Ahoy Shipmates!!!

Continuing on with your Naval education we bring you another installment of MSW’s Navy Word of the Day.

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I remember those fire watches from way back when , at Great Lakes. These days we have smoke detectors but still have a roving security and fire watch in the dorms or enlisted BEQ, BOQ. There is also a mandatory fire watch in any tent set up in cold weather, that has an open fire , either gasoline or kerosene heater. So we didn't have to stand that watch ,we often bundled up and slept in the cold with the heat off. It is good to maintain this watch, should the smoke detectors fail. Just have to make sure that the watchman is responsable enough to stay awake.

At Great Lakes, my son would volunteer for fire watch or even trade for it just to keep from doing any task he felt was less desirable.

There was also suppose to be a fire watch posted whenever and where ever there was burning, or welding.

Never been navy, so never tried standing firewatch in that regard, but used to work each year at the "midtfyns festival" a yearly music festival with about 20.000 people coming, getting drunk and sleeping in tents.

I was part of the night shift, patrolling the campinggrounds for open fire and worst drunks, I will never forget hosing 5 germans and a BBQ out of a tent .... they refused to put it out so I and the fireman I was patrolling with, had to help them put it out .... they were wet, angry, drunk and not in the mood to argue with two sober guys with each a firehose

How could I forget ? Grumpy is right.......I was in an engine room too and every time we welded or cut or grinded there was a fire watch to be sure that the bilges did not catch fire or that hot slag didn't fall from the upper level onto a person below. Good call Dave.....Al

As a Chief Engineer in a plant, I still have to post a fire-watch whenever we do any welding or burning! Since NONE of the guys working there were ever in the Navy or even any service, this is totally foreign to them, but perfectly normal to me and the safety and fire department.

Bingo.

The place I used to work failed to do this and caught the ceiling fo the plant on fire. When I asked the safety supervisor why he had violated a OSHA rule he had a blank look on his face, "What rule?" He asked. I shook my head.

The closest I ever got to being in the Navy was NJROTC in high school. Every spring we'd go down to Navy boot camp in San Diego over our spring break to see what it was like. We had been told there was going to be a fire alarm at least one night the week we were there. One night an alarm went off and a friend of mine was downstairs faster than you could say "alarm clock."

I guess the tradition of keeping a watch nearby wasn't around in the yard where they were converting the SS Normandie, aka USS Lafayette, into a troopship. The sparks from a welding torch set fire to life jackets.