[BobClay]

It's been quite a few years since I've seen that film but when I watched it again tonight it made me feel uneasy. I'm not altogether sure why. It seemed a bit simplistic.

In my time at sea I was involved in two ship borne fires. One on the boiler front in the engine room, which I certainly wasn't directly involved with as I was the Sparks, we were at sea and my station was sat in the Radio Room awaiting developments. I was wary because my time as a fireman when I first went to sea told me there was a lot of danger in a boiler front fire, there are high pressure fuel lines feeding the burners all over the show. I'm happy to say the engineering crew rapidly bought it under control and all ended up good. But the damage I saw when I went down for a look afterward certainly gave me a lot of pause for thought.

The second believe it or not was an electrical fire on the bridge ! I was directly involved with that. It was more smoke than fire admitted, but smoke is pretty terrifying stuff because it hides horrors and incapacitates. Fortunately that too was stopped before it got to the flame stage, but the general fire alarm was sounded and the training kicked in and it was resolved. I wont go into details, but it was caused purely and simply by a failure in a transformer.

What makes me uneasy about this film is all the problems seemed to have been caused by the ship's crew, from cause right down to end result. It seems a bit 'company' orientated to me, but, if it's based on a true incident I'm surely not going to berate it.

Suffice to say the final comments are very relevant, fire is a true anathema on a ship. That's why we trained and trained and trained for it, certainly when I was at sea. And I did most of my sea time on tankers of one kind or another.