect and direct attack. Indirect attack (in part) is the stratagem of delaying the fire's spread by closing off ventilation, followed by the application of a fire extinguishing agent not on the seat of the fire itself but in the general area. Note the modifier "delay". While some fires can be put out by indirect attack it is an uncertain process. Essentially you are trying to choke a powerful beast or asphyxiate it with its own waste products. To not expect the animal to fight back would be foolish. An indirect attack buys you time, if nothing else, to abandon ship or make a direct attack. Keep in mind I am talking about the case of uninspected fishing vessels, not, for example, an "inspected" container ship, in which combustible materials are not allowed in ship's construction. A direct attack is just that. You are sending your crew in to find the lair of the beast and kill it. Hoses, extinguishers, SCBAs, turnouts--all the paraphernalia of firefighting--are called into play. Your crewmembers will enter a superheated atmosphere hot enough to melt the helmets on their heads, a fire creating its own ventilation system to expand itself exponentially.

The two methods of attack are wholly exclusive of each other. With a direct attack you want to vent off the heat and smoke which otherwise hampers your fire teams' effectiveness, knowing full well that increased ventilation allows the fire to spread. An indirect attack usually requires shutting off ventilation. A direct attack is the most dangerous option, of course. Unless your crew is equipped and truly prepared to deal with the beast--and I contend most crews are not--it is better to prosecute an indirect attack, or you are begging for an injury. In an indirect attack SCBAs and turnouts still have a vital role, if only in rescuing trapped personnel and setting off fixed firefighting systems. In 1996 the tug Scandia caught fire off the coast of Rhode Island. The fire might have been quickly extinguished by the fixed CO2 system. However, the discharge controls, located in the fidley above the engineroom, could not be reached because of the lack of SCBAs and turnout gear aboard. The fidley had become so hot no one could enter. The end result was the grounding of the barge North Cape and the spill of 828,000 gallons of fuel oil on pristine beaches. I argue that nearly all vessels, in any trade, are ill-prepared for a direct attack on a major fire. Unless training of the sort specified elsewhere in this series of articles is performed, crews should limit themselves to indirect attacks. SCBAs and turnouts should only be used to rescue trapped personnel, or similar limited tasks. Your Opponent I prefer to think of fire a living entity. I do this not to play cute with the subject, to anthropomorphize fire as would be done in a Disney training film. By any objective set of standards, it is difficult not to class fire as a living thing. It metabolizes air in the precise proportions you and I do. It requires food. It generates waste products. It will die from hypothermia. It can be poisoned. It breeds at an incredible rate if unchecked. And just as any brute animal will fight back if attacked, fire is prepared to defend itself. This is rarely spoken of in marine firefighting schools--the viciousness with which fire lashes back, seemingly with a mind of its own, when attacked. -You make plans to fight a fire with hoses. The fire takes out your generators. You lose the fire pumps. The fire has disarmed you. -A fire team opens the door to a blazing compartment. The inrush of oxygen causes an explosion. The chief mate is gravely injured. The fire has decapitated your leadership. -Your fire team, breathing from air bottles which will last only ten minutes, manages to find its way down to the factory floor after seven minutes of stumbling around smoke-filled spaces. They can see the seat of the fire. Their

SCBA alarms go off, warning of only two or three minutes of air left. The fire was clever, hid itself from view, drew your people in and asphyxiated them.

A trainee extinguishes a Class B fire with a portable CO2 extinguisher. The author defines a major fire as one that cannot be extinguished with portable extinguisher.

What is a Major Fire? In this series of articles I will constantly refer to a 'major fire'. I define a major fire as one that cannot be put out with portable extinguishers alone. I also use the term 'Hot Zone', which I define as that area in which a person cannot safely operate unless wearing an SCBA, due to the presence of smoke. The Present System is Inadequate Put aside for a moment the fact that we treat fire as a sort of venereal disease in our contingency plans, ready to crop up any moment but easily put down with the right medicine. Consider our preparations for fires aboard ship, as they exist now. We are well past the Dark Ages of emergency preparedness. After all, we have the Station Bill, do we not? We have the Shipboard Firefighting Plan, covering contingencies from hold fire to engineroom fire. We have the lovely Safety Equipment Plan, drawn up by the marine architect, showing in three colors where all the firefighting equipment can be found. What is more, we have drills and we have equipment.

