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For three days I took part in an offshore survival course. This course is required before anyone is allowed offshore and teaches basic safety techniques.
The first day consisted of a group of six guys sitting in a room listening to the typical safety rubbish. Three from Azerbaijan, one from Australia, one from Pakistan and me from England. Where ever you go there is always a mixture of people from around the world. The second day is when the fun started. The morning was an introduction to using life jackets, re-breathing apparatus and inflatable life rafts. In the afternoon we started the practical activities in the pool. To start off we did some practice with lifejackets and climbing into life rafts, once we had that down, we put on re-breathers and practiced going under water with them. Unfortunately they only wanted us to stay under water for 30 seconds so it made the exercise pretty pointless. The next stage was the helicopter simulation. For this exercise you had to sit in a box which is then dunked into a pool and rotated around. You are expected to stay under water for 10 seconds to "allow the helicopter blades to stop spinning", then you had to swim out of a window to get to the surface. Once you manage to complete the exercise with a re-breather on, you then have the option to do it totally unassisted. Without the re-breather and nose clip it is much more of a challenge, not because you cant hold your breath that long, but because when you turn upside down all the water starts going up your nose. The third and final day concentrated on the different types of fire and the possible methods to extinguish them. The morning was just theory work and in the afternoon we were allowed to use some extinguishers to put out some controlled fires. At the beginner firefighting level we only worked on fire types A and B (Solid stuff and liquids). I got to use a water, foam and CO2 extinguisher to put out some small fires. Next came using two types of gas mask, the first was a "smoke hood" and then a mask with supporting air cylinder. The smoke hood is a mask which totally covers your head and has a filter capable of removing non toxic smoke; as such it’s not particularly useful. The mask with cylinder means you don’t have to breathe any of the smoky air. We used both of these masks to traverse a totally dark facility starting with artificial smoke and then the real stuff. |