A ship carries more portable extinguishers than any other item of safety equipment, and each one runs on three separate clocks at once. The annual service is well known. The five and ten year requirements, and the spare charge arithmetic, are where operators come unstuck. By MarineCraft Journal · 14 September 2026 · … Read more
The emergency fire pump exists for the day the engine room is on fire and the main pumps are unreachable. It is tested rarely, sits in a compartment nobody visits, and fails on inspection more reliably than almost any other item aboard. By MarineCraft Journal · 2 September 2026 · 9 mins read … Read more
On an offshore platform, detection has to work before there is a fire. The system is watching for gas, not flame, because by the time something is burning the useful window has already closed. That inverts how detection is designed, maintained, and audited. By MarineCraft Journal · 28 August 2026 · 10 mins … Read more
Ships rarely fail firefighting audits because the equipment is broken. They fail because nobody can prove it was maintained. The extinguisher works, the pump runs, the system is charged, and the finding is written anyway, because the record that should sit behind each of those things is missing, late, or signed by the … Read more
Two pieces of breathing equipment on a ship look similar and are constantly confused. One lets a firefighter enter a burning space. The other only buys a few minutes to escape one. Mixing them up, or letting either run down, is a deficiency that recurs on inspection after inspection.
A fire in a ship’s engine room has to be fought by a system that was chosen years earlier, on a drawing board. Pick the wrong extinguishing system for the space, and the mistake is built into the vessel. Here is how CO2, water mist, and foam are matched to the hazard.