Why is it then three persons died on the fishing vessel Galaxy in the Bering Sea, October 2002? Plans and equipment were in place. The officers had attended firefighting school, were experienced, brave and extremely competent at what they did. Yet the three members of the investigating fire team were blown overboard before they even saw the actual fire. Station bills, plans, equipment--all meant nothing. The fire, finding itself under attack, waved what amounts to an exceedingly large paw and smacked three humans over the side in an instant. One drowned. Two others were pulled aboard, one of whom subsequently drowned in the chaotic bid to abandon ship, as fire consumed the vessel with incredible speed. The fire advanced. It did not play to the rules of the script as laid down in all the plans and bills. If seamanship and courage were enough to deal with a fire, fires would be put out in short order. The trouble lies in the fact that fire--a primitive lifeform existing on an accelerated scale of existence--can easily change its behavior to outwit any poorly thought-out plan you may have devised. Fire's stock-in-trade is killing the brave and reckless. The only hope of extinguishing a major fire lies in tactical training carried on aboard ship on a regular basis. Without this tactical training mariners should not even attempt a direct attack on a fire--a classic charge-up-the-hoses and let's-go-get-it attack. Containment and evacuation should be the only options. Fighting a major fire is like playing in the Super Bowl--and the fact is your team's experience consists of five days or less of training taken years ago, piecemeal, nobody in the team having played together as a group (i.e. trained in a simulator as a crew). Who would honestly expect to go into a Super Bowl game with such an inexperienced team, fight the best team there is--no holds barred-- and not come out with someone injured or dead? What's more, you actually think you have a chance--it was built into poor-sucker-you in firefighting school, surreptitiously and by osmosis. You would attack the fire and it would die; unless of course you were slovenly in responding to it, in which case you deserved what you got. The fact that the opposing team was actually better than you, could kick your ass in short order on its worst day with one blaze tied behind its back, was not discussed. Or let's use another analogy, perhaps more to the point. Marine firefighting is akin to hunting lions in tall grass. The lions will fight back. You had better be prepared for those attacks. Somebody will get hurt--depend on it. Your people will get lost and separated in the grass. Forget about command-and-control from somebody back in camp. Your hunters have to be able to operate independently; be savvy enough not to inadvertently shoot each other; steady enough to hunt on even with a hunter down. And they need support: more ammo, more water under that hot savanna sun. What I propose is a radical new way of approaching firefighting organization and training aboard uninspected vessels in the Alaskan trade. Radical for the maritime world, not for professional land-bound firefighters. For them it has been standard procedure for many years. 7

Most firefighting schools have time to only teach the rudiments of extinguishing fires at sea. Tactical training is needed for true proficiency.

Fundamentals of Tactical Training Some of the fundamental differences in tactical training I see between professional firefighters and ship's crews acting as firefighters are: 1. 2. 3. 4. Priority-setting. Monitoring of personnel. Command and control. The existence of an efficient Support Team.

Most station bills will address one or more of these fundamentals in a cursory manner, but seldom with the depth they demand. These fundamentals are the cornerstone of the rigorous shipboard training which must occur if a crew expects to mount a successful direct attack on a major fire. Without them success is an unconscionable dice-roll. Fundamental #1: Priority-Setting A city fire department is under no illusion that it can put out any fire that comes its way. Firemen set priorities accordingly. First comes saving public lives. Next comes protecting firefighters. A sorry third is saving property. A warehouse that is a raging inferno is often let burn. The firefighters content themselves with preventing the spread of fire to other structures. Everyone goes home alive. With marine firefighting the first priority should be the preservation of life. If poorly trained crewmembers are rushed into a direct attack on a major 8

fire this priority will have been violated. Crewmembers will be taking a risk, which, unless it involves the rescue of trapped personnel, is unjustifiable. Not conducting a direct attack on the fire, knowing full well the fire will eventually spread from any containment boundaries, is a real option. As I have said, with uninspected fishing vessels, particularly the older ships, trying an indirect attack by closing off all ventilation and doors seldom extinguishes a major fire, and usually serves only to delay its spread. Nevertheless, it is my opinion that an indirect attack is all most mariners are capable of if they want to avoid loss of life. This does not impugn the caliber of the people or their training. Mariners are not professional firefighters and will never approach that skill-level, unless they choose to invest far more time than is practical given the constraints of their jobs. Even then the physical demands on a professional firefighter are far in excess of what we can rationally expect from the average mariner. If the Galaxy crew had devoted their time to slowing the advance of the fire by closing doors and securing ventilation, towards the end of swiftly abandoning ship in an organized manner, three men would be alive today. To a certain degree basic firefighting training puts personnel in danger of injury or death because they are left with an illusion of capability they do not truly have. In the vernacular: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The logic is irrefutable: lives on the Galaxy were lost when they needn't have been. This is not the fault of the officers or company but rather the present mindset in the entire maritime world. The Galaxy's officers were doing what they were trained to do, in conformance with the practice of most merchant marine vessels. In part, the danger lies in relying on contingency plans and "paper planning" of all kinds. Contingency plans read like cake recipes. The cook always assumes the ingredients will behave the same way, every time, when in fact nothing can be more unpredictable than the makeup of a ship's crew or the interaction of that crew with a raging fire. For example: Central to firefighting contingency plans should be the question of when to abandon ship. An average contingency plan addresses this with directives such as "Only when all means available to extinguish the fire have been exhausted will the crew abandon ship". Better we supplant that way of thinking with a decision-tree: CONTINGENCY PLAN FOR FIRE-FIGHTING

Are there any trapped crew members that need to be rescued? Yes? Make a direct attack on the fire. No? Then Is the crew highly trained and physically fit to face a major fire? Yes. Fight the fire. No? Then

Use an indirect attack. Close off all ventilation sources and all doors. Actuate fixed fire suppression systems. Is the weather good and help at hand? Yes? Abandon ship. No? Then Deploy carefully monitored crews topside ONLY, to cool the weather deck and slow the spread of fire. Prepare to abandon ship. Is the fire advancing on the survival craft / embarkation deck? Yes. Abandon ship. No? Then...

