After a successful call at Israel we sailed away last night from Haifa heading towards Turkey. To reach our next port of call, Antalya, we are spending a day at sea and pass the South West side of Cyprus. As a matter of fact we could see Cyprus on our starboard side for most of the afternoon at a distance of about 12 nautical miles. If all goes well we will arrive at Antalya at 8 am tomorrow morning. Antalya is historic town located on the south coast of Turkey. The area which is now Turkey was for most of its history a battleground between various empires and the results are still very visible today. This means that Museums and Ruins are an important part of most of the tours which our guests can take.
Nothing has really changed to the current day as the Middle East continues to rumble on with Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder if 2000 years from now mankind will gaze at artifacts left behind by our period of time in the same way as we are doing now. History is being written every day and the nice thing is with a cruise, we can sail from location to location to have a look at what was written in the past.
In the meantime life on board goes on and the guests are all recuperating from two intensive days in Israel. When I went for breakfast this morning at 06.30 I was the only one there for a while, a new experience as we have quite a few early risers on board. Normally the Gym is already active by 0600. But this morning it was me and two cooks in the Lido who greeted a beautiful sunny day at sea.
My task today was to create mayhem in the ship and then to give the ship’s crew the chance to get things under control again. The law requires every ship to conduct a fire drill once a week on top of whatever training that might take place to retain the proficiency of the crew. With my rather unique position within Holland America I have the chance to get everybody running, from the Captain down to the Laundry, by throwing drills which are based on my own and others experiences — on what went wrong in the past and what improvement we made then —.
The biggest challenge is most of the time not the act of extinguishing the fire itself. We all get training for that. The biggest challenge is the need for a very fast reaction to an occurrence, to keep oversight, and to stick to protocols (which the company developed through the years) all the way to the end of an evolution. We have about 50 people going during a regular fire drill, all willing and eager, but if they all do their own thing than the end result might be the opposite of what they were trying to achieve.
By far the biggest challenge is an Engine Room fire. One of the reasons is: there is a lot of stuff down there that burns. Another reason: it burns a lot easier as the average temperature of the area is already higher. A fire needs heat to burn as well as a fuel source and oxygen and a higher temperature makes ignition easier. Then there is the imminent danger of the fire affecting the main and aux. engines and then the lights go out and nothing works anymore. The Emergency Generator will come on line but this engine only provides the most basic power needed to save everybody’s lives on board.
So today we exercised a “losing battle” scenario. Everything was failing step by step. We put the oil separator room on fire; it burnt through into the Main Switch Board and it burnt through into the Main Engine Room. Thus we had to simulate releasing CO2 to extinguish the fire in that big Main Engine Room space and that meant a total loss of all power; and not being able to regain power again for a prolonged period. Why do we do these sorts of drills? We try to fight the fire but while we want to save the ship we do not want to lose anybody. So at all times the focus is on safe procedures, the proper coordination of all the teams and the making of timely decisions to ensure that if we have to leave the ship, everybody can do so safely. The company can always buy a new ship; you cannot buy a new life.
In real life such an evolution would nearly take a day, during a drill we can compact it into an hour. After completion we held a debriefing which lasted almost as long as the actual drill. The whole drill was reviewed step by step with everybody getting the chance to explain what they did. Learning the lessons provided by the drill. Then we can apply them during the next drill to ensure that everybody reaches an even higher level of proficiency in a skill which we hope that we never have to use.
Would it really come that far in a real life situation? I doubt it as all these spaces have individual fixed firefighting protection systems which would normally drench out any starting fire before it would be become a challenge.
I was very happy today. All involved followed the scenario, everybody followed the protocols and the coordination was great; if the ship would burn out, everybody on board would have been kept safe. In a week from now we will have our next drill and then we are going to see what happens when individual teams face individual obstacles and how they will overcome them.
April 15, 2015 at 5:24 pm
As a HAL guest, such information as this is most reassuring. I think I am safer at sea than I am in my home.