Navigational emergencies
First actions on a grounding or collision
- Raise the alarm, stop or handle the engines as appropriate, and inform the Master.
- Sound round the vessel and assess damage and flooding; close watertight boundaries.
- Check for pollution and for injuries, and account for all persons on board.
- Fix and record the position and time and make the required reports.
- Take damage-control action and, if the situation warrants, initiate distress procedures under the IAMSAR Manual.
Fire and abandonment
- Know the emergency parties, the muster list and the drills, the fire control plan, and how to isolate fuel and stop ventilation to a space.
- Know the classes of fire and the correct extinguishing media, and the fixed and portable firefighting systems carried (covered in depth in the Advanced Fire Fighting course).
- Know the life-saving appliances — liferafts, lifeboats, EPIRB, SART, immersion suits, the line-throwing appliance — their markings, locations and use.
- Know the survival principles and how to launch, manage and recover survival craft, and how to account for and control passengers.
- Abandonment is the Master's decision and a last resort, taken only when the vessel is a greater danger than the sea.
Distress communications
The OOW must be able to send and handle distress and urgency traffic through GMDSS — a DSC distress alert with position, followed by a MAYDAY by voice giving the vessel's identity, position, nature of distress, help required and number aboard — and recognise the distress signals of others. On receiving a distress, the obligation to assist under SOLAS and the search-and-rescue framework of the IAMSAR Manual apply, and the OOW acts on it and informs the Master at once.
WARNING — The first minutes decide it Raising the alarm, informing the Master and accounting for people come first, before investigation. A calm, practised drill in the first minutes of a fire or flooding is worth more than any later heroics.