To most mariners this is a strange way of thinking of emergency plans, always so black-and-white between the covers of their vinyl binders. In the actual event decisions to questions never posed by the contingency plan must be made quickly, under enormous pressure. Chief among these are always: What are your priorities? Saving lives or preventing pollution? Is your crew competent enough to fight a fire? Do you have the equipment for a direct attack? We assume that crews are competent enough to tackle a major fire because of STCW training: a ludicrous assumption. If you're a captain ask yourself the hard question: can your crew play the equivalent of the Super Bowl without getting hurt? During your fire drills do crewmembers actually breathe the air from the SCBA tanks? No? Forget about direct attacks, unless you're trying to save trapped personnel. Use your gear to cool down boundaries and delay the spread of the fire, and prepare to evacuate. You are out-classed. In training at Coastal Transportation's own fire-fighting simulator I find that mariners who do not practice with live-air on a regular basis make serious errors that would, at least, cause a direct attack on a fire to lead to a fiasco. The resulting rout and wasted time would result in fire spreading faster than it would have, had it been left alone behind closed doors. At worst these errors would have led to the death of a "green" crewmember in the Hot Zone. With the Galaxy fire three of the most experienced people in the crew were just investigating the fire--hadn't even got near the seat of it --when they were blown overboard. Think of this when you ask yourself if you're ready to play the game. The average mariner reading this article is no better prepared than those individuals. To extinguish a fire at the cost of one life, when the option was abandoning ship on a calm sea with the Coast Guard at hand, is a cold victory.

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A key factor in a safe firefighting operation is keeping track of who goes in the Hot Zone and how long they have been in.

Fundamental #2: Monitoring of Personnel In a major blaze ashore firefighters are rotated in-and-out of the fire-line. A professional firefighter may only spend 10 minutes near or inside a structure combating a blaze, before he or she is rotated out and another firefighter takes their place. There are three good reasons for this. Heat and physical exertion soon drains a firefighter's strength. Professional firemen are in extremely good physical condition, better than most of the persons on your shipboard fire team. If a professional gets tired in 10 minutes of firefighting, imagine what would happen to one of your crewmembers. Next is the all-important subject of SCBA-air; important enough to be addressed in full elsewhere in this article. Fire-fighters should be withdrawn from the fire-line before their low-air alarms go off. An SCBA air alarm goes off to indicate 20% of the air supply is left. This typically means two to three minutes of air, with older style SCBAs. That's not enough of a safety margin to escape from a smoke-filled environment below decks. In 1993 the fish-processing vessel All-Alaskan burned in the Bering Sea. The single fatality was one of a pair of crewmembers who, acting without orders, donned SCBAs to investigate the fire in the ship's hold. Both men turned back on hearing their alarms go off. They did not allow for a safety margin for escape. The victim became separated from his crewmate and died of asphyxiation. Most importantly, rotation gives the fire-commander, the person in charge of the operation, a measure of control over the firefighters--one of the few controls the commander has. The commander knows the fire will fight back in unexpected ways; that it might advance at any minute; that radios will break down and escape routes can be cut off. The fire commander has limited control over the fire's behavior. By rotating fire-fighters in-and-out on a set schedule the commander can monitor and exert control over people, not

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the fire. Remember, the priority should be preserving lives, not extinguishing the fire. "Rotate who?" is the question that comes to some mariners' minds. A city fire department has a wealth of persons to draw from to combat a fire. A vessel in the Alaskan trade might have a crew of well over a hundred persons, but typically less than ten have any firefighting training, and usually far less than that. Rotation of personnel is still possible, however, with a crew of as little as six, as will be explained later on in this article. Fundamental #3: Command and Control The commander of a shoreside fire-fighting effort is on-scene, not in the firehouse miles away. He or she sees what is going on and keeps positive track of personnel locations and fire-lines. Most importantly, the commander gives his or her undivided attention to the fire. Consider the shipboard fire drills you have participated in over the years. It is a rare person who has not experienced a captain trying to run the firefighting operation from the wheelhouse, with no real appreciation for what is happening down below. This is a recipe for disaster. If the captain wants to leave the wheelhouse and lead the firefighting effort, putting the mate in charge of the wheelhouse and the Maydays, so be it. But the fire commander must be on-scene and authorized to take whatever actions he or she deems necessary, with no other duties such as navigating the ship or talking to the Coast Guard. This leads back to the Station Bill. The Station Bill lists who will do what job in case of an emergency, e.g. the captain in the wheelhouse and the mate fighting the fire. What happens when reality intrudes? Departure from the Station Bill causes confusion. There will be times when a young knowledgeable captain will be a better fire-commander than an older mate just brought in for a relief trip. If the Station Bill does not reflect this it will be an agent for chaos rather than organization.

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In a major fire injuries should be expected. Personnel must be trained to deal with them.

Fundamental #4: The Support Team A major firefighting effort ashore requires a sizeable support team. Specialized trucks containing SCBA bottles and hoses are dispatched. A mobile canteen to rehydrate firefighters sets up shop. A first-aid station is readied to treat and evacuate injured citizens and firefighters. Without these support services the fire-fighting effort grinds to a halt. Without breathing-air firefighters cannot function. Without liquids they drop from dehydration. Aboard ship there must be a team (or person) designated to perform all these services, if a direct attack on a fire is contemplated. While station bills and contingency plans might touch on these matters, they seldom treat them in a coherent way, nor do captains allow for in-depth training of Support Team members.

