Every week on board all ships at sea, as a mandatory International Maritime Organisation regulation, we have emergency drills for circumstances such as a fire on board, collision, abandon ship etc. These situations are simulated; the ship's crew is briefed; then mock procedures on how to most efficiently tackle and subdue emergencies are carried out. Response times are noted, individual action and ability scrutinised and protocol updated accordingly at a safety committee meeting held the day after the drill.
At these drills, as soon as the general emergency alarm is sounded, the crew, due to repetitive practice, immediately assembles at their muster stations in full safety gear including protective clothing, safety helmet, life jacket - to elude the ever present danger of death by drowning- and extra friction shoes ready and eager to take on any shipboard emergency.
Actual emergency
Last week there was an actual fire on board my ship, at the aft stations where the hefty 80 millimetre mooring ropes, used to make the ship fast to a jetty when in port, are stowed. The ironic and now evidently futile thing about these drills is that everybody is informed about them a day in advance.
They are told the exact time of the drill and the scenario that is to be simulated so that the crew drops any work they are engaged in 15 minutes before the alarm is to be sounded, gear up and stand a few steps away from their muster stations with the necessary equipment at hand and ready to use.
Response times are obviously recorded as fantastic and everybody is happy. So when the real fire alarm sounded at 10.30pm that night I was geared up and at my muster station in 90 seconds only to find it as abandoned as a sinking ship and as empty as the pages of an unwritten book. Instead most of the crew, I observed, were running around in hapless panic flailing their arms about crying 'Fire! Fire!' at the top of their lungs, with none of them actually being aware of where the fire was.
All of these hapless fire criers, and I mean every member of the emergency response team, was in their sleeping attire ranging from polka dot pajamas to flimsy towels, sporting no better than bathroom slippers as their firefighting gear.
When we finally managed to gather at the scene of the fire I saw that one of the eight poly-propylene extra tensile strength ropes, which are neatly coiled side by side into tall bundles about two metres high and a metre in diametre was on fire.
I observed that most of the crew's instinctive response was to immediately run and grab the nearest dry powder fire extinguisher they could each get their hands on – which by the way is useless if you want to put out a fire of this kind – and started spraying the suffocating powder all over the poop deck which is the area at the extreme aft of the ship which accommodates the winches used to pull these ropes and short, thick round poles, called bits, around which they are tied.
None of the crew, in the heat of the moment actually waited to reach the burning mooring rope before deploying their fire extinguishers. They ended up with empty cylinders when they reached the fire, ejecting spurt after pitiful spurt of useless residual chemical at the flaring rope.
When we finally managed to rig the fire hose and start the fire pump to extinguish the fire with sea water – which is what everybody should have done in the first place – the poop deck became something like a freshly-polished ice rink and the scene unfolding before me was akin to a rugby team trying to score a try in a mud wrestling ring.
The crew, in bathroom slippers, started one after the other to slip on the stainless steel deck now bathed in sea water and as elusive to friction as a duck's back is to water. They stumbled and fell like the cricketers in that old Centre-fresh chewing gum cricket advertisement where a batsman manages to score a boundary through 11 incompetently diving fielders.
The Centre-fresh team
Does anyone remember that ad? It used to run on Star Sports during cricket matches some years ago. I thought of my old cricket buddies then, with whom I used to play at the Sharjah Cricket Stadium and how we would ridicule anyone who slipped while running on the wet grass or made a faulty dive by calling him ‘the Centre-fresh fielder'.
The first time our team got to play in the stadium – on grass for the first time because almost all the other grounds in UAE are hard sand and earth — none of us had had the awareness or the foresight to wear spiked boots.
It was an evening match with the grass starting to dew up, so in the field, one after the other, whoever went after the ball would run a few steps and ceremonially have his legs swept from under him and crash down on the grass with the rest of the team laughing at his expense.
After that first painful match, when we were sitting in the locker room, nursing our respective aching behinds and chalking up another defeat on our imaginary scoreboard we jokingly dubbed ourselves ‘the Centre-fresh team'.
The other night at the fire, I guess that not so noble title took leave of my old cricket team and found a new home on my ship.
- The writer is a deck cadet aboard the M.V Wajdi Arab
