Episode 7. Fire Aboard the Louis St. Laurent with Anthony Patterson

On this weeks episode of Legacy; Survival Stories, master mariner and search master Anthony Patterson recounts a fire onboard the Canadian icebreaker Louis St. Laurent  just seven days into his first voyage at sea.

Hosted by Dan Latremouille

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Transcript

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The time is March 6th, 1982. The place is the North Atlantic in Canada's coastal waters north of Nova Scotia. The situation is as follows. Canada's largest icebreaker, the Canadian Coast Guard ship, Louis St. Laurant, is performing routine operations in favorable conditions as the crew prepares for a fire drill. Eighteen year old Anthony Patterson is learning the ropes of maritime life. It's only his seventh day at sea and everything on board seems like an adventure until the fire alarm begins to sound before the scheduled fire drill. Smoke begins to fill the cabins in the bridge, and Anthony is about to be thrust into a crash course in Marine emergency duties. This is legacy survival stories. You're going down, you're going down. Legacy; Survival stories. Welcome to Legacy Survival Stories. I'm Dan Latremouille, and I'll be your host. We've got another great show for you today. We're bringing to you a long time Coast Guard personnel, Master Mariner, a search master. He's got a bachelor in maritime studies. He's worked search and rescue. He is currently the director of marine simulation at Virtual Marine Systems in Newfoundland. And he comes today to us with an incredible story from early on in his career with the Canadian Coast Guard. So, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Anthony Patterson. Welcome to the show, Anthony. Well, thank you for having me down. It's it's fantastic. I know that you've been at this a long time, and I know you've got a whole bunch of stories. And it's a little unusual to have somebody who's who's got a long and storied career like yours that had such a dramatic story so early in his career, which is the story I think we're going to hear today. So if you don't mind, why don't you set the tone for us? What year what year is this happening? OK, so we're going all the way back to 1982. And in case anyone can find the official report, which I can't, and they're trying to follow along. This is coming from my memory as an 18 year old, my seventh day at sea and the Coast Guard. So you are literally 18 years old and literally on your seventh day on a Coast Guard ships. How did you end up there? Did you go through the Coast Guard College? Right. So I grew up in Saskatchewan and and I applied to go to the Coast Guard College after I failed the eyesight test to get into the Air Force. I thought driving the ship was going to be like flying a plane. I was completely wrong, but I made the right choice for the wrong reason. Well, and where are you going to end up? Do you? Yeah, that's right. So I joined the Coast Guard at the Coast Guard College in August of 1981. And at that time, the program was called the sandwich program. So we do some training at the college and then seafarer's and then back to the college, back to sea, back to the college. And that happened over a three year period. OK, so at the time then the whole program was three years. Yeah, that's right. It was a three year. It was called the Sandwich Program. So it was roughly two years of academics and one year of service. And when people hear that, it sounds like it sounds like, you know, a two to one ratio, but it certainly isn't, is it? Because when you're at sea, you're at sea. It's not as if you get to take a break and go home in the evenings, is it? No, that's right. In fact, we were working 12 hour days when we were at sea. Cadets are the lowest on the lowest rung of the ladder on the ship. So we get to do absolutely everything. You're a fighter, so you're that you're the gopher. Exactly. So. So from you know, from August when I joined the college until December, that was the first academic phase. And that really was just getting everyone to the same theoretical level on the basics of navigation. So those people that were in my class who, you know, been at sea cadets and stuff, you know, that that authority already knew a lot of things about fretwork, things like that. But for me, it was a mountain of a life learning curve. I absolutely knew nothing about the water or navigation or anything like that. Had you grown up on boats or anything or this was not really new? Yes, entirely new. The first time I actually saw a ship that I can remember seeing, a ship was flying into Vancouver for my interview with the Coast Guard. So I well, I suppose it does make some sense. There's not a ton of ships in Saskatchewan unless you get way, way, way up there. Well, that's right. Now, and Saskatchewan. I was a swimmer and a lifeguard, so I had a quartic. Safety was my background. And I think that's kind of what drew me to the Coast Guard as my second choice after the Air Force is that, you know, I've been a lifeguard. I you know, I actually rescued some people in pools. And it seemed to me that, you know, the Coast Guard was close to that. So that's it. No more than that. It was just that was the only connection. Well, once you get a taste of it, it's a it's hard to get the water out of your blood once you've got it in there, isn't it? Oh, that's right. Yeah, exactly. Strange things happen in strange places. So so what happened is that, you know, at the end of exams in December, then the navigating class, you know , went home for Christmas. But then in January, we were assigned to go on board ships. OK, so you're returning to and this is the Coast Guard called at the time it was in Sydney, Nova Scotia, correct? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So in fact, it still is. So the Coast Guard College is based in Sydney. It's at the old Edward Navy bases where where it originally was. And, you know, and so we went to went home, came back and I was assigned to Maritime's Region at the time. It's now all been bundled together into Atlantic region. But at the time, it was Maritime's region with the headquarters in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. And when I. Over there, I was assigned as one of I think was six cadets that were assigned to the lowest solera, you know, the largest ice breaker in the fleet. And it had the most capacity to take cadets because most ships would only get one cadet. But the lioy had six because they had so much space on board. It's funny you say the most. I you take cadets and you took the whopping load of six cadets onboard. Well, that's yeah, that's right. Well, there is a how many came out? Let's see if there is about 50 navigating cadets came out in January. SIFIs. OK, and so they'd be and they'd be scattered across the country assigned to various vessels. Do you have any choice in that? Or they just sort of tell you you're going here, you go in there. Yeah. Zero choice. They just they put your name out of a hat and if you want. Now, what they tried to do is that over your three year program, like you're to see faces, they tried to give you a little bit of time on an icebreaker, a little bit of time on a search and rescue vessel and a little bit of time when a boy tender. Okay, well, that's good. A little a little bit of cross exposure. Yeah. So you would get you would get to know kind of how those operations worked. And as cadets, we were in fact, we only went on the bridge to steer or to be a lookout. Our main focus was to really understand how things worked as a seaman, like someone on deck and doing the same job that the crew was doing. It was very important that we we figured that out because this is our one and only chance in our career to actually work on deck. There's probably a joke there about the one and only change in your career to actually do some work. But I'll let it ride for now. Well, yeah, that's true. It's not much of a joke anyways. So what? So big on the Lewie was I was kind of upset at first because the Lewie at the time she had boiler's, so it was a steam turbine vessel. And the steam engines could generate a tremendous amount of power, but the cost was very high fuel consumption. So now you fast forward to the early 80s after the fuel crisis in the 70s, is that Ilui was probably the most expensive ship for the Coast Guard to operate. So. So if you don't mind me asking why then does that mean that you don't want to be on it? Is it because you think they're not going to do much just due to the cost of operating it? Yeah, exactly. She was going to be stuck in Dartmouth. The very last ship to be deployed on Gulf icebreaking operations was going to be the Louis Samirah because of the cost of fuel. Well, that's sort of my friends. Everybody else is going have to do exciting things. And you're going to end up sitting, you know, in a bunk at the dock basically pretty well. And that was from January until the beginning of March. That's exactly what what happened. In fact, I remember we were on the Lewie, you know, the in February, us on the Ocean Ranger sank. Yeah. And the very same year. That's right. Yeah, same year and that year. Well, exactly. And I remember going up on the bridge because we could pick up the at night, we could pick up the the radio broadcasts on twenty two so we could hear the operations going on, on the grand banks in Halifax from the ship's radio system just for it. So I still back home when you referred to 182. What are you referring to there? Oh, yeah. No, it's it's a radio frequency. So it's kind of like the medium frequency for for intermediate range communications. Like normally you can go 200, 300 miles. But at night, you know, with environmental and atmospheric skipp, you can sometimes receive broadcasts, you know, maybe five hundred thousand miles away. And it just kind of depends on the evening. And it just so happened on on that, you know, when the ocean ranger went down and, you know, and the search after the ocean ranger, that the atmospheric ship was such that that we could heat at night, we could hear the broadcasts and Halifax. Wow. Well, that's that surprising, Skip. And that would have been that would have been some interesting but probably disturbing stuff to listen to. Well, it was you know, it was a very surreal experience. You know, it's like, you know, everyone on the Coast Guard, you know, hard wired to go out and help people. And and we were hearing, you know, our sister ships out on the search and we were stuck in Halifax and we couldn't do anything, you know? It was a it was a very sobering experience on the bridge. There was not one word spoken when we were listening, listening to it. And like I again, I was just a young kid. And further compounding your probable frustration at the fact that look at all these you know, these these ships are out there doing stuff. And here here I am stuck at the dock basically doing nothing because my ship's too expensive to run. Yeah, that's pretty well it. Yeah. OK, so let's let's skip back then. So there's you and you're frustrated, but at least you're on a ship. You're going through your cadet program. And so what what is it that eventually gets you guys off the dock? How does it that you end up heading out to sail? OK, so what happened was that there was really bad ice. Conditions in the Gulf that year and Sydney Harbor got blocked, and with the blockage of Sydney Harbor, of course, that stopped the ferry going back and forth to New Zealand and the. Yeah, OK. Yeah, that that actually is a pretty that's a that's a big deal. Oh, it was massive deal. Right. And and all the other icebreakers were just going flat out, just trying to keep the Gulf open. So they needed another icebreaker in the mix. So the LOI was was dispatched. So we left, you know, roughly March 1st. You know, I'm not sure exactly, but around there, you know, around that time, late and early March, somewhere in there. Yeah. And we sailed up to Sydney and and we started doing ferry escorts. And it was really self is, what, two or three times a day. You know, pick up the ferries outside of Sydney Harbor and bring them to the Marina Lantic dock. So when you say bring them, are you basically just just just basically driving in front of them to clear the ice out? Yeah. Yeah. I said, yeah. So it was you know, we were the icebreaker and we were clearing the path. I remember I wasn't on the bridge at the time, except once I got the steer while we were doing it. Most of my my view of this thing was on deck looking at the ferry very from, you know, from the deck level. But but but that's that that's really what we were doing. There was it was really interesting. You know, like I had no idea how close the ships would get to each other while they were breaking ice. And so while you mentioned taking the pressure, how close are we talking about? Well, my impression was you could of spit and hit the other ship, but no, we were not quite that close, but I'd say we were maybe 20 meters away as we were breaking. That's pretty close to say that when you're looking at a ship that's, you know, three, 400 feet long. But that does seem pretty close. Well, it is. And you have to you have to take the pressure off the side of the ship and and all of that kind of stuff. So. So basically, that's what we were doing. We had done a few other odd jobs. And Magdalen Islands, we had to, you know, escort a ship