AFFF bilge cleaning

Short Navy Story from the archives dirt cheap rims

There are three ways of doing any job , the right way, the wrong
way, and the Navy way. The only difference between the last two is
the Navy way is accepted and you won't get in trouble for doing it
that way. case in point painting the bilges. A bilge is a holding
area for leakage in engineering spaces. Imagine a room the size of
your house with all kinds of machinery that is cooled by oil and
salt water. Take all of the floors out and put in grates and all the
leaks drip into your basement where you have several different ways
of pumping them out. Add all kinds of little pedestals for machinery
to sit on called foundations and miles of piping and valves and you
have a bilge. Navy likes the bilges painted terra cotta red because
the Navy paints everything that doesn't move and salt water makes
steel rust.

The right way to do this is to completely clean the bilge,
sandblast loose paint and rust, prime with a suitable primer, and
apply a finish coat. This takes months to do and involves shipyards
and dry-docks.

The Navy way is a few days before an inspection, you clean the
bilges. Take a 5 gallon pail of AFFF which is the stuff they foam
down runways with and fight oil fires, and dump it in the bilges.
take three or four fire hoses and stir it up good till it looks you
put a whole box of Tide in mom's washer and then pump it overboard
while you agitate and rinse with the fire hoses. Your bilge is now
clean except for nuts, bolts, wrenches, hammers, and Zippo lighters
that people have dropped. Now you fill the bilges back up with salt
water again to just below the gratings and empty about 150 gallons
of oil based terra cotta paint into the water and start to slowly
pump the water out until the bilge is dry and the paint coats
everything on the way down. Keep your bilges dry for the next 8
hours and everything is pretty for the inspection. Of course half of
it will blister and peel in the next few months but then we can do
it all over again the next times we get visitors.

The wrong way is the same as above if the chief bosun or your
inspectors catch you which is fairly easy as the first step for
preparation involves cleaning and you have a whole toolbox worth of
tools embedded in paint at the bottom of the bilge.

The first chief I worked for onboard ship was tired of spending a 1000 dollars a quarter for new tools and had went to serv-mart and bought all new tools just prior to the ship getting underway for Westpac.

He initiated a new check out procedure and assigned a man to the tool
cage to hand out and check-in tools each workday. First day of the
program someone lost a 1/2 in drive ratchet working in the bilges
and the chief was upset. He told the man not to come out of the
bilges till he found the ratchet. The chief had a couple of rubber mallets
and every time the man stuck his head up above the deck plates he would
throw one at him. The ratchet hadn't been misplaced though, it had
been stolen and eventually the thief started feeling sorry for the
guy in the bilges and returned the ratchet without revealing himself.

They had very few problems with lost tools after that.