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BSafe Case Study 25 — A Cigarette, a Sofa, and a Fire That Came Back

🕑 5 min read words Safety • Incident

Vessel: 2,565 GT general cargo ship
Date & location: Accommodation, Deck 2, en route Gibraltar to Belfast
Outcome: One crew member injured, extensive fire damage, no lives lost — required naval firefighting teams to finally extinguish a reignition
Human factors: Impairment and Unsafe Smoking Practice · A Fire Believed Out That Wasn't · Cascading Equipment Failures
Source: Britannia P&I Club, BSafe Incident Case Study No. 25, drawn from MAIB Accident Investigation Report 18/2014

1 real case studyMAIB Report 18/2014~5 min read

A Night Ashore, Then a Night That Didn't End

After a Gibraltar layover for bunkering and minor repairs, one AB went ashore and drank before returning. That evening in his cabin, he opened his porthole (common practice given the ship's noisy, unreliable ventilation), drank a further 6-8 units of beer, and smoked cigarettes — continuing after getting into bed. A cigarette is presumed to have fallen onto the cabin's synthetic-material sofa. Papers, lighters, and a plastic container of paint thinner were later found in the space. He woke around 0315 to pain in his hand and leg, his cabin already engulfed in smoke and flames — and in a panicked, partially-dressed state, threw an already-burning blanket onto the fire before running to the bridge, failing to properly close the cabin door behind him.

Hours of Fighting a Fire That Kept Finding New Ways to Spread

The general alarm sounded within two minutes. The chief engineer and motorman got to the engine control room via an emergency hatch, shutting down accommodation ventilation and power to slow the spread while starting the fire pump and emergency generator. Two crew in SCBA made repeated entry attempts through thick black smoke and extreme heat, withdrawing each time air ran low. Eventually the crew rigged a hose through the burning cabin's own porthole from a stage on deck — while, elsewhere, a red glow and closed conditions appeared in the motorman's cabin too. Around 0600, water draining excessively into the engine room forced the crew to stop the fire pump; a power outage then knocked out steering gear entirely.

By 0800, only vapour was visible from the portholes. The master, chief officer, and chief engineer judged it safe to re-enter — and found the fire in the motorman's cabin genuinely reduced, if still hot. Less than an hour later, it reignited. Attempts to douse it through the porthole failed. The Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre was called at 1007; the crew prepared to evacuate, and the EPIRB was activated at 1025 (cancelled by the master at 1046 as the situation stabilised enough not to abandon). A naval vessel deployed fire teams aboard; a merchant ship and a coastguard vessel also arrived. The navy teams finally brought the fire fully under control by 1226.

What This Illustrates

Alcohol consumption ashore, followed by smoking in bed near flammable furnishings, created the ignition scenario directly — a genuinely avoidable starting point for everything that followed.
The cabin's furnishings (a synthetic sofa) and stored items (paint thinner, lighters, papers) turned a single dropped cigarette into a fast-developing, material-rich fire.
A fire judged ‘out’ at 0800 based on reduced smoke and heat reignited within the hour — an assessment made without the margin a genuinely extinguished fire would have given.
Cascading secondary failures (water flooding the engine room forcing the pump offline, a power outage disabling steering) compounded the situation well beyond the original cabin fire.

Recommended Actions

Grounded directly in what this incident shows:

Smoking in berths, especially combined with alcohol impairment, removes exactly the alertness needed to catch a fire at its earliest, most controllable moment.
Personal cabin items with real fire-risk potential (paint thinner, excess flammable furnishings) deserve the same scrutiny as any other stowage — a cabin isn't exempt from basic fire-load thinking.
A fire judged extinguished based on reduced visible smoke and heat needs a longer confirmed monitoring period before crew stand down or re-enter without full readiness — reignition risk doesn't end when visible symptoms do.
Firefighting water management (drainage, pump capacity) and electrical resilience (steering gear power) both need contingency thought before a real fire, not worked out reactively mid-emergency.

Human Element Analysis

Impairment and unsafe practice combined

Neither alcohol nor smoking in bed alone guarantees a fire. Together, in a cabin with real fire load, they created the exact conditions this incident needed to start — a combination worth naming directly rather than treating as a private matter.

Confidence outpacing verification

The decision to re-enter at 0800 was reasonable given what could be observed — reduced smoke, less heat. It wasn't verification that the fire was actually out, and the reignition less than an hour later proved the gap between the two.

One failure enabling the next

Water in the engine room forcing the pump offline, then a power failure taking out steering — neither was the original fire, but each new failure narrowed the crew's options at exactly the point they most needed them open.

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