that was stuck up there and came back. So then I remember, as I bring this up to the point of, you know, the event. So that was March six. And we were like every other day, we were just kind of waiting outside of Sydney Harbor for the ferry to come over from Newfoundland. And then we were going to, you know, meet them at the ice age and then bring them into the dock into Sydney. And so, you know, and it was a beautiful lake. All the other stories, you know. It's a dark and stormy night. Well, mine's the opposite. It was flat. It was a beautiful day. There was there's not a breath of wind. It is interesting in emergency response, you know, stories and all the training and stuff, you know, they always tell you a bad things don't happen on nice days. But lo and behold, apparently they do happen on nice days, too. Oh, well, yeah. And that's what happened to us, you know. So it was a beautiful day. Not a breath of wind. The temperature was a little bit cold, I don't know, minus 10 or something Celsius. But but like nothing untoward. No, but my Eastern Canadian mark standards that that that sounds like a pleasant day. Yeah, it was beautiful and it was beautiful. And and that day we were going to have the first boat fire drill that, you know, since we sailed out of Halifax. So, you know, the routine and the Coast Guard at the time was that you do these drills on the weekends. And because we hadn't really changed, like there's only six cadets and a crew of eighty two. So we didn't trigger the regulatory requirement to do a boat and fire drill because we changed too much of the crew . There's only a few new people, and that was us. So off they went. And we we're going to have our first boat fire drill on March 6th at one o'clock in the afternoon after lunch. OK, I've got you. And just again, for the for the folks at home, what Tony is referring to there is as soon as typically speaking, it's somewhere around the 25 percent mark that you did change a certain percentage of your crew over, you have to do a drill as soon as possible so that you've got everybody up to speed on the on the procedures of that ship. Is it is that about right, Tony? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's enshrined right in the in the safety of Life at Sea convention, which came from Titanic since 1912, up to even today. That's that's the rule. Gotcha. OK, so there you are on this morning. And you know that there's a drill coming at one o'clock in the afternoon. Are you nervous about the drill? Do you care or is it just a thing? Oh, no. I mean, like like remember, I'm an 18 year old who kind of ran away from home in Saskatchewan to go to sea. So everything is an adventure and everything is exciting. That's of the way that's the way I was. If only all the workers out there could maintain that enthusiasm when they mean it, when they when they do those drills every month or two weeks or whatever, from now to the end of time. Well, you don't OK, now that you're getting into the crux of the story, we'll come back to that point again. OK. So so anyways, it was eleven, eleven thirty somewhere around that. It was before noon, but it wasn't so far away. We're kind of all getting changed, you know, from working on deck. We were actually chipping and painting somewhere and, you know, getting ready to go for for lunch in the officers mess, or we had to get it out of our coveralls and get into our uniforms and the fire alarm goes off. Now, you know, as so this is this is just before lunch, somewhere in the 11, 30 ish range, you know, that you get a drill scheduled for one o'clock and you're thinking, well, gee, it's not one o'clock yet. Is that is that is that about the mindset that's going on here? Well, that's what the rest of the crew was for me. It says, oh, for Furler. And I looked at, you know, my my muster station in the bunker I was in and said, you know, report to the to the hospital. But the bunk above me, which I had occupied, you know, the previous day because I switched births, I said to report with all the other cadets at at the officers lounge. So it was the two different bunks in one room reported to two different stations. Yeah. It was the cadets cabin. So they kind of depend which bunk you were in, depended where you were going. And in fact, it turned out later that all the cadets, except for one, were supposed to go to the officers lounge. And that one was the one I had just transferred my bunk to the lower berth, which was so interesting. Is that. Yeah. So so that kind of put me into a little bit of a situation. I said, you know what, I'm just going to stick with the rest of the gang. I'm going to go with them to where I was, because I didn't know whether they knew that I changed my bunks or anything. In fact, it was a great big empty room. So I just changed my bunk because I was so like you. You were told to tell you when you weren't assigned a bunk, you just went, I no, I like this bed better. Yeah. Yeah, I like this bed better. Like I don't want to be climbing up there all the time. In fact, we had a rough day the day before and I realized, you know, the merits of having a lower berth. So I said, OK, I'm going down to the lower birthrate. So, you know, so you're kind of getting the the sense of what's going on. So we we saw fire alarm. We look on our thing report there, I else. And, you know, cadets being a little bit keen. We also said, you know, we went back to no, we didn't have any medic training at that point. But just, you know, common sense from the college. They told us, you know, if everything ever happens, never go on deck without warm clothing and stuff. So, by the way, our Kathleen Koch is at home. Med is a Marine emergency duty training. So that's your basic safety training like a business is the bad old days. You could actually go to sea for six months without any safety training. Wow. Wow. Right. Because they had such high turnover in the marine industry. Why waste safety training on somebody who's going to quit, you know, the day after they go on board the ship? Gotcha. And in fact, in my year, half of the navigators that went to see in first year see phase quit because of seasickness. They couldn't get over it. Well, having having been seasick a couple of times in my life, I, I can't judge that too harshly. It is it is not a good time. Yeah. So it's so these like after the indice phase, in fact, right after you know, in in June when we got off the ships went to Newfoundland to do our fire-fighting and first aid and evacuation, all that training, our med training was happening in the summer of 1982, but in the winter of 82, we were on our first offense. OK. All right. So then back to the event then. So you're looking at where you're supposed to report to