The scene behind the wheelhouse of the Coastal Trader (I) after a fire in 1997. Notice the melted aluminum stack (background, right) and the holes in the aluminum skiff (foreground, right). Damage to the latter was caused solely by radiant heat. The fire spread to the wheelhouse early on.

The Captain and Chief Engineer

The Person in the Wheelhouse In the traditional plan for shipboard firefighting the captain stays in the wheelhouse. The captain makes maydays and directs rescue craft to the ship. The ship still has to be navigated, if possible, to prevent collisions and grounding. Ultimately, the captain has to make the decision whether to stick with the ship or evacuate.

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Manning the wheelhouse with the captain is perfectly sensible, unless the captain wants to run the firefighting effort from the wheelhouse. Some captains will be unable to resist the temptation of running the show themselves. In such a case it is better that the captain assumes the firecommander's role himself and leave the wheelhouse for the fire lines. A trustworthy mate can easily handle the mayday-aspect of the operation. But the two jobs--fire commander and "wheelhouse person" communicating with the outside world--should be completely separate. Both demand the full attention of the responsible person. In my job as port captain I have often paired young captains who have a detailed knowledge of their own ships and crew members with older mates new to the vessel. In such a case the captain might very well be the best choice for fire-commander while the mate calls in help. This is perfectly acceptable and, if contemplated, the Station Bill should reflect this, so there is no confusion when the event happens. The Role of the Chief Engineer Many fire contingency plans state that if the engineroom is on fire the chief engineer will man the engine room. This is nonsense. To say that a chief engineer will lead the attack on an engineroom fire is one thing. But there is no "manning" of a compartment on fire. There are no bystanders. The question is, is your chief engineer competent to lead an attack on a fire? You are playing the Super Bowl, remember. Chief engineers, like captains, are often older individuals not in the best of physical shape. Why would you want that sort of person on a fire team performing a direct attack on a raging fire? The chief engineer on an uninspected vessel is often the only person in the entire crew who possesses the knowledge to put the engineering plant back together again after a fire. You must assume your front-line leadership will be injured or killed in a major fire; welcome to reality. The loss of a captain may or may not mean much, depending on the experience of the chief mate. Far worse for the ship would be the loss of the chief engineer. He is the king on the chessboard. You don't want to sacrifice him or her at the start of the game.

An excellent position for the Chief is as head of the Support Team. The Chief's leadership skills will be needed to direct these individuals while the mates are busy with the fire teams. The Chief's mechanical skills will be needed to troubleshoot, repair or jury rig the SCBAs, emergency pumps, and other gear needed for the firefighting effort.

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Fire team members practice organization at a simulator.

Organizing the Crew for Fire-Fighting

On uninspected vessels in the Alaskan Trade it is usual to organize crew members as "hose teams" or "fire teams" of two or more persons each. The captain is in the wheelhouse making Maydays and leading rescue craft to the ship. The other crewmembers are given ancillary roles: "assist as directed" is a frequent one, as is "close doors and ventilation", even though the latter goes against the basic tenets of waging a direct attack on fire. Splitting the crew into hose teams makes sense. What is not appreciated is that the ancillary personnel (the Support Team) are in fact vital to the effort. This Support Team must be trained long and hard in helping firefighters don their gear, change air bottles, facilitate rotation, perform the grunt work of feeding hoses around corners, rehydrate personnel, and--importantly--provide first aid. In testing at Coastal Transportation I have observed that a poorly trained Support Team causes the entire firefighting effort to grind to a halt. And the training they receive must be done with live-air, i.e. SCBA air must actually be used. A crew of seven can perform the jobs listed above, though with small crews the fire commander must take part in the actual firefighting. A fire-commander ashore directs the operation from outside the Hot Zone, letting others do the fighting. Most vessels in the Alaskan Trade do not have this luxury of manpower. Very often the mate (or captain) will have to don the gear and take the nozzle. Having the fire commander incommunicado in the Hot Zone for periods of time may not be ideal, but it is dictated by reality. Which is why fire-team 15

members must be trained to act independently and make good decisions for themselves. After all, it is assumed that officers will be decimated in a direct attack on a major fire. If the crew is incapable of fighting on with their leader down a direct attack should not be contemplated. With larger crews special problems present themselves. On processing vessels with crews of well over a hundred someone (or better yet several people) must provide crowd-control duties, to prevent a chaotic rush for the liferafts. Processing vessels have known this for years and, in general, have made excellent plans for coping with this situation. The only problem with these plans is the same as that for any written plan made in regards to firefighting; provision must be made for the loss of leaders. The Galaxy fire is a stark example. The captain, receiving a report of a little smoke below decks, delayed making an ETA. Quite prudently he sent an investigation team to the scene; it would be a rare captain to make a Mayday based just on the initial report of a little smoke. When those crew members were blown over the side by an explosion the captain took over the manoverboard operation on deck. By the time he and the crew had rescued the two survivors in the water the wheelhouse was in flames, including the radios. At risk to his own life the captain searched the burning wheelhouse until he found an operable handheld-VHF. His Mayday to the Coast Guard base on St. Paul Island brought help to the survivors. The abandon ship operation did not go well. Crowd control may have helped but of the two people ideal for this task, the captain and mate, one was busy elsewhere with vital work and the other, tragically, was dead. The Station Bill and contingency plans, the cornerstones of maritime disaster planning, went out the window in minutes. The fire decapitated the ship's leadership as it spread to multiple decks simultaneously. Even a crew highly trained in firefighting with unlimited SCBA air and portable fire pumps would have been hard pressed to contain it.

