- Reaction score
- 6,285
- Points
- 1,040
I think any DWP (manned or unmanned) would have the same results; all the FF systems are offline, so you just have local extinguishers for first response, and then you evacuate. That's why we have daily FF rounds, strict hotwork procedures etc, as you are pretty much hooped if you have a fire that can't be put out with an extinguisher, and with the ship out of the water and ongoing work on the firemain, your only FF source is the jetty connections.
Land based firefighters in Halifax, Vancouver and QC will just focus on life safety, and do a risk assessment on whether they can put the fire out. They'd have to run hoses into the ship, so would take a while to get a safe route in to get to any fire down low, so may just be a defensive effort if they can confine the fire to one zone. In the builds there are a bunch of precautions and temp systems in place to prevent/detect fires, but once it gets started, options to contain/suppress are pretty minimal.
This was actually an alongside maintenance period though, which sounds more like an EWP2 after a DWP, where most stuff is still online, and a lot of contractors working onboard while the ship was in the USN dockyard. The hoses etc were supposed to be set up, and sounds like the local detection/suppresion was isolated to allow for the hot work (which is totally normal). Look forward to reading the detailed report, but sounds like there was supposed to be a bunch of basic gear fitted that wasn't working (like some hose stations) and a whole bunch of other basic things (like an effective duty watch response). That's all the stuff we try and do in week one, but I'm positive we have a few operational ships sitting around in more or less this exact same condition but haven't had our number come up yet. They have a much bigger fleet, but we still have at least one near miss or minor fire a month, and something relatively major once a year or so.
In our case I don't think it's a ship leadership issue; the crews are set up for failure with the minimum crewing levels, brutal material state, insane schedules and no feasible resource load to get them out the door, on top of things like the failed Martech rollout and plummeting trade numbers. It's all really coming to a head, so hoping a few ships get tied up and the general fleet op tempo is reduced to allow for repairs before we have our own Bonhomme Richard and someone gets killed.
