Episode 6. Fire in the Sauna with Mark Carew

Lifetime mariner and fully ticketed offshore installation manager Mark Carew joins host Dan Latremouille to take another look at human behaviour. This time he takes us onboard a decked out drill ship fully equipped with its own sauna. That was, until the fire. Get ready to sink into Legacy; Survival Stories.

Hosted by Dan Latremouille

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Transcript

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The time is approximately six thirty pm. It's the end of the offshore workday. The place is offshore West Africa. The situation is as follows. A brand new fully outfitted drill ship is engaged in regular offshore operations. The ship's modern and thoughtful amenities include facilities like gyms and saunas to make its crew as comfortable as possible during their month long hitches offshore. Life seems pleasant until those same amenities become the source of the emergency. This is legacy survival stories that ignite you go down, you go down. going down, This is legacy. Survival stories. Welcome to episode six of Legacy Survival Stories. My name is Dan Latremouille and I'll be your host on today's show. We welcome back Lifetime Mariner and fully ticketed offshore installation manager Mark Carew. While setting up for this interview, Mark and I got to swapping stories and talking about some offshore experiences. So we will take you right into the beginning of Mark's story about a serious incident that occurred while Mark was in charge of an offshore facility in Africa. We're talking about human behavior before, during and after an emergency. So just let me set the stage. It is a brand new drill ship. And I sailed it from Korea down to Cape Town, South Africa, up the west coast of Africa and where they're working. All right. So you're in West Africa, West Africa. All right. So guys are outside. They're working and they're tired. We have a sauna on this one. A sauna on a drill ship. So folks back home, when they tell you that they're out there working what they call on the iron prison and prison, and they get all kinds of word for working offshore. You just remember that it's not all as bad as they make it sound to be, as Mark describes the sauna on a ship. So Sanni was was a great number. And so so here's the story. So because it's a sauna, people in bare feet and whatever else, you know what goes on in the sauna. I asked the catering people to be very practical, and I knew what went on in a sauna. But now I'm wondering. But OK, so you got a sauna, all right. Yeah. So we got a song. I asked him, make sure there's no bacteria. We don't want to get people with fungus or whatever happens in the sauna. So say please pay particular attention to the cleanliness of this song. OK, sure. saunas are wet, moist, yucky places, you know, in there. But the smell is beautiful. We ever been in a new sauna and you get that cedar typed up, man? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they would. Yeah, yeah. So we have this up. Everyone's loving it. But right outside the door of the sauna, there is a heat detector right outside the door. OK, so for the folks back home, a heat detector on an oil and gas platform, it's not sort of like the smoke detector in your house. It's it's something like that. But to a degree that's almost unimaginable because you can't have fires on an oil and gas platforms. It would be absolutely catastrophic. So you've got a heat sensor right outside what is on purpose, a fairly hot room. That's right. So in the computer logic that we have, if one sensor goes off, there's an alarm, goes on the bridge and we send someone to investigate. If two sensors go off at the same time, it's a call to confirm fire. It goes immediately to alarm and everyone muster. OK, so the computer then sort of decides whether this needs to go. Should somebody just go check it out or do we need to actually immediately go to alarm? Right. Right. So it happens frequently. And so the alarm goes on the bridge. The guys up on the bridge, it becomes a nuisance. No beats all this this heat sensor that's outside the sauna, which of course is a hot room, is constantly setting off this heat sensor up in the bridge. Yeah. And they're getting annoyed and they send someone to go look and it's. Oh, yeah, Johnny's in the in the sauna. He's got the steam going on the rocks there. And oh, yeah, he opened up the door. So this goes on and on and on. So it became a habit to isolate the heat detector outside of the sauna. And to do that, you go into the computer and you isolate it so that it does not go into the system. OK, so functionally, the heat center still there, but you're telling the computer to ignore it. Exactly. OK, which is wrong. Well, this this this is wrong. This is setting the tone, but a human behavior. It happened over and over and over. And I don't blame the guys for being like we get so many false alarms on the ship or rig, so many, and you just get so tired of it. So they decide, OK, to shift time. We work 12 to 12. So around 11, I think they to put the isolation on and take it off around three. That was kind of what they did. I didn't know that. So back up to the catering people. So here they are. The sauna is cold and the one of the catering people goes in and she's doing an awesome job cleaning this thing. And so she was cleaning the bench and the sauna came with a cedar bucket, with a plastic lining and a ladle, a wooden ladle. So this the bucket where you sort of put the rocks and stuff, the bucket was to take water and you take the ladle and you have the hot rocks and you dump a little bit of water on the rocks and it makes this big beautiful and you get hit by a heavy steam. So it's not a Steam's it was actually a dry summer, but that's what came with it and that's what the boys were doing. So once again, human behavior. So this lady goes in to clean. ksaNa and it's cold, so like not in use for a long time. So she needs to clean the benches so she takes the bucket and places it on top of the love of rock. Dun dun dun. But there is no heat there. OK, you're not really doing anything wrong at this point. She's just placing it there because she needs to get in there and use some elbow grease to get that thing clean. She does her job and she forgets the bucket on the lava rock. OK, fast forward about