HRO5 Decision Excercise-Shipboard Fire Safety
It is one thing to read articles that describe the general characteristics of sites that practice High Reliability Organizing (HRO) or the general principles of HRO. It is something completely different to apply the practices and principles of HRO to specific situations and risks. That’s what this post is going to guide readers through. It will be an opportunity to apply the principle elements of HRO that I listed in my second HRO blog post (LINK HERE),
The HRO design problem presented in this post is to create a fire safety system for U.S. Navy ships. Shipboard fires are very dangerous and undesirable, but they do happen. This makes them something you can anticipate happening sometime, somewhere. You can hope for the best, but you need to be ready for the worst.
The system you design must include both prevention and response. To keep the problem tractable, it excludes large-deck amphibious ships like the BONHOMME RICHARD and aircraft carriers because their hardware and human systems are an order of magnitude more complex than Frigates, Destroyers, and Cruisers.
Background
Your fire safety system must account for the organizational and engineering complexity of ships as well as human limitations. A full discussion of this complexity is beyond the scope of this decision exercise. It is sufficient to note that ships have systems for propulsion and electricity, communications, radars, ship control, and weapons. No single person or small group of people can know everything about everything on a ship so the crew is divided into departments to operate and maintain these systems.
If you have no experience with fires aboard Navy ships, a really good place to start developing an understanding of how hard shipboard fire fighting is to watch one or both of these two videos:
Back in the day, it was a requirement for every group of Navy students attending Fire Fighting School to watch Trial by Fire. There is nothing like watching extended videos of flames, explosions, and human tragedy to make you more serious about shipboard fires.
While you watch the videos, take notes about the biggest problems the crew of the USS FORRESTAL faced and how they dealt with them. The system you design for fire safety and response needs to handle all the problems and risks you note. It does not need to include the physical design of the ship, which is a given for the purposes of this decision exercise.
Next are the principle facts and some of the risks of shipboard fires. Fire prevention should be an important part of your system. Fire prevention aboard ship includes managing risks like:
Storage of inflammable material (since the presence of such material cannot be eliminated)
Ammunition (including missiles)
Hot work (ships and their piping systems are constructed from metal, which requires high-temperature repair processes like welding, cutting with acetylene torches, and brazing)
Maintenance on the system (always needed) without compromising the ability to fight a fire
In case prevention fails, your fire response has to include:
Equipment to fight fires (you don’t need to list the equipment, just what to do to ensure its readiness)
People to actually fight the fire (you don’t need to specify who does what, just how you would organize them). Your design needs to account for things that could go wrong (something always does, remember the USS FORRESTAL videos), and
Training (what kind?, how frequent?)
As a review, I pasted the list of HRO design principles from BLOG POST 2 below:
Principle 1: senior leaders engagement in details, shaping and maintaining a culture that prioritizes reliability and safety,
Principle 2: centralized control of technical design and management practices,
Principle 3: decentralized decision-making for operations, and
Principle 4: processes of personnel development that emphasize organizational learning from experience, training and development
How would YOU design the organization, technology, training, staffing, and resources to manage the risk of foreseeable occurrences like a shipboard fire?
The Design Challenge
Identify the top 10 features of a system for fire safety aboard U.S. Navy ships. The system you design should touch on organization (on and off ship), technology, training, staffing, and resources to manage the risk *before* a fire starts. You should organize your design around categories, which could those in the prior sentence or: Prevention (not letting fires start), Preparation (being ready to fight the fire), and Response (actually fighting the fire). For each feature of your system, identify which of the four HRO principles it connects to. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know much about the details of ship design or Navy policies and procedures. This is your system.
While you should be as specific as possible describing your system, you do not need to go into technical details of how ship crews would actually respond to fires (tactics). Don’t write: “My system will require periodic fire safety inspections.” Do write: “My system will required these kinds of inspections looking for these things with this frequency.” Another way to think of the design challenge is this: what would you expect to see if you went aboard a ship that was using your system?
Your design should account for the scarcity of resources in the real world. Navy ships don’t exist to fight fires. They exist to cause damage (which includes fires) to the ships, aircraft, and installations of forces hostile to the United States. Although the crews of Navy ships are “paid for” in a sense, anything they do that doesn’t have a very short and specific connection to navigating safely and putting ordnance on target is costly in terms of crew attention. This includes preparing for external inspections and assessments. Any feature of your system that requires off-ship support costs money, always a scarce resource.
In the next post, I will provide one possible design for shipboard fire safety and response. Don’t read it until you have written down (pen and paper are good) a few ideas or you will miss the point of this exercise (hint: it is related to thinking about how to be reliable). The ideas I provide don’t represent “the answer,” just one possible answer. The design I provide will not indicate what the current U.S. Navy shipboard practices are because the purposes of this HRO decision exercise do NOT include critiquing those practices. The purpose is give readers practice thinking about HRO in practice.