muster. You follow the crowd. Well, we followed the rest of the cadets because we're all in there. And being Kene cadets, you know, we're we we bring warm clothing and we even bring our life jacket in our hands because we figure, well, you know, boat fire drill, I guess, fire first boats act. So we're standing up there and, you know, there's a lot of grumbling. People are going to their muster stations and there's a lot of grumbling. They say, what the hell is going on? You know, like it's supposed to be one o'clock. Why is it why is it 11, 30? And it's all they know is is doing drills and a bunch of seafarers grumbling about having to go to a muster station. I'll have to take you at your word. Well, exactly. But more importantly, they were saying. And doesn't the old man or the old man, the captain, as you know, it's a slang for the captain. Doesn't the old man know? Is the boat drill first and then the fire drill? So a lot of like I'd say half the crew went to the boat station, not to their fire station. Oh, so, so. OK, well, this is getting interesting. So now you've got a situation where people because they know the drill is coming, they're anticipating the usual flow of the drills and they're just kind of just going ahead and following, like falling into that routine as opposed to following the actual alarm. Yeah, that's right. I mean, they OK, you know, fire drill alarm went off and they just autopilot. They went to you know, the old man made a mistake. I'm going to my boat station now. Some people went to the fire stations and some went to the boat station. Interesting. Okay. All right. So anyways, we're standing. There is not much going on. The alarms are ringing. And then I start smelling smoke and we're kind of looking at each other as cadets was saying, you know, the Coast Guard is going all out on these drills. Right. And we start seeing a little bit of smoke coming out of the passageway and say, wow, smoke bombs all works. Right. And then it became real, real fast because the electrical officer came running down from the bridge deck. And and, you know, people some officials running drills. So that's not a good sign, isn't. No, and you can tell when people are like very stressed out and very excited and he was like this guy we met before, like he was just very calm all the time, but he was super excited. And he pointed at us or he pointed at me, actually, and said, go get the air back from the engine room. The air pack. Yeah. Scott Air back in. OK, so like a breathing bottle, like the sort of thing. Breathing apparatus. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's the brand name. Sorry. I guess I got to be careful. The breathing apparatus. Oh, don't worry about that. Just for just for clarity for everybody listening. So we're talking about the sort of thing, you know, like firefighters where you put an air tank on your back, put a mask on so you can breathe in a smoke environment or something. Right? That's exactly it. And because we were cadets by we're wasting our time wasting time while we were in Halifax, you know, sitting there. One of the things we had to do was to make a hand sketch of the entire ship and the location of every extinguisher, air act, fire hose, everything on the ship. And that was part of our training is that the chief officer was going to quiz us, that we had to know where everything was. So that was the that was the training that we were doing as cadets. So when you said go get the starter pack from the engine room, I knew exactly where it was. I knew where the closest was. Right. Lo and behold, you're you're you're make work project actually paid off a little bit big time. So I go down there and that was I think in the mid 80s, there was a change in the way that muster lists were done. We were in the early 80s, in the early 80s. The crew was not organized around fire teams or boat teams or rescue teams. And the crew was was designated to go to certain locations on the ship. And then the officers would assemble the fire team and the boat team and all that kind of stuff from the people. So there was oilor no, I don't know. oiLor number 10 was assigned to standby Scott Airpark number three and wait for instructions. That's basically how how the muster list work. OK. All right. I've got you. Right. So I go down to, you know, Scotter Park three, which was the closest one. And I'm started and there's, you know, oiLor number 10 standing there. And I start, you know, unshackling the the air pack to bring it up to the bridge. And he stops me and says, you know, that's the air pack for the engine room. You can't touch that. And anyways, we had very brief and intense words. And I got I got the point across to them that there actually was a fire, but he didn't believe me. Still think he still thought it was a drill going on. Right. So so now you so you're saying that like, you know, there's a fire now. So you're before you'd been on deck and you know, as you said, that the Coast Guard was really going for the drills. Well, what was the trigger that you knew that this was real? Was it was it this this electrician or whatever who came down and was was killed? So that's when you knew this was this was we're not joking around here. This is the real deal is real and actually came from lifeboat lifeguard training, as strange as it is, because I had the same thing kind of happen to me as a lifeguard is you're always pretending people are drowning like your friends or I'm drowning, I'm drowning. Save me. Right. The first time you're encountered with a drowning person, your initial instinct is they're not actually drowning. Then all of a sudden you wake up, you say, oh, wait a second, they're drowning and you go in and get them right. So because I had that experience when I correlated smoke, smell of smoke, that's the sight of smoke in a very excited guy. And just my my switch flipped and I said, no, there's a real fire. That's that's what triggered me. Right. I don't know about other people, but that's what it sounds like. You're sounds like you're human evolution. Biological responses were working correctly. Thankfully. Thankfully, yeah. So anyway, so I pulled the air out of a number 10000 said there's a fire that you should tell someone in the engine room. And I ran back up and and passed the Scuderia back off to the the group that was assembling to go and investigate where the smoke was coming from. And at that point, like all the other cadets were not lifeguards or anything like that, but I was a lifeguard. I had some medical training. So, you know, I don't know if it was the right thing or the wrong thing, but I said, you know, my muster station is actually in the hospital and I probably should be in the hospital. So I always let them know what I was doing. Well, it was kind of a consensus. So it's like, you know, what should we do here? And I said, yes, I feel the hospital. Anyone comes looking. Well, I don't know. That's that was your muster stations. This is just you or you and a bunch of cadets. Yeah, it's just me and the six cadets. We're all kind of did a huddle. I meant like there's no officers. There's nobody here telling us what to do. We're just trying to figure out. So what did you say? Your seventh day on the seventh day at sea and and you've been left unattended in what is, by all appearances, a real emergency. