Fire! Fire! Fire Down Below.
by Published on 12th January 2021 12:35 PM
An unwanted fire anywhere is a bad thing – An unwanted fire at sea is downright dangerous. A fire safety poster I once saw on one of my ships said; ‘Remember! At Sea, You Cannot Call for the Fire Brigade.’
I took part in numerous lifeboat and fire drills on British ships. My role in the drills was pretty basic; put stuff away or roll up the fire hose after the drill, etc. However, fire drills on the ‘Flag of Convenience’ ships I sailed on as a radio officer, were few and far between. Let’s face it, fires don’t start on these ships, do they? Or maybe they do.
Another fire prevention poster I saw in the Mann Island Shipping Federation Offices, Liverpool read;
‘Bright Sparks really rather dumb, smoking near an oily drum. Doesn’t he know the oil is tinder? Soon he’ll be a ruddy cinder.’
The poster showed a caricature picture of a sailor smoking a cigarette near an oil drum. Well, whether it was someone smoking near some oily rags or spontaneous ignition of oily rags in a bin, I don’t know, but a fire started in the engine room of my ship the SS Sapho 1 as we were halfway across the Atlantic. The smoke from the fire was enough to send the engineer and his oiler, coughing and spluttering, from the engine room. The smoke pouring out of the lantern light sent the South American and African sailors into a frenzy, rushing to the lifeboats, wanting to abandon ship. I myself had the MF transmitter warmed up, ready to send out an SOS if need be, had the fire got out of control. This wasn’t necessary, the Greek chief engineer organised a fire-fighting party and they dealt with the blaze. Luckily it was confined to a pile of rags in a storeroom. Although only a relatively minor incident, I really did admire the engineers, wearing nothing more protective than asbestos overalls and a smoke-hood, climbing down into the engine room dragging the fire hose with them. I thought at the time, climbing down through smoke and heat must be like climbing down a ladder into hell. A friendly flickering flame has a bad habit of spreading very quickly into a major conflagration. With flashovers and backdrafts, fire can, and often does, spread faster than a man can run.
Some years later I left the sea and at the age of 28, I joined the fire brigade. In the nearly 29 years I was in the service, I attended 100s if not 1000s of fires. Fires ranging from a garden hut on fire to a six-storey mill blazing from end to end and bottom to top requiring 20 pumps and 3 turntable ladders to deal with it. From the rank of fireman (Firefighter for the PC brigade) to Station Commander I attended fires in canal boats, cars, hotels, houses, flats, schools, offices, factories, shops, woods, and on the moors. One fire, in particular, reminded me of the fire in the engine room of the SS Sapho 1. It was a fire in a sub-sub-basement of a Bradford city-center office block. My team and I had the latest fire kit, gloves, anti-flash hoods, deep penetration breathing apparatus sets, thermal imaging cameras, and high-pressure hose-reels. I staggered out of the building, totally exhausted, I just rolled over in the gutter, too tired even to take off my face mask. It was then I remembered the two engineers at sea, wearing their old asbestos Fearnaught suits, wearing a cumbersome smoke-hood, air fed by a pair of bellows manufactured in Germany in 1937, climbing down through the heat and smoke to fight a fire deep in the engine room. My heart goes out to men at sea who have to fight a fire without the benefit of being able to call up 20 fire engines to help them.
PC R701198
