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AM Pride: The Fire That Found Every Open Door

🕑 5 min read words Safety • Incident • Engineering

Vessel: AM Pride (Anchor Handling Tug Supply Vessel, built 2006, 1,951 GT)
Date: 12 September 2024
Location: Indian Ocean, 1.5nm from the FA Platform, south of Mossel Bay, South Africa
Outcome: No injuries — total vessel abandonment by helicopter
Human Factors: Fire Door Discipline · Crew Familiarisation After Turnover · Command and Control
Source: RMI Maritime Administrator Marine Safety Investigation Report, published 18 August 2026

2 decision points · 4 outcome paths · 6 min read

What Happened

On the morning of 12 September 2024, AM Pride was on helicopter stand-by duty when its fire alarm activated, indicating alarms across three zones inside the accommodation and the bow thruster room. Black smoke was found in the main deck alleyway. The vessel had recently undergone an 80% crew change.

Many doors throughout the accommodation, including fire doors, were open when the fire broke out, and the ventilation was running in full recirculation mode. Both conditions let smoke spread rapidly through the entire accommodation block — and made it far harder to find where the fire actually was.

Around 1100, unable to locate the fire's source or bring it under control, the master ordered the accommodation and engine room locked down and arranged a helicopter evacuation. Crew continued firefighting while waiting. At 1600, all crew were safely evacuated and the vessel abandoned — without anyone knowing for certain whether the fire had actually been extinguished. A salvage team confirmed the following day that it had.

Where It Started, and What Fed It

A fire expert traced the origin to two side-by-side electrical sockets in the Recreation Room, on the portside bulkhead — almost certainly a tracking fault, caused by moisture or damage introducing a conductive path between two conductors. The Recreation Room had been repurposed as a storage space at some point after the vessel changed hands, holding everything from cleaning liquids and aerosol cans to spare electrical equipment, without anyone formally assessing whether the space was actually still suited to its new use.

Once the fault ignited, the fire's spread was shaped entirely by the accommodation's door and ventilation state. RMI's investigation found that open fire doors, full-recirculation ventilation, an open fire flap, and an unsealed service duct all worked together to move smoke throughout spaces that should have stayed compartmentalised.

A Crew That Had Barely Met Each Other

With the exception of the master, chief engineer, and second officer, every crew member had joined the vessel only 4–6 days before the fire. A fire and abandon-ship drill had been run — but roughly 40 hours after departure, not within 24 hours as the Company's own SMS required for a crew change of this scale. During the actual emergency, the investigation found firefighting actions weren't always carried out by the people assigned to them, equipment locations weren't consistently known, and the fire's true origin was still being misreported by some crew even after it had been correctly identified by others.

Recommended Actions

Fire doors without automatic hold-back arrangements stay closed, full stop — not propped with rope or wedges, regardless of how routine the task requiring access is.
Test self-closing devices on fire doors regularly, not just when a defect is reported during a Port State Control inspection.
When a room is repurposed — storage instead of recreation, for instance — run a management-of-change risk assessment before the space goes into use, checking whether original installations (like unused electrical sockets) need adapting or decommissioning.
After a crew change of 80% or more, run a fire and abandon-ship drill within 24 hours, not "when convenient" — and treat it as genuine emergency-readiness verification, not a box to tick.
Keep an accurate, current inventory of firefighting equipment locations, cross-checked against the actual Fire and Safety Plan — not what individual crew members recall from memory during an emergency.

Human Element Analysis

Fire Door Discipline

Open fire doors are rarely a deliberate safety compromise — they're usually just convenient. AM Pride's investigation found this had become routine enough that inspectors across multiple flag and class changes never once flagged it.

Crew Familiarisation After Turnover

An 80% crew change is not the same operational context as a normal turnover. Standard joining familiarisation, run individually as each person signs on, doesn't build the collective, practiced readiness a near-total crew replacement actually needs.

Command and Control

Experienced, trained firefighters performed below the standard of their own training — not from lack of skill, but because roles, equipment locations, and reporting lines weren't collectively rehearsed as a team before the real emergency arrived.

Industry	Incident	The Parallel
Offshore (North Sea)	Piper Alpha, 1988	A shift handover gap meant critical information about equipment status wasn't passed on — the same category of failure as an 80% crew change without adequate collective familiarisation before an emergency arrived.
Aviation	Kegworth Air Disaster, 1989	Crew shut down the wrong engine under pressure, misreading which system had actually failed — a parallel to AM Pride's crew continuing to cite the wrong fire origin even after it had been correctly identified.
Rail (UK)	King's Cross Fire, 1987	Smoke spread far beyond the original fire's location because of airflow patterns nobody had assessed for that specific risk — the same mechanism as AM Pride's recirculating ventilation carrying smoke throughout the accommodation.

See How You’d Handle It

AM Pride's decision simulator puts you in the accommodation before the fire, and again in the first minutes after the alarm sounds. Two decision points, four outcome paths, one of them the real one.

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