Episode 3. Human Behaviour in Emergency Situations with Mark Carew

This week on Legacy Survival Stories, host Dan Latremouille is joined by Mark Carew, a master mariner and offshore installation manager with fourty years experience to talk about human behaviour in emergency situations.  Hear about a crew that had praciticed for emergencies so well that when an emergency happened, they did exactly as they were taught, and that put them all in danger.

Hosted by Dan Latremouille

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Transcript

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The time is between 2005 and 2010. The place is the Samsung shipyard in South Korea. The situation is as follows. The ship is tied up at the dock for maintenance. The ship's activities, including required emergency drills, are ongoing. The crew have carried out their duties so many times with such efficiency that it seems like they're prepared for anything and nothing could go wrong. This is legacy survival stories that ignite you're going down, you're going down. Legacy survival stories. Welcome to Legacy Survival Stories. My name is Dan Latramouille and I'll be your host. Usually on this podcast we cover some difficult subject matter. Sometimes it's dark, sometimes it's harrowing, sometimes it's scary. But those aren't the only stories out there. So today we're going to bring you something a little more lighthearted. We have an incredible guest today. My friend Marc is a full ticketed Master Mariner and an offshore installation manager. Mark came up through his career initially as a commercial diver while he was building up his experience and his sea time towards his Marine related qualifications. After Mark had his Marine qualifications, he segued into oil and gas, where he became O.I.M.. That's the offshore installation manager, Marc is, one of those guys who has been so methodical, successful and humble, that either inspires you to be a better person or to wonder where you went wrong with your life. Please welcome the incredibly knowledgeable, experienced and interesting Mark Carew. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciated it. I think you make me sound a little bit better than what I am, but I can't be done. Just a simple run. I'm a sailor through and through. All right. So let's do a quick recap on your career. I've mentioned some things already, but you begin early on as a commercial diver. So, uh, any particular terribly interesting or scary stuff under there or something I'm using you find under the water? Well, lots of stuff. I started out when the ocean ranger sank and I heard that the salvage was going to take place, and I found that that was going to be fascinating. So that's what drove me towards the diving thing. So how old would you have been for those at home? The ocean ranger went down in nineteen eighty two, and it did change the landscape of the oil and gas environment in Canada. And it had implications across the world. But going back to Mercure. So you would have been I think I was it was eighty two, so I was about nineteen. I think I was in Memorial University going to school when it happened. I remember the day it was Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day, 1982. Yeah. What a nasty mess today. Yeah. So you got into commercial diving and you were better. That actually seems like a weird one. So the salvage of the ocean ranger was going to happen. And you thought there you sort of thinking, hey, here's a here's a that doesn't no. It for me, that's what I want to do. So eventually after I, I went to school in Toronto at Seneca College and cutesie to become a commercial diver. And then I came back and I was working in Newfoundland, sometimes doesn't have a lot of work, as many people know. So I had my car, my sleeping bag and my diving gear. And I drove to Halifax on my way to Toronto, and I ended up getting a sleeping in my car, believe it or not, for I'd say three or four weeks. You sure you weren't a musician or do you know? I was knocking on the door every morning to get to get a job at this local diving company and sleeping in my car. And one day the owner came and knocked on the door, said, do you know where Pier 27 is? And I didn't know where it was. I said, sure. And I went. And so I started working weekends. And when no one else wanted to work and eventually, yeah, I got a job. A funny story of Halifax Harbor used to be not so clean. Now it's pretty clean. You don't say. Yeah, it was pretty nasty stuff. So I didn't have much when I got my first apartment that didn't have anything in it. So I was working on a Coast Guard ship one day. Drop the wrench. I go down to the bottom of the harbor and I look all over the place and there's plates like beautiful plates with Coast Guard emblems on it them. So are we talking like dinner plates, dinner plates, saucers, silverware, like a jackpot of cash? For me and me being who I am, I decided I needed a sixth place because I was going to establish myself in the world. So I got six plates, six sort of six bowls, six Boonen, six of everything, brought it home, washed it up and used it for a long time. So fast forward bunch of years, I meet my wife. My wife comes into town one day and I decide to make her supper. And she's commenting