Humberside firefighters at sea: 'It's like crawling into an oven'
The facility in North East Lincolnshire is built from three stacked shipping containers and designed to replicate the interior of a real vessel. It includes an imitation engine room, kitchen, crew quarters, and watertight doors and hatches made of thick heavy metal.Trainer Gary O'Hara said: "Effectively, we're inside a big metal box. All that metal's getting superheated. "If we put too much water in there, you potentially create a lot of steam.
Mr O'Hara said: "There isn't any visibility, depending on what's on fire. It could be thick, black, acrid smoke, so everything's done by touch and feel."He said the scale of the environment made firefighting at sea unlike any other domestic incident."If you imagine going on a ferry travelling from Hull to Amsterdam or Zeebrugge or somewhere, and the amount of floors, the amount of doors, the amount of cabins that you've got in a room like that. "Compared to your normal two-up, two-down property… it's completely different."
Firefighters also train with a 45mm (1.8inch) hose, much heavier than those used for house fires. More personnel are needed just to drag it through the ship's narrow passageways.Station manager Glyn Dixon said: "You're fighting in extreme heats, narrow, confined spaces, and unfamiliar environments - not just because they're afloat, but because every vessel is different."It's tantamount to crawling in an oven and firefighting within it."The Humber is one of the most important port areas within the country, having 15% of most vessel traffic within the UK. "It's a predominant risk for our area, and it's something we take seriously."
Crew manager Carl Carter had just completed a training scenario in which crews had to rescue a fake casualty from deep inside the simulated ship.He said: "The frequency of you getting a ship to firefight is low but yet the risk is high. "It's probably one of the most dangerous jobs you can have when you're in the service."
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