Steve Thorpe – Seven seconds

Yeah, so you get seven seconds to react to any emergency onboard a submarine, so that’s controlling the speed, the bubble for the attitude of the submarine, and then get the emergency pipe out and do the emergency actions to make sure you keep the submarine safe.

Simon: What’s the emergency pipe?

So, depending on what action … what the incident is onboard, whether that be a fire, hydraulic burst, casualty, electrical failure, whatever, that you would need to know all these emergency operating pipes, called the DOPs, to bring the ship’s company to a heightened readiness.

Simon: So pipe is a sort of series of actions.

Main broadcasts.

Simon: Sorry, say that again.

So, you will have a General Alarm which is like an ‘ahooga’ sound, and …

Simon: What’s an ahooga?

[makes a sound like a klaxon horn] Emergency Stations and then you would have a main broadcast that you will have a Main Broadcast that you will pipe. So, everybody wakes up, ‘cos there’s no passengers on a submarine, everybody has a job to do if there is an emergency onboard. So, it’s a really difficult position to do but a really rewarding one when you get it right. When you get it wrong it’s awful. And you can literally sink or swim a submarine by it ‘cos if you get it wrong, yes, you’ve got the Captain and the Officer of the Watch bail you out but if you get it wrong potentially you can kill the crew, so you need to have it nailed, and it’s quite a strict Board understandably to get that through.