maybe six hours. The guys are getting off ship. They're talking all along. Hey, would you like to get in the sauna? Yeah, I'm having a hard day, man. I'm going to get medicine. I'm going to be, you know, using that sauna. So what do they do? An hour before shift to make sure it's ready for when they get off. One of the guys goes down, turns on the timer, on the sauna and turns it on and walks away. What? He wanted it pre-heat it so that when he got off, he didn't have to wait for it to heat up. Which sounds reasonable enough. Yeah. He didn't look into the gas and he didn't check and he didn't look inside. And all of a sudden the bucket catches on fire and the bucket is lined with plastic and the smoke detector is isolated and fire really happens and nothing is going on. So here we have bypass the safety function, the safety device. We have had, you know, one of us should have picked up in our assessments that that could have happened, you know, that you could place some something up on top of those hot lava coals. And the thing is, isolate it so the fire proves and it's that nice cedar smell that we were talking about. It catches fire. So it's not until the smoke moves outwards past the zone of where, you know, the sauna is and all the alarms start going up. So this would be in the accommodation space. So it's a kind of accommodation. It's above the bough thruster, which is about 60 feet below. But it's it's in an area. There's not a lot of flammable stuff in there, but it's the sauna is flammable. Where's the next closest sensor? So your your your workers have bypassed the primary season for this thing, whereas the next closest sensor like hell fire with this might remember, it wouldn't have been to too far, 30 feet away down the hall, kind of down the hall, something like that. So by the time this thing, the smoke reaches down the hall, it's fully engaged. You know, we have some stuff going on. So we muster and the smoke fills up all of the accommodation because it is, you know, people open up doors and the fire doors are held open by electromagnets and they close when you when you have an alarm. But anyway, air goes to smoke up into the cabin. And for again, for the folks back home on a on an oil and gas installation, regardless of whether it's a ship or a platform or whatever, the typical procedure when there's an alarm would be. And I'm sort of asking Mercure that alarm sounds and people will go to a muster station that is in the accommodationists. Right. In fact, it's almost always the galley. Right. Yeah. Or the restroom. So here these doors are spring-Loaded and they're held open by an electromagnet. And how it works is that when the alarm goes off in that area, the power is interrupted to the electromagnet. The spring closes the door and you now have a fire barrier. OK, so this is meant to reduce the spread of fire. So these are fired or fired or something. But before that got the alarm, there was smoke and it went on up into the accommodations. And that's where we didn't know. That's where we ended up sending people. So on a ship, you have a primary muster station, a muster. If you don't know what a monster is it? It's just a gathering where you go together in the event of an emergency on a ship. So when the alarm sounds, you have a place to go. And that's the place that the muster station is. The place. Yeah. But you also have an alternate that you would go and it's usually outside of the accommodation somewhere else. But once again, we're all like sheep and cows. We drilled and drilled and drilled. And the people who go to the galley, went to the galley, went to the Macero, even though we made an announcement to go to your alternate muster. Okay. Are they walking through smoke to get there? Well, they're just walking and they're complaining. Why are we coming in here with all this? But they keep on walking. So everyone's kind of walking in and breathing in the smoke. And finally someone calls up and says this is not a good idea to muster in here. There's just smoke everywhere. So then once again, what happened? We had the person who was cleaning the sauna. She wasn't negligent, really. She was doing her job at the time. The the lava was cold and she put the bucket there, but she forgot the boys on the bridge through repetitive nuisance alarms decided to make their life easier. And let's be proactive on that and let's isolate the alarm for a couple of hours so that we don't have to be running down there. The guy who turned the Sonna on, he was just tired and cold and wanted to do his thing. Turn on the side. He walked away. But the combination of everything together. Yeah, no one thing is the problem. It's the thing. Is adding up all together the sequence of events. So after once again, you get the fire out. It wasn't so much. There was fire, but mostly smoke. So there no one was hurt and everything went well. People did their job. Everything got done. So once again, you have a safety stand now and you asked the questions, why? Why did anyone put the bucket on? Well, it wasn't hard when I did it. OK, fair enough. Because she wasn't thinking in the future. She was probably focused on her job. Why was the center. Well, it was just went off over and over or over. The next question is, well, why didn't you look inside when you turned the song on to see if there was anyone in there? I mean, like there was no one there was off shift and just turned it on. So collectively, how many mistakes were made? Well, at least three lots. So when you look back at these things, you obviously have to learn, you have to debrief, you have to talk about it. You have to put procedures in place. And obviously, the first thing was no one's allowed isolate anything unless it comes through me. Now, normally, isolation's are not on a ship or a rig is a permit to work process. But this sometimes if a smoke detector goes off, the guys will isolate it while they're sending someone to investigate so that the whole ship doesn't go into Poltava. So we had to adapt our procedures and we had to remove the bucket, obviously. Well, there was no Sahni at the end of it. But but but there was never going to ever, ever be a bucket in that size again. But it came it came with the ship that no one put it there. It just came with the ship. Someone had an idea to put a wooden bucket with a ladle for water on a dry sauna