Along with the proper gear a firefighter needs the proper tactics in his head to contend with a major fire.

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Training on Tactics vs. Contingencies I hope I have stressed enough the unpredictable and relentless nature of fire aboard ship. To think in terms of specific plans for certain spaces is not helpful. Rather than concentrate on "cookbook" contingency plans for particular fires I believe ship's officers should concentrate on learning a toolbox of tactics that can be used for any fire, switching between them as needed. This means training and more training, most of it done aboard ship. When conducting drills these tactics should be varied for different scenarios of fire. -A fuel-oil fire has broken out in the engineroom. The fire teams responded quickly. At the start two hoses were deployed simultaneously, from opposite directions, so that an attack from one direction would not simply push the fire elsewhere. Eventually the fire was extinguished in the engineroom but only after it spread to the factory above it. It burns for hours. Firefighters rotate inand-out of the Hot Zone, while the Support Team tends the fire-fighters and equipment. In the example above two separate attacks were used: a coordinated attack from two directions, to prevent the actions of one team from spreading the fire in another direction; and two-team rotation to fight a stubborn fire. Learning tactics like these should form the backbone of fire drills.

Team members practicing proper entry procedures.

Tactics

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The length of these articles does not allow a comprehensive discussion of shipboard firefighting tactics. Therefore I will touch only on the most difficult to learn: two-team rotation. Two-Team Rotation For a major fire, especially one that is well established but confined to a single space, two-team rotation is a useful tactic. It seems very familiar to most mariners. One fire team goes into the Hot Zone to deal with the fire. They come out eventually and rotate with another team. This is good as far as it goes. What is missing is timing the duration of the personnel in the Hot Zone. What is the priority in fire-fighting? Preserving lives. Once a fire team goes below deck they are out of contact. Handheld radios, as everyone knows, are difficult to use with an SCBA mask on. Once overheated in the pocket of a fireman's turnouts they become inoperable anyway. At what point does it become clear that the firefighters in the Hot Zone are trapped or lost? The firefighters waiting above can only wonder and worry--the kind of doubt that engenders panic. Panic is loss of control and control is precisely what is needed, if not over the fire then over the personnel. For that reason firefighters need to be recalled from the Hot Zone after a set duration of time. For the average SCBA found aboard uninspected vessels ten minutes is a good duration, perhaps fifteen minutes for more modern SCBA units which tend to last longer. At any rate, the firefighters should begin their return to a safe atmosphere before their low-air alarms go off, to provide a safe margin of time to effect an escape. The firefighters in the Hot Zone cannot consult watches buried under their gear. The standby team and Support Team need to time the firefighters in the Hot Zone and signal them a few minutes before their time is up. This can be done with the general alarm system if it functions. It can be done with a hammer banging on a bulkhead or a small air horn stowed with the emergency equipment. But the firefighters outside the Hot Zone--standby fire team and Support Team--must understand they are responsible for the lives of those within it. They are the actors in the only reliable contingency plan in the firefighting operation: when the set duration of time is up and the fireteam in the Hot Zone has not appeared, the standby fire team has but a single purpose: to save their comrades. If the two teams should meet half way in the Hot Zone so be it, but the standby team should enter without hesitation for the sole purpose of rescue. Let us suppose however the first team (led by the mate, who is the fire commander) comes up at the end of ten minutes. They pull off their SCBA masks. As the Support Team swarms over them like a pit-crew in a stock car race, changing bottles and offering water, the sweating, breathless firefighters tell the standby team where the fire is and what steps are needed to combat it. The standby team now enters the Hot Zone and combats the fire. The first team, resting in a safe atmosphere, can take the time to radio up to the wheelhouse what they have seen and what steps have been taken to combat 18

the fire. When the set duration of time has elapsed for the team in the Hot Zone the resting team goes in without hesitation, either to rescue their crew mates or combat the fire. No time is wasted in waiting and wondering. Once the Support Team has changed out air bottles and offered water to the resting team they take care of other duties: making sure hoses are freed up, fetching gear, tending emergency- or dewatering pumps. All important is timing and signaling the firefighters in the Hot Zone. Keeping the firefighters hydrated is usually neglected in shipboard drills. The firefighters will sweat prodigiously underneath their turnouts and once dehydrated quickly lose strength. If the fire continues on for hours they will begin to suffer from heat exhaustion. All firefighting schools make a point of keeping their trainees hydrated. For some reason the lesson seems to be ignored aboard ship. Hydration of course presupposes you have stockpiled water for the purpose. A major fire will likely cause a loss of electrical power, disabling the saltwater and freshwater systems. You may have a portable firefighting pump to get water to the fire, but how do you get water into your firefighters?

A Dash for Timber by Frederic Remington. Train for worst case scenarios, such as a hasty retreat in the face of an aggressive threat.