on this this exotic club, commenting on where'd you get this type of Halifax Harbor? And she wouldn't eat her supper. She wouldn't eat this up Raval. I sat around, watched them all times now. Wouldn't eat the supper. That's how bad it made her. I got to ask, what did you make? Lasagna. OK. It wasn't some weird greasy. It just this on. But that was my yeah. That was my interest introduction to her. And then I was working as a diver. We were Outland Pipeline off Cohasset and Pinnock of SABL. So for the folks at home, that would be one of the earliest maybe the first 1990 maybe. Yeah. So if not the first, very, very, very early in Nova Scotia is oil and gas development, one of the first sort of projects that actually came to fruition and actually had any, you know, large scale production going on out there. Yeah. So my ship had a GPS system and it came in with problems. Oh, you're using fancy words, two words now, dynamic positioning. All right, so Mark, tell us what's dynamic positioning. So dynamic positioning is a hovering of a ship. It's ability to keep a ship in one position using sensors and thrusters as the we use sensors in the form of GPS, digital differential GPS, and we have beacons on the seabed. And as the wind or the waves push us away from where we want to be, the computer knows and will automatically turn all the propellers and push us back. And as a result, we hover in one place for months at a time for diving operations, for drilling, for heavy lift operations. And that's what I became. Eventually, I became a specialist in dynamic positioning. OK, so that's actually a pretty nifty piece of technology. I mean, that means that if you're on a ship, not all not all ships have this. That's no. No. At one time, I was one of the only people in Canada that had this vast far when I was a Marine officer and I was four, I was got a job on this this ship. It was a heavy lift ship for 18 years or was only nationality of Italians. They came to Canada. They were forced to hire a couple of Canadians. I was one of them. And so you snuck in? I got in there and my life was miserable because really, they didn't want me there. And we like walking into a union shop. We are not. You kind of felt scabby. Yeah. Yep. Scary is what they treated me. But eventually I found out about deep. And they I started looking at it. And this was early BP. And then I found out all the books were in written in English. So I used to take them to my cabin and I'd work 12 hours and sleep four or five hours, and then I'd study deep. And then they kind of found out I was taking the books from the bridge and they didn't want me to know . So I was not allowed to take the books anymore. And I had to come up to the bridge and read them in the chat room. But I eventually got enough money together and sent myself over. You had to go all the way to Conns Burke at one time, right over to Norway, where the system was invented. Now it's offered everywhere in the world. I got a I got a Segway back here to the introduction where I said, you make a person more inspired to do better or wonder where they went wrong with your life. And there's a perfect example of Mark working 12 hours a day, sleep in a couple of hours, and then study in four, five, six hours of downtime. The tip of the cap to you? Well, when I made the change from diving to Marine officer, I thought I'd be a shoo in because I had worked offshore and I had all kinds of experience, but no one wanted to hire me. I came out with the third mate license, and it just happened to be a late 80s. No one was a when I come in 1990, sometime 93. I'm thinking it was a downturn in the oil industry and there wasn't a lot of jobs and I couldn't get a job. It was really difficult. So when I did get a job and I found out the DP was a ticket to Hollywood wages, I said that's where I want to be. So singular focus. And you sorted it out. And lo and behold, there I go. Achieved excellent success. Yeah, I did, too. So Mark works on a with an Italian crew, something large vessel that's got dynamic positioning. You're at the leading edge of that as it becomes a sort of a I mean, it's worldwide now, as you mentioned . But at the time, you know, hardly hardly anything had that. So there's an excellent examples of Murks focus on his ability to to get things done and and persevere. Yeah. And tell me tell me more. Well, what what else interests you out there? Yeah. Well, what is interesting me at the latter part of my career is human behavior in emergency situations and how people act before an emergency, during and after an emergency. And I'm fascinated by how people act. And have you ever seen the video, Bradford Stadium Fire? Oh, yes. Yeah. And that's and that's a great microcosm of exactly what I'm talking about. So I'll just segway real quick right here. For those that are not familiar, that would have been early 80s. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a what we would call a soccer match. But over there, they would call a football match at a medium size stadium. Then the probably five to 6000 range, and they had a significant fire. This video is available for anybody and Youtube, if you want to go look it up. But it's it's intense and not for the faint of heart. With that, I'll pass it back to Mark. Yeah. So what's interesting about the video is human behavior. So a fire catches and nobody moves. There's I don't know how many people, but say thousands of people sitting in their chairs. Fire not too far from them. And they don't get up and leave for the exits like you should. So time goes on. Time goes on. Eventually you see people panicking and jumping all over the rails and some of them on fire. And then another thing happens. The emergency people like. The police there, they're trained and they're expected to go into the emergency area and try to rescue people. So we do take it for granted that somebody in uniform shows up at their. Sorry. Yeah. So so they go in there and they start grabbing people and dragging them out. And meanwhile, there's sort of like a hooligan type of atmosphere in the back where people are celebrating, literally jumping up and down, saying, hurray, that this football stadium is burning down. And literally people right there and you can see this on the video, people are on fire. And that is a behavior that I am curious about, what turns people into boneheads when they in emergency happens. So then the police just go in, they grabbing the people and they're dragging them out and all of a sudden civilians go in there. So there is a story and I think you may have even told me this at one time, that out of 100 percent of people in an emergency, 15 percent stand up and lead, 70 percent of the people are dazed and confused, don't know what to do. And if they see leadership, they will follow. And unfortunately, there's 15 percent at the end who turn into hooligans, idiots. There have been stories about people going around stealing things from people's cabins as this ship is sinking. Yeah. All kinds of horrible stories for for reference. By the way, credit where credit is due. Although I would love to take credit for those stats. That's actually Professor John Leech from over. I believe he's alive. He's from the U.K. And did he he was the one that came up with those studies and those percentages. But but yeah, super interesting how people are. Yeah. So the if I was to I guess you're here to hear my stories and stories are something that you can't just flip off the top of your head. You have so many of them. And sometimes something needs to read Jrg or something like that. So the story I was going to tell you today, I'm on a brand new drillship in in Korea, South Korea in a shipyard called Samsung. OK, so this is in the yard, you know, sort of in the yard. So we took delivery of the vessel and I had to sail it across the harbor to another sort of a shipyard just to do some finishing touches on it. So from one shipyard just across the harbor to the other. Yeah. And for anybody who hasn't been there, I've actually been I have been all over the world. And I have been to the not the Samsung area, but one of the other big guards in Korea. And I on their day. Oh, my goodness. It was the day will heard like 60000 people a day. And these little scooters trying to get in it. You take your life in your hands. You're trying to get 60 people funneling into a four open front gate of a shipyard. Yeah, it is amazing. I mean, for a sense of scale for everybody at home, the shipyard there, if you could imagine, the entirety of Halifax Harbor, all of it, all of the waterfront entirely being one big shipyard, and they have three or four of them up there. It's mind blowing cranes that are bigger than the biggest building in Halifax. It's just enormous. So I had just taken possession of the ship. I tied it up in another shipyard and in the oc in the international community, you're supposed to have a a drill boat and fire drill on a ship. How often? Oh, jeez. I'm under the microscope now. Come on. Oil and gas is typically a weekly. Yeah. So it's monthly. So you're supposed to do it monthly. But if you're on a passenger ship or if you're in a you can have a higher level of safety. So my company, we would do it weekly. So in the Oil and Gas Weekly. So what happens is that we drill for several reasons. One is to train the people, allow them to know what they're supposed to do in the event of an emergency, and test out the equipment to make sure it's functional. And unfortunately, there's people get into a rhythm and hear what the rhythm is, a brand new ship. It was new people, not necessarily new, but they came from other ships. So, no, not not new to the industry, but new to the vessel. Right. So we had had maybe four or five drills, weekly drills before. And people and I announce them drill Sunday. So, by the way, just to back up a little bit, what's your position on this or are you are you the master of the vessel? I think I was master then, or I was probably chief mate. Might have been on scene, commander. I don't there's another example of how successful Mark has been. He's been master on so many vessels, he can't even remember which ones are which. So so we have a fire, but OK, back up a little bit. So every week we do the same thing. Now, you're supposed to wear PPE, which is a hard hat, coveralls and work boots. Any time you're out on the on the deck and we hammer that to them, hammer, hammer, hammer glasses, you could lose your job if you don't have it. So we have these drills and people know the drills Sunday at noon.