like a lot of bad ideas. And I and we did say earlier that we were not going to have any terrible, sad, harrowing stories. But I feel like we've hit one here. Because you didn't have a song after that. No know. So the rig manager, eventually we say to him, you know, months later, umpty think in the budget, we could get a new Sonna wouldn't talk about it. Now, I'm not talking about wouldn't bring that one up, but I know. And then I was afraid to even talk about it ever again. So we went on that ship with no sign of the rest of the time, I think was under a couple of years, so. Oh, that's too bad. That's too bad. But I am glad to hear that no one was hurt or injured. I am fascinated by the people functionally walking through smoke to get their muster area complaining about the smoke and the muster area. You've trained people to do a certain thing, which is usually the right thing. But if there's a little bit of a like just a little thing gets changed in there somewhere and all of a sudden that compromises the whole procedure. So human behavior like common sense could have prevailed. But because we have drilled. And so these drills that were so back to the drill thing, you have it once a month or you can have it. You're going to have it every day if you want. But in the offshore, we have it every week. And we are very precise. And we're we go through every space on board the ship and we have an assessment for every space on the ship and everyone's trained. But we maybe if we do too much, people just wake up in a bed, walk like zombies to where they normally go. It's almost ironic. You say you mentioned common sense earlier and you don't want to leave it to common sense. You want to give them a procedure that this is what you should do. Right. The only problem with that is if there's a slight change now, you need that common sense. But you've trained it, Erdem. You know, from then on, the announcement had to be. And we drilled alternate, we drilled alternate. But I have to admit before that we didn't drill alternate. We it's on the station, Bill. Everyone knows that that's where you go if the accommodation is on fire or if you have reached a warehouse or something like that. So once again, we can change our model, modify our procedures, and we learn from it. And thank goodness that no one was injured. So I'll I'll ask the question. And even though I think you've already kind of answered it, go back and tell me, what would you do different? And I'm going to guess the answer is practice that muster at the alternate station before the event. Exactly. Yeah. And to not only we did a once in a while, say once every couple of months. And if you happen to not be on the ship when that happened, you might have missed that event. You know, you might have been home when we did that alternate drill. So that's one thing we did and we had to reinforce and secondary and tertiary backup place to go to muster. Second thing we did was we really cracked down on the permit to work and the isolation's. So then I had to make a standing order. And standing order from a captain is pretty much what's going to happen. And it's a written down and all the officers have to sign it, stating that they have read this and they acknowledge it and they acknowledge. So you can't pretend you didn't hear can't do that. So and then the isolation, even for nuisance alarms, was not allowed to happen as a result. We had lots of false alarms. So now you got people little angry. But once again, the captain is never really. Popular at all? No, you can't. The coach of the team is yelling out their pockets, right. And then the third thing was, well, you know, like you just said, they have to change it, change it up and not have drills it same time. And I have them in the nighttime. No one likes them in the night time. Three o'clock in the morning. Supergrid one super unpopular. You got to you got to do it, because if you have it all the same time all the time, people are just going to keep doing what they're doing. So in the oil business, and especially the guys on the drill floor, they work hard. They at the end of four weeks, they're they're beat, completely beat. And by me pulling an alarm three o'clock in the morning, which is halfway through their shift of sleeping. Yeah, that's not very popular. But what's the alternative? What just happened? Yeah. The two two scenarios that you've described where where nothing horrible did happen, but it certainly could have. Certainly could have. That's fantastic, Mark. That's another incredible story. Great, great examples of human behavior, even in an industry that probably sets the standard globally for for for being safe and for and for overkilling procedures. And you mentioned permits to work and all that. And and even there sometimes the procedures are not perfect. And that only takes a little bit a little little tiny mistake here, a little change of things over there. And then you've got the potential for a real problem. You seen that Swiss cheese pitcher? Yes, the Swiss cheese. So it'll be Swiss cheese model. So if you if you don't know what that is, if you take out a slice of Swiss cheese like a small slice, it will have holes in it. And if you take out another slice of Swiss cheese, the holes are not really the same because they're made by bubbles in the teeth and you put another one in another one. But if something happens and the holes all line up, that's what the incident would be. So not only one thing has to happen, but two and three and four things have to happen for that emergency to happen. If one of those Swiss Jesus was moved an inch, that Internet would have stopped. Yeah, would have caught it. What about it? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us on the show today, Mark. We hopefully one day we'll have you back here on legacy survival stories. You've been a fantastic, interesting guest. And as you noted, you've got dozens of stories, hundreds, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So I'd love to have you back here sometime on legacy survival stories. A good game for it. I enjoyed it. It's great. And good luck with this. I I'm looking forward to listening to the different podcasts you produce. Excellent. Thanks so much, Mark. OK. 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 dot com. 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