Posted on 06/26/2024 6:51:56 AM PDT by dynachrome
Agree, a very reasonable supposition.
Thanks. The images on your post aren’t displaying, at least for me. I’ll pick it up on Amazon when it’s available.
Thanks for the link.....BUT it is horrible, with a few lines of text sparsely sprinkled among the pop-up ads all down the page.
I was on cargo watch on a bomb ship in Viet Nam when a small fire broke out in the hold. One of the Vietnames longshoremen set a 1000 watt cargo light on a tarp.
I used to live on a Submarine, SSBN 599N. Fire was more feared than flooding. While my boat was a nuclear boat the power backup was diesel. Hydraulics everywhere, electricity everywhere and plenty of stored diesel fuel. All you need is a match or a spark in the wrong place.
Fires happen and we would train for them over and over again. The luxury we had was that we had EAB (Emergency air breathing) masks with air manifolds every several feet. One of the things you had to learn was to find the manifolds in the dark or blindfolded. If you couldn’t do that you could become a casualty during a fire. PKP (Purple K Powder) was your friend, water is a very dangerous thing to extinguish a fire with on a submarine. With loss of the reactor and below periscope depth you depend on the battery just like the old boats. One thing the battery didn’t like was sea water. Seawater in the battery would quickly supply the ship with some very toxic gases, worse than the smoke. The Battery is always at the lowest point of the boat, water seeks the lowest point. Under water there is no place for the smoke to go, no place for toxic gases to go and no place to get fresh air, very serious business a fire.
Interesting place a submarine.
We went on Wonder last October for our first cruise and I was very impressed. We earned enough points in the casino to go for “free” again but this time we went on Navigator last month. During that cruise we earned enough points to get 2 cabins so we’re taking our granddaughter for her 21st birthday in the fall. Even though we gambled to get a “free” cruise, it was still cheaper than if we’d paid the advertised price, plus we had fun doing it.
Thanks. I’ll keep hitting Amazon till they log them in:)
Yes. That’s what we’ve always done. Of course, we usually lose in the casino. But less money than what a cruise costs. And we get free drinks, so we don’t buy the drink package. A couple of times, we actually WON money. Those ‘free’ cruises are the best.
Absolutely-that does make a difference. And like you, I would not want to be below decks in a darkened cruise ship on fire with a bunch of regular people.
I took very seriously the concept of getting out of my berthing compartment on the carrier in pitch black. I memorized all the routes out, even counting the hatches on the way. I never blindfolded myself, but when nobody was around, I would close my eyes and feel my way along. I admit, I didn’t want to anyone watching me, because as a 19 year old guy, I did think there were people who would dismiss it or make fun of it.
Last time my wife and I went on a big cruise 5-10 years back, went with some friends to Bermuda, where the America’s Cup races were going on. I enjoyed it greatly, as I have sailed a bit, and on the back deck of the ship, they had a massive televisions(s) set up, drinks being sold, and you could watch the race in real time, and look at the screen to see what was going on and how they portrayed it with graphics on the screen. That was fun, and I am not someone who watches those kinds of things very often.
Anyway, my wife and I had a compartment two decks down, and the first thing I did after getting into our berthing space, was to scope it out. I looked for all possible exits, and in the course of going up and down to meals, entertainment, etc. I would constantly test myself to see if I got the steps right. The count of the stairs.
And when I slept, I had my shoes right there, a towel next to them, and a small, powerful flashlight and a headlamp beside me.
(I don’t just do this on ships. I do it in hotels, etc.)
My wife makes fun of it sometimes, but...she knows it isn’t being anal, it is being prepared. I have a fertile imagination to begin with, and I have seen and read enough to make me think of how terrible a conflagration on any ship might be, never mind that one full of things that would only make things worse. But to be fair, we did at least have some training in firefighting.
Don’t know if you were a Navy guy or not, but when I was in boot camp, they did have you doing things like walking through a facsimile of a ship’s compartment that was full of nasty smoke, as if they were just burning old damaged mattresses to create it. No gas mask, either. And they had you put out a compartment fire, everyone lined up on the hose, sometimes using attachments like a fog nozzle. They even had us put out a large recessed vat full of jet fuel they set on fire with a traffic flare.
I thought that was damn good training they gave everyone. Granted, you don’t practice it in the fleet that I know of, but in the event of a conflagration at sea, it has to be valuable experience to have at least seen flames close up in a confined space. I have always admired the damage control teams, those guys were the real deal, and I never, ever saw them screw around, ever. When a call came over the 1MC of either a real fire or a drill, those guys were concentrating on their craft with an impressive seriousness.
I always figured, having those guys running damage control efforts, and being able to call on guys who, though completely inexperienced, had at least seen a fire and held a firehose. That seemed like a good plan to maximize an effort should it ever be needed.
Sigh. Don’t know what it is like now in the Navy. But I have a pretty good idea of what it was like in the past.
The best book I have ever read on this aspect, and I have read a lot, is “Neptune’s “Inferno” about those naval battle around the Solomon Islands in 1942-1943. Just brutal carnage, slugging it out with a Imperial Japanese Navy on a semi-equal footing when naval gunfire was still a thing. And they were tough. It was widely accepted that the Japanese destroyer captains were among the best, if not the best destroyer officers in the world. Not a surprise given that they lived on an enormous island chain.
Be we had damn good destroyer captains, too. They didn’t name a class of destroyers after Arleigh Burke for nothing.
Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand...now, imagine being on a ship on fire, below decks, with panicky civilians. Argh. That would be bad.
Excellent-I immediately went to Audible, but they didn’t have it. Do you have plans to get it out there?
I like your style. I recall you were an accomplished blue-water sailor, and I have heard it said that those who write best write about what they know!
I was going to ask you these questions, then I saw your post...:)
LOL, “Tesla of The Sea”!
Boy, no kidding. Being sealed in down deep kind of concentrates the mind, I suspect.
These all-electric cruise ships, with 4,000 people crammed into 1,000 feet, are deadly in the event of a REAL fire.
Everybody else can write dystopian novels where folks are running around the countryside. Few can write them based on a big sailboat, so I figured I’d corner the market, LOL.
Audible is a BIG time commitment. I did do the Audible narration for Castigo Cay and Red Cliffs, which come before Doomsday Reef.
Well, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon, the anchors have been weighed...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0EX3Xkmvw
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