New Land-Based Training Ships for Jervis Bay

15 Agustus 2011

The new dynamic leak stop unit is overlooked by the new central control unit. (photo : RAN)

The arrival of new land-based training ships for the Navy’s School of Ship Safety and Survivability at Jervis Bay has significantly enhanced the school’s training environment.

Successfully delivered by the Defence Support Groups’s Infrastructure Asset Development Branch, the school at Jervis Bay is one of three facilities that provide the Australian Defence Force with land- based fire and ship safety training using realistic training environments.

The new facilities are part of the redevelopment of HMAS Creswell. Although still new, the ‘ships’ have been a hit with the training staff.

One staff member said, “These facilities are 500 times better than our old training facilities”.

The facilities include a central control building, new damage control units, new fire fighting units and, the pride of the school, a new dynamic leak stop repair training unit.

The dynamic training unit realistically simulates sea conditions, with up to 10 degrees list in each direction, as do the inclusion of a number of Anzac Class frigate doors, slightly modified for training purposes.

One of the 600-degree Celsius fires that trainees will have to deal with in the new advanced fire fighting training unit. (photo : RAN)

This is the second land-based ship project recently completed by Defence. The first project involved the construction of flight deck procedural trainers at HMAS Albatross. The trainers were designed to replicate landing conditions for helicopters on Anzac Class frigates and multi-role landing decks.

For the Defence project team, the Ship Safety and Survivability School project at Jervis Bay differed dramatically from the previous flight deck project at HMAS Albatross. In a first for a Defence building project, the Navy required a safety case to be undertaken.

The safety case reviewed the possible risks to personnel using the training facilities and set out necessary measures to ensure these risks were controlled.

This was a necessary precaution for personnel working in an environment that simulates real-life scenarios, particularly fighting gas and diesel fires in confined spaces.

The Navy Safety Case required that the risk to personnel was as low as reasonably possible when using the training facilities at the Ship Safety and Survivability School.

This created a challenge for the Defence project team which needed to translate the safety controls based on manufacturing processes into a set of functional processes and protocols suitable for building construction. This required constant re-interpretation of the terminology used in the two very different and specialised industries.

As a result, a very structured design methodology was developed and adopted by the team to successfully complete the project.

(RAN)