Fire, Fire, Fire!

On ships, the biggest fear we have is the fear of fire. It may seem ironic, because we’re floating in a big ocean full of water, but fire, more than flooding, is the biggest casualty that we could face. We practice fire fighting on a routine basis. Even officers go to the fire fighting school—we could even be called on to fight fires, especially on small ships like Frigates.
Yesterday started out as a typical duty day. I was sitting down in the morning and brewing a pot of coffee. As the water started to drip down into the pot, I heard a rapidly ringing bell, followed by the words, “Fire fire fire, class bravo fire in number two SSDG. Away repair lockers away—provide from repairs five and three.” Our SSDG is one of our Ship’s Service Diesel Generators. It’s about 15’x15’ and takes up a whole room. We have four, and they provide all the electricity for our ship. When I heard this word passed, my heart sank. Fires are classified by a letter code—Alpha fires are your everyday fires, with wood or paper burning. Charlie fires are electrical fires. Both are fairly simple to contain most of the time. Bravo fires, however, are fires caused by fuel. For it to be a bravo fire, there had to be a fuel leak that caught on fire, meaning it is much tougher to put out.
Underway, this would be manageable. 200 people on a ship can fight a contained fire pretty easily. In port, about 140 of the 200 people are out on liberty at any given time. This meant that we were seriously undermanned to fight a large fuel fire. The ship has three repair lockers, where we get equipment to fight fires from. We dress into fire fighting gear there, and they serve as satellite vantage points to run the operation. Usually, an ensign is the locker officer, meaning he is in charge of running the locker of about 20 or 25 men. I have some experience in running a locker, but it was limited.
As I ran up the hatches I could tell that there was a fire burning. There was smoke everywhere and people were standing around, not knowing what to do. Thankfully, there was a chief there telling them to go to a repair locker. In a crisis, people fall into two groups. 90% of people freeze or freak out. They either don’t know what to do, or are so rushed with adrenaline that they can’t effectively do things to change the situation. The other 10% get very calm. They take a breath and figure out how to fix the crisis, and then get people to where they need to go. Officers are paid to be in that 10%.
I ran to repair three—I had to go up and around to avoid the smoke. Our main locker, repair five, is where the main fire team would go. It’s best equipped to fight the fire. Unfortunately, it is also right above the location of the fire. I knew we needed to get to another locker and that it would need an officer, so I went there to take control of the locker because I was the only other officer with repair locker experience on board. Some senior enlisted had already begun directing people, and we began having people get dressed out in fire fighting gear and sending investigators to the scene to get a handle on the extent of the damage. In a time of crisis, people take direction from leadership incredibly well. It’s a perfect example of the chain of command actually working. My job was to make sure that the repair efforts were running smoothly, as well as keep people calm, which was the hardest task. Some people were yelling phrases like, “Hurry! This is the real thing! Go, go!” A locker officer’s job is to calm them and direct people in a composed manner to ensure a quiet, quick, fire fighting effort. All of the normal political interactions that we normally have in a given day went out the window in the name of rank and position. It seemed like the chain of command was actually a comfort to people. It made sure that there was a structure to fix the problem.
As we were preparing to investigate the fire, the other repair locker had to evacuate because of the smoke in the area. They joined us to augment our manning. Thankfully, we have an installed firefighting system called Halon. It’s a gas that’s heavier than air, so when it’s discharged in the space, it suffocates the fire. It does the same to humans, though, so we can’t have people in the space after discharging Halon. We evacuated the diesel room and discharged Halon. The system worked like a charm, stopping the fire (except for a couple of hot spots) from spreading.
We spent about an hour and a half making sure that the space was fire-free and safe to enter without respiratory protection. Thankfully, nobody was injured in the incident. It really was a testament to our training and crew that the fire did not get out of control. They performed admirably and were manned and ready to fight the fire in under ten minutes. What started out as an easy duty day turned into the most eventful duty day in my time on board USS Thach. Hopefully, next duty day I can actually sit and sip on my coffee without bells and whistles interrupting my breakfast.

