Basic Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting for Seafarers

Fire is one of the most dangerous enemies in this world. Fire has destroyed valuable lives of people, millions of Dollars worth property and caused serious impact on the environment. Whether it is on dry land, at sea or up in the air the situation is disastrous. Most fires take place due to carelessness of people, bad house keeping and bad maintenance. Fire is a good slave but a bad enemy.

Therefore it is of utmost importance to study and have some basic knowledge about what is Fire, How does a fire start, Fire triangle, Fire Detection, Fire alarms, Fire Prevention measures and Fire fighting onboard a ship.

In the recent past more container ships carrying dangerous cargo had fires onboard. On 20 May 2021, chemical fume emissions erupted on the Singapore-flagged MV X-Press Pearl containership as it anchored around 9 nautical miles (17 kilometres) northwest of the Port of Colombo in Sri Lanka national waters. An unknown number of containers, some of which carrying dangerous chemicals and plastic pellets, reportedly fell overboard as an intense fire broke out and explosions occurred on 25 May. Once the fire was under control around a week later, an effort to tow the vessel on 2 June to a deeper water refuge failed and resulted in partial sinking of the vessel. By 17 June the entire vessel had settled on the seabed at a depth of about 21 meters. MV X-Press Pearl became a total loss. But the crew were evacuated.

There were key issues with regards to the pollution of the marine environment. They were oil pollution, chemical pollution, risks arising from the shipwreck and lost containers, plastic pollution, environmental damage, Impacts on wildlife, Impacts on fisheries industries of the country, Air pollution.

The economical loss to the coutry was huge. The tourism industry was very badly hit. Fish exports were stopped. Local fisherman lost their jobs and livelyhood. Furthermore fish consumption dropped to zero levels as they contaminated with chemicals.

There were so many incidents involving fire onboard container ships and modern day car carriers. While the shipping industry has modern ships carrying thousands of containers with various types of cargo, ships carrying cars are equally vulnerable.

However ships crew members must be trained to Prevent fires, Detect fires and Fight fires with all available fire fighting equipment onboard.