Fire chief recounting over 30 years fighting fires and conducting search and rescues in Alaska

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

from "Bristol Monarch"
---Anyway, I still wanted to be able to ventilate the compartment before opening the hatch (and taking the hose in) but I didn’t know how. A couple of the guys who reconned the area came up an outlandish idea. To direct the smoke from a hatch in the overhead of the lazarette and force the smoke straight out to the main deck and open air, they suggested using the ships supply of cardboard boxes lashed together with duck tape into a very long tube right through deck 1 and to the main deck at which point the electric smoke ejector would be sitting to suck the smoke with great force. I asked them what would keep the cardboard from catching fire? “Well”, they said after a pause, “you gotta be fast.” How do you argue with logic like that?

---I told them to round up everyone that didn’t something better to do and start making the smoke tube