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, dear. Yeah, exactly. So I go back to the hospital and there is the we had we carried a nurse at that time and reported for duty. And sure enough, she checked me off on that and then reported back up that I was now relocated from where I was to to this new location and the scene, that she was happy that I was there, because I did have my lifeguard training and were still all current, you know, as far as being able to do something. So. So that was fine. So what did happen, though, is that remember I said the starter pack was was picked up. Yup. They assembled two hose teams to go and investigate smoke coming out of the captain's cabin. And in the actual investigation, what they found, what what was going on, there was space heaters in the officer's deck and they were in the closets and the space heater in the captain's cabin caught his clothes on fire, which with the the the fire from the clothing went up into the void space between the bridge deck and the officer's deck, which had accumulated 12 years of dust that had never been cleaned out. So it just filled the bridge with smoke. They thought that the consoles were on fire like an electrical fire on the consoles, but it wasn't. It was actually coming smoke from the void space which was originating from the captain's cap. Ha. Wow. So so was evacuated the bridge in a closet. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it turned out I read the Tasby or sorry, not the Transport Canada Ship Safety Bulletin that was issued 10 days after the fire. You know, it's part of getting ready for this. And it turned out there was 24 of those on board the ship all stowed in the closet of all places. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. OK. All right. OK, so. Yeah, so so this kind of explains why there's a breakdown is because the smoke hit the bridge. And I talked to my friend like the guys are on the bridge. You know, they became my colleagues later and they they recounted their story to me and they said, you know, the the the bridge filled with smoke. They discharge all the extinguishers into the castle. They thought it was on fire, didn't do anything. The smoke was getting worse and worse. They hit the fire alarm bell and had to evacuate the bridge. So you go back to the way that they were trained in their drills. The command and control center for the ship was the bridge, which which has now been evacuated. Evacuated. Oh, my goodness. So. Right. So that's why communications broke down right there. That's why no one was being told anything, because there was no one to tell anybody anything. Right. So they created an ad hoc kind of figured that the smoke was coming out of the captain's cabinet. That was the the source of the problem. It took a matter of, I guess, my perception, about ten minutes to figure it out. So they assembled two host teams with all of the senior people on board the ship. So the captain, chief engineer or chief electoral officer, Bosun's Carpenter, or like, oh, wait, wait, wait. So the top guys, I'm trying. So the the people in charge then are now becoming the host team. The fire team? Yes. OK. OK. Right. OK, so they go and they open up. They open up the door to the captain's cabin to see what's going on. And a fireball comes out and takes out all of what works. And the reason why is they didn't have any water in their hoses. So they they do they connect them to the hydrants on the ship. Everything was. But when you do drills inside of the ship, you don't put water in the hoses because it creates a mess. So by proxy of that, then they had connected the hoses. But just like in drills, they hadn't put water in them. So they go crack open this door. And are we talking like Backdraft type stuff here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was in the hot seat. I saw the ask like all this stuff. I wasn't there when it happened, but I saw the aftermath of it because I was in the hospital. And then we started getting these burn victims coming into into the hospital and someone very, very serious, seriously burned. Right. So thank goodness. And and and not because problems aren't bad enough. We're back to the senior people on the ship, the captain, the boatswain, like your senior people, the people that are supposed to be in charge are the ones that grab the gear to go fight the fire, didn't put water in the hoses. And so this is the people that just got taken out by this fireball. Yeah. So in the firefighting effort was down to the next tier of officers on board the ship. And at that point, my friends, remember, they're milling around still. What's going on with the fireball happened. Then the the next tier went and grabbed on and put them on fire, fire hose duty, because basically we had the top two decks of the ship were now on fire and they were firefighting from the outside, like outside of contradictions inside. And that's where the Scott air packs were. Like we ran out of Scott air packs for the fire teams within, I don't know, 20 minutes. Yeah. They going to last long, do they? Once you get going. Once you get huffing and puffing. Right. So then fire fight. So there is nearby ships. There's two other Coast Guard ships kind of came near us and we started organizing a helicopter airlift of their Scott air packs to us and us evacuating burn victims from us to them. Oh, my goodness. This is incredible. Holy cow. So then after the fire was going on for about, I don't know, three or three or four hours. So at the end of it, actually, it was breath holding is what we were they were fighting us. So you're going to have to describe that, because I'm having a hard time. I'm having a hard time with that. Are we talking about people going into a smoking area because there's no more Scott packs, so trying to fight fire while holding their breath? Yeah, getting as close as they could. They couldn't get right into that. But it was more like fire containment. It hold their breath and they do really races and the water coming out of the hose was that like one degree Celsius in the water, rushing past their feet was like really