When Things Go Wrong: Retreat Mode You are hunting a pack of lions under a blazing African sun, in dense, eightfoot tall copses of grass, where you cannot see a foot in front of you. The Great White Hunter, your leader, is taken by surprise by a lion and mauled. You find what's left of him only by the screams. The lion responsible for the carnage is killed but there are more out there, you can hear them roaring, smell them. Without a leader, arguing over what aid to render the injured, blind in the grass, your party begins to panic. Adrenaline flows. Reason is forgotten. Given a few moments to think in a new leader might be chosen and the hunt renewed. Instead the lions seize the opportunity of confusion to spring and turn on their attackers. The hunters become the hunted. Your party begins running 19

It is the dark side of the fight-or-flight reflex. Panic. The replacement of rational thought with fear. I call it Retreat Mode. Military commanders know that once soldiers panic in the face of the enemy and begin running it is extremely hard to get them to turn again. The same thing happens in firefighting. The fire is reported. Everyone suits up. The chief mate and assistant engineer go down the smoke-filled ladderway to investigate the fire, navigating by feel in zero-visibility, punished by the intense heat whenever they are so foolish as to stand up. In a few minutes they come back up, the assistant all but dragging the mate behind him. The mate stumbled and his mask came off. His lungs are singed with smoke. What's more a door was left open during the retreat. The fire now spreads up the ladderway with a roar. The firefighters' staging position, where all the equipment was brought to, is being overrun by smoke. Their leader is out of commission. The second mate is busy treating the chief mate, whose throat is swelling from the smoke, choking him. There is no one for the fire team to turn to. Nothing has gone according to plan. The captain in the wheelhouse comes down and shouts orders conflicting with the situation at hand. Bedlam ensues. The crew runs for the liferafts Reliance on station bills and contingency plans, to a certain degree, predisposes crew members to panic. Once the persons in charge of the firefighting effort are incapacitated the command structure falls apart. The plan collapses. Chaos ensues. The fire will fight back. If you don't want to risk casualties then mount an indirect attack, keep clear of the beast, and prepare to abandon ship. If, on the other hand, you do want to mount a direct attack you had better train your crew to deal with the loss of fire commanders and still fight. If personnel are poorly trained the result of a direct attack gone awry is called a rout. A door is opened, an explosion happens, people go down and it is a mad stampede for the survival craft. If training has been done well the survivors of the explosion fall back to a new fire-line with their injured and supplies, regroup, and try again. In military parlance it is called "falling back in good order". It is the hardest tactic to train for. Retreat in marine firefighting is common. The ability for fire-fighting teams to operate with their primary leader down, and still maneuver in the face of a rapidly advancing fire, can only come with training far in excess of what most ships normally do.

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F/V Blue North rescues part of the Galaxy's crew, as she blazes in the Bering Sea. Photo: U.S. Coast Guard.

Real Preparation for a Major Fire Five steps are needed if a company is serious about preparing its crews for marine firefighting. 1. Station bills and contingency plans must take into account the reality of marine fire-fighting, which means: a. Determining the suitability of the fire-fighters in regards to the type of fire they are confronting. (Not all crew members are physically or mentally prepared to combat a major fire). b. Gauging the suitability of the firefighting equipment in regards to the type of fire confronted. (Make a direct attack on a full-blown factory fire with just one SCBA and two bottles of air? Forget it.) c. Contemplating the loss of leaders. (What are the firefighters' standing orders if, say, the chief mate is incapacitated? Default to another leader? Call off the attack?) 3. The fundamentals of priority-setting, monitoring of personnel, command and control, and the necessity of a support team must all be addressed in written plans and training. 4. Personnel must be trained aboard ship using live-air from the SCBA bottles monthly. 5. Personnel must be trained to act as fire-teams capable of independent action. Each person donning turnouts and SCBAs

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should know everyone else's job as well as their own. They must know what to do when their leadership is removed, even if that just means falling back in good order. If team members are incapable of learning these concepts they should not don the gear to make a direct attack on fire. 6. A support team must be capable of supplying fire team members with breathing air and liquids for hydration, as well as first aid for injuries. They must be trained in their jobs. 7. Firefighters should have annual simulator training ashore, to test their competence, planning and equipment. This sort of training does not exist at present. It is not like the present variety of marine firefighting training offered. If a trainee doesn't personally go through three bottles of SCBA air in a simulator session the training is insufficient.

Team members helping each other with their gear at a practice ground.

Training: It Begins and Continues Aboard Ship STCW requirements help in regard to training. But traditional Coast Guardcertified firefighting training only teaches the rudiments of the game. Just as five days of football practice won't prepare you for the Super Bowl, five days of firefighting training won't prepare you for a direct attack on a major fire. Ongoing practice and coaching is needed. You need to play the game if you expect to get good at it. Moreover the crew must train as a team, not as individuals. What better time to train than a fire drill? A fire drill can be a valuable learning experience. When is it? Crew members learn how to put their gear on quickly. Once this