So about Sunday at 11: 15:24

00, they go down and change room. They put on the coveralls and their boots and they hang around waiting for the alarm to go off, knowing that, OK, I'm going to have to do this drill thing anyway. Fast forward, a real event happens. A fire in the forward thrust room real. Real fire. So now you're not allowed to say this is not a drill because that's not proper to say that, so basically. But it was real. And I said we're alongside people were to muster off the ship, on to the key. So is that part of your announcement? So, yeah, the alarm bells are ringing or the sirens going or whatever, and you're coming over the P.A. system saying attention, everybody. We have a fire in forward thruster room. Everybody, please stop what you're doing and muster on the shore. Sure. OK, except emergency teams had to do their thing so people weren't mustering. Where is everyone? What the hell is happening? So are you still in the control room or are you on the. I'm in the control room. And I'm saying why? You know, because the numbers need to come in. You usually have about three to five minutes to get everybody's position. So we call it a full muster where you know where everyone is. So I heard that everyone was down in the change room. So I run down the change room and here everyone is putting on their boiler suit or coveralls and their work boots and a hard hat, all the PPE that they're supposed to wear all the time. Yeah. So what we had drilled into them was where your hard hats, where your boots, where this where it is. And then what we did is we had routine weekly drills where people knew about it and they would go down and put on their gear and then in a real emergency, instead of doing what they should have done, which is exit the ship, they go down and put on their hard hat and their boots and made this big delay because everyone in the ship went to the change room same time. So in a weird roundabout way, by sort of regularly scheduling the drills, you're almost inadvertently trained them exactly. To rather than like do what the alarms says they were they were just in the habit now of going to get their gear on in a sauntering complacent manner. And I was I was I was fascinated by this. I said, what just happened? You know, it was very obvious this is real. There smoke. Everyone knew and everyone goes to the change room. So it's I took the responsibility ourselves because that's what we trained them to do, because what you train is what you're going to do. And we're like cattle or cows, but eventually you do it so many times. You get they call it muscle memory and you do exactly what the drills tell you to do. So that was a big flaw. Yes. Looking back at it, somewhat funny. It wasn't funny at the time. It was a real fire. We had to fight the fire down and bow thruster room. It was my ship. We had taken it from the ship here. But looking back at it now, I'm fascinated by that. And we were trying to do everything by the book, which is enforce safety, enforce safety values and train the fire teams. And and everything that I didn't want to happen happened at that time. So that's why it's actually amazing. That's remarkable, because we do talk in the industry. It often comes up about, you know, take the drills seriously and don't be complacent about it. And it's it's interesting to hear that somebody in charge of a ship who is trying very hard to do what was required and to do the right thing. Yeah. Still more or less by accident, ended up grooming people to do something you didn't want them to do. That is so interesting. So I shut the ship down after we get the fire out and we have a stand out. By the way, how about how severe was the fire? It was electrical wiring down in the high voltage. So it was 11 KVI a. So 11000 volts. There was a fair bit of damage, but we use the fixed firefighting system to put the fire out and no one was hurt. But it costs a lot of smoke. And we caused us to stay an extra month, I think. So the fixed firefighting system on that, would that be a big gas cylinders or something? C02 or Holocron or EFM 200? I don't remember which one we have. Just curious whatever we had at the time. Oh, that's interesting. OK, so sorry. You were saying that you also had a safety stand now and that's what you're supposed to do when something like this happens and everyone comes and everyone is there. And you talk about what happened. And as I was trying to explain to them or ask the question, why did everyone go to the change room to put on your stuff? And literally they were looking back at me as if I had two heads. What do you mean? That's what we're supposed to do? That's what you tell us. That's what everyone tells us to do. The safety officer, if we go out on that deck without PPE or or fired. So I then realized it wasn't their fault. It was my fault. That's where the mistake came. So then I modified I modified how I do things. But it was an eye opening experience, you know. And so then we trained people. And when they do what we trained them to do and you're surprised at their actions, you say, what the heck happened? So, yeah. So human behavior in an emergency I find interesting and very, very intrusive that don't seem so to bring this story back to something resembling a conclusion. If at that day, that time, that place. What would you do different? So if it was a real event and we were along side, you would bypass the coveralls and the work boots and all of the stuff in. You would just exit to get out, because we just want everyone off the dock. Everybody off and accounted for. Yeah. And so but we never, ever said that, you know, you just we would just warn people that you're not allowed to exit the accommodation without that stuff on which which is fair enough. These people are pretty bad for for for wearing the PPE even as opposed to. Oh, they did what they were supposed to do, but I was baffled by it. Come on. I'm human nature. What if I was in my pajamas? I would have ran off to the side of the ship. I wouldn't have been going down to the coveralls thing. Wow. That's that's an amazing story. That's so interesting. And as you note, watching the emergency behavior that people have when something strange happens, that's just absolutely remarkable. Yeah, well, that's fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us on the show today, Mark. I enjoyed it. It's great. And good luck with this. I am looking forward to listening to the different podcasts you produce. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher, and almost anywhere you can find podcasts. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe and help us move up the charts with a five star rating. We like comments and reviews, so we'd love to hear from you. If you've got an interesting story or think you know someone who'd make a great guest on the show, please reach out to us at Legacy Survival Stories. All one word at Gmail acom. You can also find us at legacy survival stories. Dot Buzz Sproat dot com. You're going down. Go down, don't you? Legacy survival stories.