warm. But it's like the hottest bath water you could. You could think of rain. So like going into the hot space and then as it floods back out, it's been heated up by the space kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Jeez, that's amazing. Yeah. So that was going on for. No, I wasn't involved in that part of this, but my friends told me that. So I again, if you read the report and there's something different than there. Well, my friends didn't tell me the truth. Now we're taking a dig at Anthony Patterson. This is this is the fact. And obviously the report is wrong. We're going with this story. You'd better. Yeah. Well, this is an 18 year old from Saskatchewan. Seventh day at sea perspective. This is what it is with zero emergency training or so. So because I was in the hospital, he had the burn victims. I was helping the nurse bring them up to the helicopter deck and to package them up and get them into helicopters to fly up, fly them off. And then the order came in, though. The captain and the captain didn't leave the ship. He was burnt, but he was he didn't leave the ship. And he was organizing a lot of the stuff as well. So he's still he's still he's still active. He's still doing he's still active. But he he was hurt pretty bad. It was he was still he was still very active. So the uh. So we're going to stay there. So the order came out then to evacuate, not nonessentials, which we had done. Um uh, the most of the crew was was dedicated to firefighting. So it was me and the bosun's mate actually had to do a lot of the other stuff. So he was on the, you know, the the phone system for helicopter operations. And I was the guy at the tank at the five minute briefing, you know, if the helicopter crashes and burns, hit this button. Right. So so I had that like on the job training, I guess it. Well, exactly. And then it was, uh, we had to go rig emergency towing gear on the stern so that the ships could tell us because a wind was starting to pick up a little bit and the fire was starting to progress into the ship, like from the from the front of the ship aft. So so we wanted to turn to are we like like are we. Forty five minutes to this. An hour into this. Two hours into this. Where do you think? We're about forty five minutes out here. About forty five minutes. OK, so you know, then we're getting we're getting one or the other Coast Guard ships then to rig a tow to the stern of our ship and then tow the stern into the wind. So the fire would be blowing forward and not into the accommodation to help the firefighting. Which ultimately they did, and it was, you know, it worked like a charm. So but again, like, you know, you're rigging as rigging these 10 inch warring hazards with the boatswain's mate for for toying with with another ship and getting the messenger lines out. We had a hundred. I don't know how many. To me, it was a hundred, maybe fifty, maybe thirty, forty five gallon drums of aviation gas that were last to the rail, just behind the fire. Oh, dear. So after we did after it took us two days to load it in Halifax and took the boatswain's mate and myself about 20 minutes to get them all back on the flight deck after everyone had flown off rigs and had to rig the was it the avalanche life raft, basically reading the instructions on the house naturally for raft and then just doing what it said. So rigged and ready to go. So just quickly, for the folks at home, everyone probably knows what a life raft is. But a dove at launch life raft is one that you would. You would. It actually hangs off a little crane type thing. David, so that you can board it at height and then sort of lower yourself down to the water rather than having to jump in. And so and never having used it before, never having had any any of the Marine emergency duty training, you guys are literally reading the instructions on the on the shell, like reading the instructions on the outside of it. That's it. That's exactly it. And so so all that was going on. Right. And and so we finally got the fire under control up on the on the accommodation area enough. And we we were able to get because back then your ships could recharge their own air packs. So the other Coast Guard ships were recharging your packs and it was kind of a shuttle service going on in there and then cycle next to you guys. Right. Yeah. So we had a few spare that were full. And once the fire was under control enough, they spent they sent a team into the ship just to do a quick inspection of the rest of the ship, because after the alarms went off, I'd say it was like five minutes, maybe ten minutes after the hour went off. They were not getting back in the accommodations for any reason. Right. So we had a lot of people actually just left. I want to flip flops and T-shirts for me to evacuate them because like gloves and and hats and warm coats became the number one thing. Oh, so yeah. That you had to have that completely. So now you're back to the fact that people came out for what they thought was going to be a drill, grumbling about it, so completely unprepared for what turned into a real emergency that that from from from the account here and from from the reports escalated incredibly quickly . And so now they get there outside and you can't get any accommodations because it's damaged, burning, etc. So now you've got people trapped outside in in the North Atlantic. I mean, we're not way up in the north north here, but it's still march in Canada. Oh, my goodness. Was minus 10. Like I said, it was a nice, nice day so that they weren't getting frozen with windchill. But it's pretty cold. It was cold enough outside. Right. So, yeah. So anyway, so we had but anyways, go back to the guys that went inside of the ship and they found that the galley was about to go, was actually on fire. And this goes back again to Drill's. So what happens during a drill is that the cooks just they they go up with their life jackets in their hands. They say, I'm here you go, check, you're there. And then they're immediately excuse to go back down to the galley to keep cooking. Which which which which sounds weird, except that boy, that food is important on a ship. Well, it is, right, because you can interrupt, you know, supper or whatever your next meal is. If you take the cooks out of the galley and they got to shut everything down for an hour, you won't you'll have sandwiches for supper. You know, you're not going to have food or sorry, you're kind of hot food. So they when they left, remember, this was a boarding fire drill and the old man hit the wrong button. Oh, my God. So they they just, you know, had their their weights on, you know, their weight cooking gear. They grab their like their cooking fits the other chef outfit, I think. Yeah. They went up to the to the boat deck, standing there with the lifejackets in their hands waiting for someone to say, OK, Tagg's go back to the to the galley. But remember, supper was starting to be served, so everything was on the stove and all the stoves were on full blast. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Right. So when they came back, it all caught fire. The galley was on fire in the mail. This is down in the middle of the ship. And we got zero chance of fighting a fire inside of the ship at this point. So what they had to do was close the doors and pull the fire suppression system. And thank God that knocked it out. Otherwise the ship would have been lost. Holy jeez. On top of everything else, like you've spent all this time trying to wrestle this fire upstairs and the whole time there was another one brewing downstairs. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. So so that was pretty well the end of all that excitement the rest of the time. Like the daily all stuff. Was that the fire watch? Overnight in the morning, we had we were we were told in to Sydney there were two ships. I think by that time the Labrador had come up with I remember. Right. So the Labrador was breaking a channel and we had two blunders, one along side and one tying in front of us and trying to keep us from hitting the ice. And a few times we did hit the earth so our ship would stop dead. The other ships would keep going. And we were snapping these 10 energizers like they were just rubber bands saying no problem. Right. And so we we got into to Sydney and, you know, that was wonderful. A couple of days later, we got towed down to Halifax. The Coastguard College lent us their their gyro compass that they used for teaching because we had no Jarold compasses or anything, and we had to steer from the emergency steering flat. That was the other job of the cadets. We had the great big mass of wheels down like 30 feet in diameter. And this is how, you know, you're you're shuttering the ship. Yeah, exactly. So the they set up a temporary bridge in the in the service, and we were just trying to steer to stay, you know, to ease the strain on the towline. And so they were just called down to us. You know, of course, is the steer. And we have this great big massive wheel like it's like an old movie, right. We had one person on one side and the other one on the other side. And you're just grabbing the SPOK and pulling it down and pulling it down to turn the wheel and and the gyro compass every place we could fight or fit. It was sideways. So we whatever, of course, they gave us we had to add 90 degrees to it and then steer that right away. So that was a lot of fun. So, I mean, it's a Coast Guard ship in the 1980s, and you're basically steering, you know, like something from the 1500. It's almost like, you know, just yelling down to the to the and then a bunch of people just turning a big giant wheel. That's that is crazy. So I got to ask this, and I'm almost scared to know the answer. But, you know, all this drama and all this fire alarm that, you know, wasn't really taken seriously and then turned out to be real, and then you've got a sudden escalation of people, the people in charge get caught in the fire. And it's like, did you guys were you able to get a full muster? Were you able to count for everybody? Yeah. OK, yeah. So everyone was accounted for. Nobody died in the incident. There was a couple of people were really seriously hurt. And and I think that hurt that lead subsequently to to a death later. But there's nobody at the incident itself that that was that was that died. You know, the day that the incident occurred. But but the I'm guessing here, the burns and such. Yeah. Yeah. The injuries were all the serious injuries were all burn injuries. Oh, no. Yeah. Which are probably the worst ones that I have. Yeah. So, you know, in a way, it was it was interesting is that all the stuff we did in that day, like we had to get by carrying an anchor. It is a very specialized term. Basically, you disconnect the anchor from the anchor table and you use the anchor cable to attach to a toll line from a ship. So it gives you a very strong pull. But like that's called cating an anchor. And Jan never heard that phrase before, but it's going in the going in the memory banks now. Yeah, well, exactly. So it's you know, the anchors kept in the anchor pocket. Well, you do have to know how to do that in your training. And you're taught that at the Master Mariner level. And and most people in their entire career will never catch an anchor. Well, I'm very candid and anchors into mine, and I've never done it. Yeah. And I carried two anchors, you know, with the bosses, mate. You know, it's you know, on my seventh day at sea. So, you know, you talk about an acceleration of some aspects of the training. I mean, that's that experience. Did it. Is incredible. Yeah. You I mean, you covered well, thankfully, you didn't have to use any sea survival stuff. But it sounds like all of the the firefighting training that you did that you would have got eventually and the, you know, first aid training that as it happens you had because of your life lifeguard background and then all of your your nautical type training had a cat, a cat, an anchor, and to arrange and slip houses and and so forth. Sounds like you got you got the the crash iest crash course in that that one could ever get. Well, yeah, exactly. That's the way I look at it. So, you know. So what do we get from that? I mean, like it was a it's a very exciting story, but like what came out of that and the number one thing that I got out of that from that that experience right up until today is it really makes a difference on how you do your your emergency drills on board. It is probably the most critical thing that you. Onboard the ship, because you fight exactly the same way as you train. When we put people under stress, whatever you do on a drill and whatever shortcut you put in the drill for whatever reason, is that when the time comes, people will forget that it's a shortcut. That's a that's that's very interesting you say that. And that is a recurring theme that the what you what you what you drill people to do and what you repeat and repeat and repeat in your drills is what they will do in an emergency, even if it's suddenly inappropriate or incorrect or even completely illogical. And as you say, I mean, the the doing the drills, but with the fire hoses, like with no water. And I perfectly understand you don't want water in your accommodations, but if you don't ever test it, how would you ever know? Oh, my goodness. That's that's crazy. Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt there. Yeah. No, but it's a very common theme. I mean, you look at an accident investigation reports, and this just keeps happening over and over again. And this Saulius convention, Safety of Life at Sea convention, it says right in there that your drills have got to be as realistic as practicable. No practicable is a legal term. That means that you don't don't do a drill, that you're going to hurt anybody but get as close as you can without crossing that threshold. And, you know, there's a lot of things that you do in emergency, like responding to emergencies, like they're dangerous like you. Well, it's hard to use operational equipment in a drill and be realistic without having danger of hurting somebody. If you're going to push the realism curve. Yeah, 100 percent. Correct, 100 percent. Right. So you start to you know, I call them shortcuts. They're not it's not shortcuts. I mean, there's very valid reasons why you don't push the limits during a drill. You don't want to hurt anybody during a drill. You know, I, I well, I became, you know, captain of a ship. I didn't want to hurt anyone during a drill and I never did. But that's but that's just the necessity of it. So, you know, when you start looking at what I'm currently doing in simulation, I mean, this is really a big incentive is that experience I had on the Lewie was what can we do to make these drills more realistic? Well, it's that sounds like a powerful motivation that that's like that is a remarkable story. How how quickly that turned wrong and how, you know, as we often say, that the dominos lining up or the Swiss cheese holes lining up, you know, the the the fairly relaxed attitude towards drills, the the. I don't I hate to use the word complacency, but I can't think of another word that fits where where, you know, there's a drill. So you just kind of show up, take, you know, get your name ticked off at the at the muster list or at the muster station and then just go back to work kind of thing. And all of a sudden, all of that comes to bear in an in an awful hurry like that is just amazing. Yeah. I mean, when things start to snowball on your list of the. She said I was in the search and rescue sites like, you know, fast forward a few years, my career after that, you know , I'm on the search and the search and rescue side of thing, rescuing people in these situations. And, you know, again, you just you just see it is that when you talk to people, after you pull out of the water or got them off the boats or whatever, it's like there are kind of a standard how quickly things snowball. Like once it starts to go, it goes really, really fast. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a. And no, no, no greater evidence than than the story you just told. That's incredible. So I'll ask this thing. So you said one thing. You're one of your big takeaways would be would be, you know, drill, drill is realistic as you can. And is it fair to say you would probably agree with, you know, add some variety to your drill? So. And I mean that a lot of times on ships, they'll they'll kind of do their they'll they'll do the drills . But, you know, that's just kind of show up at the lifeboat station and the muster station, sit around, have a brief, maybe done the suits once in a while. But I guess what I'm saying is, would you agree that it's probably a good idea, throw some space in there from time to time, do a fire, drill from time to time, do a a person in the water drill, stuff like that? Oh, I, I can't agree more. I think the essence of the drills is that you should have the crew never know exactly what's going to happen. They've got to be trained how to expect the unexpected. Otherwise, they will not have resilience. They drill like the drills are, not only like the technical thing, like how does this piece of equipment work and where do I go when the alarm goes off? And what does the alarm sound like? It's more than that. It is that something is occurring. There is going to be no incident that's ever going to be the same as a drill. So why do you make the drills predictable? And I'm not talking through the alarm off at 3:00 in the morning because there's good reason why you don't want to do that. But when you do have drills, people should be going there and saying, OK, like what's in store, like what's going on? They've got to develop this sense that they've got to keep their eyes and ears open and adjust to things as they are occurring, rather than to have a mental model that things are always going to be the same. Otherwise, it will not have resilience. And if they don't have resilience, they're going to run into a big problem. Yeah, that's well said. That's very well said. OK, Tony, I think that's probably a good spot there. Unless you have any last tidbits that you wanted to add in. No, no. I mean, it's I'm really glad you're having this podcast because it's it's good for people to get these stories out. You know, that's part of what you learn from each other. Yeah, exactly right. It we're trying to to further the knowledge. And it's hard to be the the sort of the eye opening, you know, eye popping part of a story when when you talk to somebody who's really been there. And I mean, the story you just told. I had not heard that, Tony. We've known each other for for 10 ish years now, and I've never heard that story before. And I'm Florida over here like that is that is an intense that is an intense story. And I'm glad I'm glad you made it out of there. And I'm glad just about everybody else is doing I'm sorry for the the those that didn't I don't know all the details there, but I hope that that you and the rest of the people that did come through are wiser for it. I know you are, because I know what you do for a living. Yeah. Well, I can guarantee you the the people that I'm still connected with that had that were on that fire, that that fire changed them. They all have the same perspective is it's got to be real. It's got to be real as you can make it. OK, well, that's that's fantastic. Thank you so much. Anthony Patterson for joining us on the show today. And I get the sense from a few comments you made there that there might be a few other a few other nuggets of gold rolling around in your in your storybook vault in your head. So if you're willing one of these days, we'd love to have you back on the show. Happy to do it. Thank you very much. OK, thank you so much, Tony. Take care and we'll talk to you soon. Bye bye. If you have a story to tell or know of someone who does, please contact us at legacy survival stories. All one word at Gmail dot com. You can also find us at Legacy Survival Stories. Dot Buzz Sprout dot com. 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. 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