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plateau of competency is reached little or no learning goes on afterwards. In fact, some crew members develop a mindset that just because they can don their gear in a drill in under a minute they are prepared for all hell breaking loose. Those persons are in for a rude awakening when the event does occur. On too many ships drills have become something akin to going to church--a chore seriously approached and soberly conducted, but minus actual learning. Good captains recognize the huge problem of making drills realistic, of giving an edge to a fire drill to shake their crew from complacency. The need for this is enormous if the crew is to have any competency in firefighting. The captain will have to face resistance from the crewmembers themselves. If no one is sweating, if a few sore muscles and bruised egos aren't endured on the road to proficiency, little or no learning is going on. To be truthful there will be ships where, for a variety of reasons (physical and mental), crews cannot be goaded into any kind of efficient firefighting force. It is best for captains to learn this information before a major fire breaks out aboard ship. Station bills must be drafted and contingency plans written with the individual capabilities of the crew members in mind. Not a simple task. After devising a realistic scenario of shipboard fire, a captain should conduct a fire drill with the participants in turnouts operating SCBAs on live-air. A smoke machine would be a great aid. After witnessing the crews' performance a knowledgeable captain should be able to see their weaknesses. The deficiencies should then be addressed during drills aboard ship A period of time before or after a drill should be set aside for teaching each crew member the basics: SCBA operation. Proper movement in the Hot Zone. How to find your way out of a space in zero visibility. To be honest many captains are more or less ignorant about these subjects themselves, and will have to read manuals and perhaps attend firefighting courses again to become proficient. Once the rudiments have been learned (or relearned) the real work starts: training the crew to function as a group, so that if one team member is incapacitated the group can still function, if only to fall back in good order. Molding each team member into a leader is neither desirable or practical. The goal is to train crew members to make fundamental decisions that will preserve life. A training technique towards this end is rotating different crew members through the fire commander position during firefighting drills. The actual fire commander can stand back and observe the performance of the fire teams and revise contingency plans based on the competency of the crew. The SCBAs need to be activated in at least one drill a month. The low-air alarms need to ring. People have to swap out bottles from pressurized units. Drills done by simply breathing ambient air out the masks' disconnected breathing tube won't cut it. SCBAs are deceptively complex to operate. For example, in training at my company I find personnel that still don't remember that SCBA bottles have safety devices which must be actuated to close the 23

valve. (Luckily these are people new to the company). In simulator training precious minutes are lost and SCBAs are rendered inoperable by poorly trained people trying to change out bottles. If those persons had used live-air during drills the mistakes would not have been made.

Training Aids In addition to the ship's own fire-fighting gear only a few props are needed for realistic training aboard ship. Smoke machines are invaluable. A small smoke machine, perfectly adequate for training purposes, costs as little as $75. The smoke (usually a fog of water-based glycerin compounds) is non-toxic and non-flammable. Larger machines costing around $500-$800 can flood the superstructure of a 200' long vessel with fog in minutes, especially if aided by a common fan. The fog will even trip smoke alarms. The fog is extremely clean. The only place residue might be a problem is a very small compartment after the machine has been left on for a considerable time. Having crew members accustomed to working in zero-visibility is just one benefit of a smoke machine. Another is checking the ventilation patterns aboard ship and testing the effectiveness of ventilation closures. Training with a smoke machine aboard a Coastal Transportation ship disclosed a large ventilation leak between the engineroom fidley and the galley. If a fire had broken out in the engineroom the galley would have quickly been flooded with smoke. Good information for the ship's officers to know. To simulate the seat of the fire red Christmas tree lights work well, especially in conjunction with fog. Hose handling is a vital fire-fighting skill. Going about the interior of the ship with a fully charged hose during a drill is enough to give most officers the shivers. Yet in simulator training I see attacks either stymied or slowed by failure of the support team to feed hose to the fire teams in the Hot Zone. For realistic training a charged hose is desirable. Fittings can be cobbled together to inflate the fire hose with compressed air. This gives the trainees the awkwardness of a charged hose to contend with, if not the weight. If the crew size allows it a useful piece of training gear is a video camera or, better yet, two. While Coastal Transportation has its own firefighting simulator, shipboard fire drills are sometimes conducted at the dock to see how crews perform in a more familiar environment. The drills are realistically staged with a minimum of equipment. Smoke machines are used. Officers from the company are called in to play the part of Coast Guard personnel communicating with the wheelhouse via sideband radio. During these drills two video cameramen record the drill. One follows the actions of the person in the wheelhouse. The other cameraman follows the firefighters. At the end of the session the tapes are shown simultaneously on side-by-side televisions. This technique allows each "half" of the operation to see what the other was

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doing. It was instrumental, for example, in proving to some captains that trying to run the firefighting operation from the wheelhouse is disastrous. Reviewing just a single videotape after a drill is a wonderful way of debriefing crew members on their performance. At this point many a reader shakes his or her head. They have heard it before: sermons preaching more training. And they know it will never happen, because of the brick wall called cost. The Fallacy of Expensive Training Many is the captain who has marched into his home office demanding his or her crew be better equipped and trained in firefighting. Most march out empty handed after being told the cost of such training makes it impossible. The argument that unpreparedness will cost more than training in the long run is quickly countered by the port captain's grumbling about keeping the company afloat in precarious financial times. Firefighting equipment is like any other consumer good. You can buy the Maserati of gear or the Ford Taurus. You can buy new gear or old. A great ship's cook will boast he or she can make a delicious dinner out of beans and cardboard. An experienced fitter will say the best torch in the world is whatever is in his hand. The fanciest equipment in the world will never make up for lack of practice in using it. A single SCBA can cost $3,000, a new bottle $375, a set of fireman's turnouts $1000. On the other hand, reconditioned SCBAs can be purchased for less than $400, and reconditioned air bottles for less than $100. It is a shoestring operation that can't afford to spend $90, say, every other month for another air bottle. Do this for a year and you have six bottles. If a company is serious and aggressive enough the equipment can be purchased at a reasonable price over time. Nor does it make sense to buy all the equipment at once. Equipment is useless without training and training will take time. Not one simulator session but months of work at drills, using the fully activated stock of SCBAs and bottles you slowly build up. SCBAs and Air An army marches on its stomach. A fire-fighting operation marches on compressed breathing air. I have been on boats with a grand total of four SCBA air bottles. I have been on ships with upwards of twenty bottles and a special compressor to refill them. What is common with all operations is that no one wants to use the air in the bottles, lest they be caught with a reduced supply in case of a fire. The truth is that unless some of the air is used in training the rest is nearly worthless. Sending someone in to fight a major fire without recent, 25

