HOW SHIP FIRES ARE DISCOVERED
While statistics prove that a person aboard ship is six times safer than the ordinary citizen in his own home, one marine risk which holds more terrifying possibilities than any other is that of fire. A simple means of checking vessel fires before they are fairly started, is described in the April issue of Marine Review, Cleveland. The article states by a recent improvement of the Rich system for fire protection, the faintest trace of smoke in a vessel’s hold is made immediately visible to the officer on duty in the wheelhouse by means of lights. The technique of the system is simple. It merely converts the steam smothering lines required on all ships into a detecting system as well as an extinguishing system. The pipes already leading from each hold to the main line in the engine room are continued up to the wheelhouse, where they are all grouped together in a detecting cabinet. By an arrangement of miniature searchlights in the base of this cabinet a beam of light is thrown upward out of the end of each pipe and in full view of anyone in the wheelhouse.
Air or, when a fire starts, smoke is sucked up from each individual hold through these pipe lines by small electric motors placed in the base of this cabinet in the wheelhouse. The first trace of smoke as it comes up through a pipe passes through the stream of light at the end of the pipe and is made strikingly prominent.
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