1.4 Contingency Plans, Escape Routes & Internal Communications

1.4 Contingency Plans, Escape Routes & Internal Communications

Core Principle: An emergency is not the moment to discover where the second exit is, which plan covers a bunker spill, or how to raise the bridge from a machinery flat. Table A-VI/1-4 requires every seafarer to have working knowledge of the ship's contingency plans, its escape routes, and its internal communication and alarm systems — before an alarm ever sounds.

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1. The Family of Shipboard Contingency Plans

A modern commercial ship carries a stack of statutory plans. Each has a different owner, a different trigger, and a defined stowage location. Basic Training expects you to be able to name the plan, say what triggers it, and say where it lives.

Exam Watchout: The fire control plan question almost always tests the duplicate outside the deckhouse. SOLAS requires a second set to be permanently stored in a prominently marked weathertight enclosure outside the deckhouse for the assistance of shore-side firefighting personnel. A shore brigade arriving alongside must be able to read the ship's fire zones without entering the accommodation.

What the Fire Control Plan Shows

Fire control plans are drawn using the standard graphical symbols of IMO Resolution A.952(23). A general-arrangement plan for each deck shows:

• The control stations, and the boundaries of A-class and B-class divisions.
• Fire-detection and fire-alarm zones and sprinkler installations.
• Extinguishing appliances — hydrants, portable and semi-portable extinguishers, fixed installations, foam and powder applicators.
• Means of access to compartments, decks and escape trunks.
• The ventilation system, including fan-control positions, damper positions and the identification numbers of the ventilating fans serving each section.

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2. Means of Escape (SOLAS Chapter II-2, Regulation 13)

Escape provisions exist so that a person can get out of a space when the normal route is on fire.

The Governing Rules

1. Two ways out. Stairways and ladders must be arranged to provide ready means of escape to the lifeboat and liferaft embarkation deck from all crew and passenger spaces. In general, at least two widely separated means of escape are required from every normally occupied space.
2. No long dead ends. In accommodation areas, dead-end corridors more than 7 metres in length are not permitted — a corridor that traps a person with only one direction of travel is a design fault, not an inconvenience.
3. Escape from machinery spaces. Category A machinery spaces require two means of escape: normally a steel ladder to a door in the upper part, plus a protected escape trunk with self-closing fire doors that discharges to an open deck.
4. No locks. Doors on escape routes must be openable from the escape side without a key. Cabin doors must not be fitted with locks that need a key from inside.
5. Markings and low-location lighting. Escape routes are marked with a directional arrow-and-running-man symbol. On passenger ships, low-location lighting (LLL) — photoluminescent strips or electrically powered systems, guided by IMO Resolution A.752(18) — is fitted along the deck edge so that markings remain visible when smoke has banked down below eye level.

                 WHY LOW-LOCATION LIGHTING EXISTS

   Overhead lights + high signage        Deck-level LLL strip
   ----------------------------------    ----------------------------------
   Smoke layer descends from the         Marking stays in the clear air
   deckhead downward. Within 60-90 s     layer at deck level, exactly where
   an overhead EXIT sign is invisible.   a crawling crew member is looking.

Escape Route Discipline

• Walk your primary and secondary escape routes on familiarisation day, in the dark, counting doors and turns by hand.
• Never stow gear, dunnage, drums or cleaning trolleys in an alleyway or on a stair landing.
• Never chock, wedge or tie back a self-closing fire door.
• Never use a lift during an alarm: a blackout traps the occupants and the trunk behaves as a chimney.

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3. Emergency Escape Breathing Devices (EEBD)

An EEBD is a hooded, short-duration air supply carried so that a person can walk out of a smoke-filled space.

• Duration: the FSS Code requires a service duration of at least 10 minutes.
• Construction: a hood that covers the whole head, or a full-face mask, giving eye and airway protection; supplied from a small compressed-air cylinder or an oxygen-generating canister.
• Locations: at least two in accommodation spaces, and units positioned ready for use at easily visible places in machinery spaces, reachable within seconds from the working positions.
• Hard limits — the point most often tested. An EEBD is for escape only. It must not be used for fighting fires, for entering oxygen-deficient voids or tanks, or worn by a fire-team member in place of breathing apparatus. Training units are separately marked and must never be stowed with the service units.

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4. Internal Communication and Alarm Systems

Communication Discipline in an Emergency

Emergency traffic is short, structured and confirmed. Use the closed loop: the sender states the message, the receiver reads it back, the sender confirms. State who you are, where you are, and what you have before you state what you want.

"Bridge, Bridge — Second Engineer at the purifier flat. Fuel oil fire at number two purifier, roughly one metre square, no casualties. I am closing the quick-closing valve and evacuating. Over."

That one transmission gives the Master a location, a size, a casualty count, an action already taken and an intention — everything needed to commit the fire party.