Fighting Fire Afloat

Boats are wretched, awkward, and mortally dangerous places for a fire. Most boats are built of flammable materials, and most cruising boats have an auxiliary engine fed by highly combustible fuel within a tight compartment. Most cruising boats also have a galley—essentially, a fire-pit designed to contain a fire to some degree. A boat offers no easy retreat from a blaze: Most have but a single path for movement fore-and-aft. That sounds like a grim scenario, but take heart: There are rules and sensible tactics to minimize fire risks and even to deal with fires on boats. As you get started in boats, you’ll learn to be obsessively vigilant of flame in any form, and to have an awareness of the risk of fire every moment of your time on the water. The key to fire-risk management is preparation. Thoughtfully preposition all the tools of defense within ready reach, alert every new crew member to the locations of these tools, and describe their functions. There is no good outcome to a fire at sea. The best you can hope for is a mess and some expense. In the event of a fire, make the mess, expend your tools, and don’t spare anything in killing a fire. What Fire Needs Fire requires: Ignition, fuel, and air. Deny it any one of these, and it dies. Prevent ignition studiously. Open flames of any kind will at some time bolt for escape. Imagine these three scenarios: priming fluid for a kerosene stove—flaming alcohol—spills onto the sole; a lee lurch of the vessel throws a dish towel onto the lit stove; a corroded electric connection arcs across flammable cleaning supplies; an unshielded electric motor ignites fumes. Avoiding these scenarios, and any others you can imagine, requires organization and forethought. Deny fuel. Identify all of the combustibles on your boat—fuel, fabric, aerosol cans, solvents, grease, paper, wood—and keep them away from any means of ignition. One boat owner imagined that the place where paper towels would be most useful was over the stove. A vagrant breeze unwound the roll while coffee was brewing. The dangling paper ignited and the flames began to travel up toward the curtains, the overhead, and the plastic food containers. Only a quick-witted and lucky throw of the entire roll—up and out of the galley and overboard—stopped a potential grief. Cut off air. Scientifically, fire can be defined as “rapid, exothermic oxygenation.” Easy-bond oxygen atoms combine with flammable atoms of many kinds. That’s why many commercial vessels have a paint locker— a tight-seamed metal compartment or chest that isolates flammables from oxygen. Use caution with these in the event of an emergency: Opening the door, lid, hatch, or whatever seals the locker introduces a gust of oxygen. In fact, if you’re ever opening any compartment during firefighting, you’ll be introducing more oxygen, so beware the possible jet of flame that will blast out of the oxygen-deprived space. Fire demons. Among the most dangerous substances pleasure boats carry is gas under pressure, be it propane, butane, or LNG (liquefied natural gas). Gasoline, which is highly volatile, is almost as explosive. The sinister qualities of these demons is that they easily spread as explosive vapor. That vapor is heavier than air. Vapor sinks and collects in a boat’s bilge, where the feeblest spark can set it off. From a distance, the results would be spectacular. Boaters have learned by bitter lesson to store gasoline with exa