Originally Posted by
etudiant
May be quite challenging to implement. as a lot of this stuff is bulky, often in out of the way places and not easy to stow. Plus there is a real cost to breaking down and setting up at each shift, as suggested.
Like the idea of a two person supervisory/inspection team though, it keeps people honest when they know their work is under scrutiny.
Not sure how you would achieve any of it tbh - including a 100% sweep of a ship of any size. Even a fairly small ship has 100's of compartments, and, especially below the waterline, there is often no lateral or fore/aft access (or only within a small zone) before you have to come back up several decks to then go down into the next area. Of course, you could say only compartments being worked on, or adjacent to, need be inspected - but even so - in a major refit, that would be constantly changing and not insignificant. Not sure how wireless would work given the construction of ships either.
Again, as mentioned, much of damage control relies on compartmentalization which is often impossible to enforce as compartment hatches and doors are often open for access with "temporary" cable runs/hoses/ventilation passing through which probably took days to set up in the first place. We are not talking about the odd extension lead here or there. Certainly in the RN, there is a fire-watch mandated to monitor specific high-risk tasks where dedicated members of the ships' staff are present in all compartments that could be affected during, and for a pre-determined time after, any "hot works" or similar have been carried out. They have, generally, portable fire appliances for 1st aid/immediate response + the risk assessment will see that you have the best main-stream fire fighting system you can have to back up your immediate response from the portable extinguishers. Any downtime on fire systems will all be risk-assessed and mitigated for as best you can before it is switched off.
Your only real hope is to prevent a fire; as proven here, if you get one which gets established, you are pretty well stuffed given the open access during refits. It's more a case of apply the current rules which usually work, better education, and yes, proper supervision by Dockyard supervisors based on risk-assessments backed up by random spot checks. All should happen anyway. Of course, all adds to the cost so, where refits are bid on a commercial basis, maybe corners will be cut on supervision for example. Ultimately, unless a genuine accident (equipment failure or similar), such events are due to people not doing what they should do and, has been recently implied in the Karachi crash thread, if you make something idiot-proof, a bigger idiot will simply come along and see that as a personal challenge!!!
'Sides, we've only been doing this Refits thingy since the early 1500's so bound to be some teething problems with it!