Halfway Day

Well, 3 days ago marked the halfway day for deployment. Over the hump. It feels good, but it’s tough to know that we still have 90 days left (well, 87 now). These days in the middle of deployment are really the dog days of deployment—where you’re far enough away from home to be run down and tired, where you’re homesick but busy. All the while, you’re not close enough to coming home that you sense you’re almost there. It just kinda drags. I’m sure it’s how baseball players feel in the weeks after the All-Star break.
But we trudge on. It helps to have most of our in-port time during months 3 and 4 of our 6-month deployment. We have been underway for a few days to conduct some submarine exercises with the Chilean Navy, but after this week, we have an 18-day stretch with only 2 underway days. The variety helps things to move faster.
Prior to this underway time, we were moored in Concepcion, Chile for a week. There were lots of things to do in this city. South America seems to love casinos, because they’ve been in every port we’ve visited, much to the detriment of my bank account (except for last port, where I made up for it, thankfully). We were moored next to a small mountain, which I got to run up to the top of—a very cool (and tiring) experience. We had a wardroom social with officers on a Chilean Frigate. They proceeded to challenge us to chugging contests and drank us all into oblivion. Who knew Chileans could drink? It was very interesting to see their wardroom and ship and how similar it is to ours. Chileans had signs in English all over their ship. I asked why that was, seeing as their primary language was Spanish, and they told me that they were trained by the British Navy, hence the signs.
The weather is still cold, but it’s not as cold as it was down in the south of the continent. We’re transiting north at such a slow pace, that their winter is catching up with us faster than we are running away from it, so temperature differences haven’t been too noticeable. In about a month and a half, it will be back to ungodly heat. The temperature differences have thrown my body out of whack. I keep thinking it’s Christmastime soon, but I have to stop and remind myself that back home, it’s the middle of the summer. The warm weather will help with that problem.
Finally, a note about Concepcion’s mall: it rocked. Notably, they had two Dunkin’ Donuts (get it together, San Diego—Chile has more Dunkin’s in one mall than you do within a 500 mile radius) and Nuts 4 Nuts vendors everywhere. For anyone who’s been to NYC, they know Nuts 4 Nuts sell those hot honey roasted peanuts on street corners. They were everywhere here in Chile. They were a nice taste of home. Unfortunately, the Dunkin didn’t sell coffee. I know, I know… That’s like having a McDonalds without hamburgers, but it’s true. Just lattes, cappuccinos and donuts. But it was still good to see—I’ll take what I can get.

Puerto Montt

We recently finished a port visit to Puerto Montt, Chile, where we got some nice rest and relaxation after transiting through the straits without issue. The town was pretty small, with the downtown area encompassing only about 10 square blocks, so we got to exploring the town pretty quickly to find the cool bars. After talking with the Chilean pilot, (In nautical terms, a pilot is somebody who knows a certain area of water very well. Our Chilean pilot embarked onboard our ship for the straits of Magellan to help us navigate it. It’s useful because pilots know currents in certain areas, weather patterns, and changes on charts that we use. Though the Navy doesn’t pay them for this, an ancillary benefit is that they also know local bars that are cool.) we decided to camp out at a rugby bar, “Haka” named after a rugby dance that a certain team (whose name escapes me right now) does before each match. It had couches and lots of local beers, so it was a fun spot.
The next night, we went to the nearby town of Punta Varas. This was even smaller than Puerto Montt. The main attraction here was a casino, but we walked about some and stopped at a delicious dessert place for some local pastries, followed by walking into a random restaurant, Mediterraneo, for a nice dinner. We’re on vacation when on liberty, so having dessert before dinner is perfectly acceptable.
Mediterraneo has been the highlight of my port time thus far. We were the only people in this tiny restaurant that was warmed by a fireplace right next to our table. The food was probably the best I’ve had in the last decade, and it was all dirt cheap. We bought a nice bottle of Camenere, a unique Chilean wine. Camenere grapes were originally indigenous to France, but a plague in the late 1800s wiped out their crops. Years before the plague hit, some Chilean farmers exported the grapes to Chile, mistaking them for Merlot grapes. They flourished, and now Chile is virtually the sole provider of Camenere wine. It is also very cheap here. An 8-year old bottle is about $20. It’s a red wine, but has a lot more flavor than most reds, and it is a lot less dry. It’s quite good.
We ended the night back at the casino. While some people decided to go update their iPhones (my phone isn’t that fancy) I sat down with some fellow officers to play a game I’ve never won at: Blackjack. I began to understand the intricacies of the game (with some help from more experienced players) and by the end of the night I had won over 200,000 pesos. Don’t think too much about it though, because that’s about $400. It still felt good to finally win one, and $400 is nothing to sneeze at. Plus, it made up for all the money I lost on roulette in Punta Arenas, the previous port.

A final note, the Chilean volcano that is erupting right now was just outside Puerto Montt, and it started erupting the day after we left, so unfortunately we couldn’t see it. But we had taken pictures of it, not knowing of its impending eruption. To the right is a picture of the volcano itself, back when it looked like just another mountain. (Our Chilean pilot told us all about it as we were driving by.)