Fire fighting

Just read the thread about the fish processor that caught fire and that 5,000 gallons of fire fighting water were still on board, which got me curious about fire fighting on oil rigs, OSV’s, etc. Do you just use sea water or is anything added to the water to help extinguish a fire? One reason I ask is that a company in my town has created some type of nano technology that the navy was reported to be interested in as it was environmentally green product and didn’t need to be contained when used. I’ve seen the stuff in action and was pretty impressed - spray it on a fabric and it was water proof and wouldn’t burn.

Seawater is used for fire fighting and must be subsequently pumped overboard before you flood the vessel.

Yea seawater is what is in all the fire mains. You can also hook up foam solution, that uses seawater too. And portable fire extinguishers come in all types: dry chem, co2.

Where the material you mentioned sounds like it’d be useful is in clothing. But firefighting equipment is already fire proof or resistant and heavily regulated.

Of course the Navy’s interested in anything that could make their cloths fireproof as the current ones are about as fire prone as you can get.

Navy Work Uniforms burn like paper

The new working coveralls the Navy is introducing in 2014 are actually flame resistant. Godawful looking though…