meaningful experience operating a SCBA is begging for serious injury or death. SCBA operation absent this training should be relegated to rescuing trapped personnel or reaching fixed fire system activation controls, rather than used for direct attack on fires. Each person designated to be on a fire team should go through a complete bottle of air in a single drill at least every month. For most vessels this means four to six bottles of air reserved just for training. The bottles can be filled at the local dive shop, or if the locals are friendly, the fire station. But I cannot stress enough that unless some of the bottles are emptied in training on a regular basis, the rest are nearly worthless. A Primer on SCBA Bottles For more detailed information on SCBAs check this link. SCBA bottle construction comes in three types: the fiberglass (aka composite bottle), aluminum, and steel. Professional firefighters prefer the composite bottle. Composites weigh less than the solid metal types but are twice as expensive and have a limited lifetime. Solid metals bottles have no expiration as long as they are in good condition. Aluminum bottles are lighter than steel. But steel bottles are available on the surplus market for less than $100 vs. $175 for a reconditioned aluminum bottle and $375 for a new composite. The $4600 dollars that will buy a stateof-the-art SCBA and 8 composite bottles will also buy you a reconditioned workhorse of a SCBA and 24 used steel bottles. The air doesn't care what's wrapped around it. Quantity is all-important. Better you have four honorably scarred, heavy bottles of air than a single bright shiny composite. 24 bottles of air? Are we planning to build a fire department? Do the math. Let's say you intend to fight a fire for two hours. You rotate your firefighters every ten minutes. After two hours of fire fighting you will use 24 bottles of air. If you are contemplating a direct attack on a major fire you had better put that fire out before your air runs out. A half extinguished fire, like a wounded animal, can be the most dangerous of all. Don't skimp on air. Air Compressors A few vessels (besides diving-support boats) have breathing-air compressors aboard, either the portable dive-bottle type or a built-in installation. They require a trained operator. On one ship I was on no one knew how to operate the compressor and the captain refused to let anyone practice lest they blow themselves up. The smaller portable compressors can take up to 20 minutes to fill a bottle. 20 minutes is a lifetime in firefighting. Large installations can fill 26

up a bottle in seconds from a reservoir tank. What happens, however, when the fire outstrips the compartment the unit is housed in? You and your equipment must be prepared to bug-out when your position is overrun. In the end, it is easier to do this with individual air bottles. Cost, too, dictates your decision. Is it better to have a $5000 compressor or 50 bottles of air ready for use? The Role of Marine Firefighting Training Facilities Due to STCW training firefighting simulators have proliferated on both coasts. More of these simulators are privately owned, and because of this increasingly creative and realistic in the training they provide. Creativity is limited by the realities of regulatory life. Most people attend a firefighting school to receive accreditation towards gaining a license or certificate. The curriculum, dictated by government regulation, is "one size fits all". The school's operator has fixed costs to meet, which means combining trainees from different trades together in a class. The AB from a fishing boat trains with the mate from a tanker and the cook from a research vessel. Ships from different trades vary widely in both crew size and fitness, in ship's construction, equipment and type of fire likely to be a threat. As a result a trainee gets an excellent beginner course on firefighting in general, but not in organizing his or her own crew for firefighting on their particular ship with their own gear. "Practice Fields" It falls to the captain to provide this next level of training. In support of that firefighting schools need to make their services available not only as places of instruction but also as "practice fields". I can envision a day when crews rent a fire training facility for two or three hours, just to practice the tactics they had drilled with in the previous year, using gear brought with them from their own boat. Coastal Transportation Inc. is fortunate in having its own Coast Guard certified fire-fighting simulator. Here ship's crews are trained as a unit, using only the gear taken from their own ships. It is not at all unusual for gear to break down during training. Training, therefore, not only evaluates the personnel but also the gear. Not all marine fire training facilities would lend themselves to this "practicefield" role. For the smaller facilities it could prove a useful niche market, as long as rates could be held down to make the program palatable to the front office. Conclusion I hope I have convinced the average mariner that firefighting preparation on Alaskan fishing boats and allied vessels is generally inadequate. Not from cheapness on the part of ship-owners or sloth on the part of crews, but rather ignorance of just how vicious and fast moving a major fire at sea can be. Mariners in the Alaska Trade are no more remiss in this than any other 27

seamen. Training for firefighting need not be grossly expensive, nor need most of it take place in simulators ashore. Catastrophes such as befell the F/V Galaxy serve as a wake-up call to us all to go beyond basic firefighting courses and cookie-cutter contingency plans, and prepare for the worst the sea can offer.

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