Hi, No fun, is it? It's the smoke. Nasty stuff. Glad you survived,Sir.
Best regards,
Dan

It wasn't a huge fire but the ship was messed up. All hands to Cleaning instead of usual work plus all the bedding and clothes smelld bad until they could be laundered but because of the fire in the laundry we could only do a small ammount and the Chinese laundry men had to work extra hard. Tradition in the RN the Laundry is staffed by civilian Chines staff (3 on our ship) who charge for their services, they buy the contract.

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Quite the experience. And the RN are some of the finest sailors afloat.
Containing fire is perhaps the worst problem aboard. Good job you guys got through.
Best regards, Sir.
Dan

Aren't most ships specifically designed to drain water?

Ouch! Smoke inhalation kills more people than the fire itself, and those who are directly affected by the fire have usually been sequestered or incapacitated by smoke.

In the old days of wooden sailing vessels, smoke was almostly exclusively the product of burning wood and tar/creosote/pitch used to seal the wood. These days, the smoke is is far more toxic and debilitating, due to the plastics and other manmade materials on board.

As a result modern vessles have fire suppression systems on board (sprinklers), and include fire-tight compartments.

Interestingly, a modern fire-fighting method involved forced ventilation. This seems contrary to common sense which has always told us to "starve the fire of oxygen." In really, air usually gets into a fire, and if it's poorly ventilated, the temps skyrocket, resulting in both excessive combustion and structural weakening. By ventilating the fire, the heat is exhausted from the building, saving structures, slowing the rate of fire growth, reducing flashovers and backdrafts while allowing firefighters to enter and move about the building with increased safety.

Getting back to the OP...

Agreed - awesome! Thirteen barges all together! (includes the big one carrying the other twelve)

It reminds me of this pic.

Draining watef from between decks isn't easy, compartments are watertight, you have to drain with pumps. On an RN warship your bedding zips up into a big matress cover and all clothing, newspapers, magazines etc should be stowed. If they are left loose they will get sucked onto the drains and the compartment will stay flooded. On a Cruise Ship in the passenger areas there are hundreds of cabins with loose bedding and items and restaurants, shops etc. Where you get a problem is a couple of feet depth of water in a large deckspace has a 'free surface' effect. If it sloshes to one side the centre of gravity of the ship moves outboard and up causing a capsize. Warships have lots of small compartments, Tankers have mutiple cells and baffles in the tanks to cut down the effect. Fuek tanks flood with seawater as fuel is used to keep them full and stop a free surface developing.

Pumping thousands of gallons of firefighting water into the superstructure of a ship can capsize it.

Ashore if a Fire Engine attands a fire and uses some of its onboard water supply they have to drainthe tank before they drive off for the same reason.

Onj the ships I served in we had Steam Power, steam was used as a firefighting resource in the machinery spaces as it has the same effect as water without the volume.

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On this note, and having a cruise under my belt this year, there's a catch here.

On cruise ships, you've got two sets of corridors on each deck. There's one for passengers that weaves through each deck, have minimal watertightness, and would be a horrendous mess, and then a separate series of corridors for crew and service personnel that have a look more familiar to merchantmen or naval vets along the centerline of the ship, complete with watertight doors and old school ships ladders that transit up and down along the centerline of the boat to avoid entry into passenger areas.

If stuff happens which requires a quick movement of ship's crew to a problem area, even if the passenger areas are flooded with panicky sheeple, the professionals have their own means of getting to and fro without interference from the herd.

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The ship blueprints I worked with during an internship decades ago had a drainage system where decks above waterline were segmented into drainage areas, usually three to five across its width, and the same along its length. Each segment would drain straight overboard. Even if large waves caused water to enter the drains, they were baffled, little would enter, and would quickly exit.

The drains were designed to handle the full combination of:
- torrential downpour
- all sprinkler systems in operation (shipwide fire)
- additional water added by on-site firefighters

The areas below the waterline were pumped.

Of course these plans were in the 80s for ships built in the late 80s and early 90s, and they weren't cruise ships.

A good friend of mine is a local fireman, and gave me the grand tour in September: Fire engines tanker water to sites. They're kept full at the firehouse in case they need to respond to a site without water. On a site with water, they simply use the hydrant supply, unless for some, rare, reason, they need to put out max volume in a very short time. Even so, their onboard supply only lasts a couple of minutes. The only time they don't tanker water back to the firehouse is if their equipment is broken, or there wasn't a hydrant supply on site where they were fighting the fire.

That's an excellent idea! It would displace all the air (and oxygen), and the fire dies. Then the steam will condense, leaving a small amount of water behind, and it's residue is non-corrosive.

So long as no one's in the compartment...

Unlike most amusment parks, where employees transit aboveground, Disney World employs the same undeground method. I got that grand tour from my best friend who was doing his internship at Walt Disney World while we were in college.

Unfortunately they will quickly become obstructed with anything floating around in the compartment, on cruise ships that's quite a lot of stuff. Even on Warships where the crew are all trained and follow routines to minimise the problem there is still a lot of loose gear.

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