Maritime Firefighting: Not Another Drill
OK, your ship has just pulled into port and will start unloading soon. The first mate has told everyone that while shore side paperwork is being completed there will be a mandated fire drill to fulfill international requirements. A designated fire team hooks up several lengths of fire hose to a fire hose station on the main deck. You are the junior crew member so you are told to drag the nozzle with hose attached to the bow of your ship. When you arrive there water is started and you are told to aim the water stream over the side for 30-minutes.
The Marine Industry and LNG
Several years ago many people in the marine industry either did not know about LNG or did not think that it would amount to anything worth more than a passing interest. At that time there were just four LNG import terminals in the and even they were underutilized. Today there are eight LNG import terminals in operation with two more slated for their first “cool down” shipments this year or early next year. In addition there is an LNG facility in just over the boarder where companies are also operation.
On Tugboats
There have been plenty of books published on the subject of tugboats in the past few years, sharing a cookie-cutter similarity - they're large, handsome, colorful, well-produced coffee-table volumes, which pretty much cover the same introductory material in the same glancing way. In all those regards and quite a few more, Virginia Thorndike's On Tugboats is a different sort of book. For starters, it's not large nor particularly handsome, and not all that well-produced - a standard paperback printed in black-and-white on paper that will probably not last for centuries. But then, it is a book crying out to be read, where coffee-table books ask merely to be seen.
