Cruise Ship 101: Passenger/Crew Drill and Coast Guard Inspection
To use its proper name, muster drill is a regular part of life on board cruises. Basically, it’s a mandatory safety exercise which prepares people for what might happen in the event of an emergency and there are two different types: passenger drill and crew drill.
Passenger drill
As the name suggests, passenger (or pax) drill is the one that every passenger goes to before the ship sets sail from port on the day they arrive, although some lines have moved on to using electronic drills in the time since I left ships. From the passenger side, you basically turn up at a designated ‘muster station’ on board (e.g. the casino, the cocktail bar), they take attendance and then you get a briefing with all the safety information you need. If a real emergency happens, an alarm is sounded consisting of 7 short blasts and 1 long blast of the ship’s whistle which is the signal to go to your muster station.
During passenger drills, the crew have work to do. During my time on ships, I had a variety of jobs depending on where I was stationed. Some of my jobs included taking attendance, directing guests around the ship, and also, oddly enough, doing nothing at all. My favourite job was probably demonstrating how to put a lifejacket on correctly. For several months, I did my best cabin crew impression and as a result, I have a load of trivial facts about shipboard safety swimming around in my head such as how many parachute rockets you’ll find on a lifeboat (4) as well as pretty much everything there is to know about lifejackets…
When anyone first gets on board, it takes a bit of time to get used to the layout so it can be hard to find where anything is. One of the problems I had was trying to get to grips with the nautical terms like forward, aft, port, starboard etc. Once you’ve been on a few ships, you realise that there’s a lot of similarity in the layout and you get used to it all. But picture me getting on board a new ship for the first time and being asked to direct guests to where their muster station is when I barely had a clue myself! Fun times.
Crew drill
Here comes the juicy bit! Again, as the name suggests, crew drill is for crew only. Most passengers don’t see it because it usually happens when the ship is in port and they’re all off exploring some new country. At 9 or 10 in the morning, there’ll be an announcement from the bridge telling any passengers still left on board that an emergency drill is happening along with some mysterious sounding code words which can vary from ship to ship. The majority of the time, it was a scenario involving a massive fire somewhere on the ship. They assume that the fire gets out of hand and after a few more signals, the crew don some very fetching fluorescent orange lifejackets and caps before making their way to the muster stations.
Once attendance has been taken and they’ve tested how well the crew respond to the emergency, another signal tells everyone to file out onto the outside deck as if the ship needs to be abandoned. If a real emergency happened, everyone would be getting into lifeboats and liferafts at this point. Once or twice a year, they actually get a load of crew members into one of the lifeboats (as many as they can fit!) and go for a short ride. If crew drill doesn’t go so well (e.g. people don’t get to their muster stations quick enough), you might get an extra training session or meeting with the safety officer but most of the time people stand on deck while they do attendance before eventually getting dismissed so you can go about your day.
The funny thing about these drills is that they’re essentially all theory-based because in a real emergency, there’s a high probability that the majority of people will just panic. The cruise lines are well aware of this due to an emergency on the Costa Concordia in 2012 and so within the first few weeks of being on board, several companies give their crew members mandatory crowd management training. Something they don’t really take into account is how intoxicated many of the passengers are within a couple of hours of boarding the ship. I say passengers but I’ll admit I’ve done crew drills incredibly hungover or in some cases still slightly drunk. A couple of times I awoke to the sound of a tannoy announcement telling me where the fire is but also with the unintentional message that I have about 5 or 10 minutes to get ready before I need to be at my muster station…
Boy, does it get tense…when the coast guard comes to call
Aroundabout once a year, most ships will have an inspection conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard, often in the first U.S. port where the ship docks after crossing over from Europe. It’s basically a glorified crew drill and they’re checking to see if all the safety procedures are being followed amongst other things. People usually get really tense when the coast guard comes because they want to pass the inspection but also because of how these inspections work.
Official looking people with badges and clipboards make their way through the vessel and fire a load of safety questions at random crew members to see if they know their stuff. Luckily, I have never been cornered at an inspection but just in case, I tended to do some brushing up on the stuff I was supposed to know the night before the Coast Guard arrived. As well as the threat of facing some difficult questions, these inspections take a lot longer than a normal crew drill and more often than not will happen in a really good port!
So now you know all about drills! Join me for the next instalment where I’ll be telling you all about how I died…
In the meantime, if you have any burning questions, either comment or send me a message and I’ll try my best to answer them. Your question might even get featured in a future post!
P.S. If this has whet your appetite for all things seafaring, all my posts about cruises are in a handy little list over here.
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