With hurricanes and earthquakes sweeping the East coast this week, the Boston fire department is ready for delivery of it’s newest and most capable, fireboat, the FireStorm 70.

Ontario-based MetalCraft Marine completed work on the FireStorm 70 three weeks ago, and will be delivering the 70-footer down to Boston in a few weeks time.

This latest delivery comes on the heels of a $14,970,000 contract just awarded to MetalCraft by the Port of Houston Authority for the purchase of three high-tech fireboats.  MetalCraft fireboats have also been build for the shipping ports of Seattle, Tampa and Miami, to name a few.

The boat will be named John S. Damrell after the former Chief Engineer of the Boston Fire Department who battled Boston’s Great Fire of 1872.

“Boston has a number of fireboats but nothing with this capability. This boat can pump about 12,000 gallons per minute,” says Jay Milner, account manager for MetalCraft Marine. “The other fireboats Boston has are a lot slower. And the faster ones they have are very tiny, in comparison to this monster. It was a quick sell.”

In addition to traditional firefighting capabilities the City of Boston ordered the fireboat to be equipped with chemical, biological and radiological (CBRD) emergency response capabilities to respond to a wider array of threats the city may face.

The John S. Damrell replaces the current Boston fireboat “Firefighter,” which seen active service since 1972 and does not have the capabilities needed for modern emergency scenarios including CBRD attacks. In a recent press release, Commissioner Roderick Fraser of the City of Boston said the FireStorm 70 will also have the latest equipment including electronic navigation systems, water jet propulsion, and a top speed of 35 knots fully loaded.

“This boat is light years ahead of the current fireboat and will greatly enhance our response capability anywhere in Boston Harbor,” said Fraiser.

The following is video of Tampa’s Firestorm 69 boat launched in August of 2009:

Golden Age Comic Book Stories (original) – via theticketthatexploded

HMS Implacable first saw service in the Napoleonic Wars. It was originally a French ship, captured in the last action of the Trafalgar Campaign in 1805. The stern gallery shown here is on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in the UK.

• Intricate Ship Sterns: Art on the Ocean on Dark Roasted Blend

L: Spicy Adventure Stories, RT: Cover of Thrilling Adventures – via theticketthatexploded

Douglas Fairbanks with movie camera, c. 1916 via turnofthecentury

Delaware Makes First Quasi-War Capture, 7 July 1798 | Naval History Blog

The title says it all. If you are at all interested in this war, time period, or what have you, then I highly suggest picking up Ian Toll’s book, Six Frigates.  He gives an excellent, rousing account of the Quasi-War and the War of 1812.  Click the title to go to the original post from the Naval History Blog.

(via boatswainsandbacteremia)

 National Geographic 1972 – via sailorjunkers

Taking place in our temporary, pop-up venue, Solomon Monk’s Pump House, Metal presents Shorelines: The World’s First Literature Festival of the Sea – a small, powerful, intelligent and thought-provoking festival celebrating some of the great writing across the ages that has the sea as a central theme. Curated by acclaimed writer, poet and performer, Lemn Sissay and artist and writer, Rachel Lichtenstein to provoke discussion, re-awaken senses, excite the adventurous spirit and discover new and classic texts about the sea.’

more  — via oneblackline

Former W.Va. lawyer works to preserve Pilgrim history

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A lawyer who once practiced in West Virginia is now working to preserve the early history of the Pilgrims and Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Michael Farber works with people who recently built an exact replica of the Elizabeth Tilley, a shallop used by Pilgrims after they landed on Cape Cod back in 1620.

“The Elizabeth Tilley was a work boat Pilgrims used to do their trading around Cape Cod Bay. It was 40 feet long and single-masted,” said Farber, who now lives in Cape Cod. “The Mayflower was huge, weighing 180 tons. Cape Cod Bay is relatively shallow. This is the type of boat the Pilgrims used.”

The original Elizabeth Tilley was stowed on the Mayflower on its 1620 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Stored in pieces, the shallop was reassembled to explore the Cape after the Pilgrims landed in Provincetown.

• keep reading
• more: The Howland Shallop Named the Elizabeth Tilley

The Graving Dock – bottom of Graving Dock 5, Old Brooklyn Navy yard on NY TUGMASTER’S WEBLOG

Sailing ships by Geo. W. Blow, from The Daily Mail Annual for Boys and Girls – undated, inscription 1949.

The Golden Hind was an English galleon best known for its circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580, captained by Sir Francis Drake. She was originally known as the Pelican, but was renamed by Drake mid-voyage in 1578, as he prepared to enter the Strait of Magellan, calling it the Golden Hind to compliment his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose armorial crest was a golden ‘hind’ (the heraldic term for a female deer). Hatton was one of the principal sponsors of Drake’s world voyage.

MORE – Sailing ships 2 – Golden Hinde museum

The SS Solon Turman, a 960-foot long cargo ship that had been rotting away in Suisun Bay for years, sits on blocks in a Mare Island drydock in Vallejo, Calif. awaiting recycling on February 18, 2011. The Turman is the first ship from the nearby Mothball Fleet to be recycled locally. Most of the other ships have been recycled in Brownsville, Texas.

San Jose Mercury News: From ship to scrap (click through for video report)

There is nothing easy — or pretty — about disposing of an old ship.

Call it scrapping. Or recycling. Or ship-breaking. By any name, what is taking place slowly at a dry dock at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard is gritty, loud work.

For the first time in decades, a decommissioned ship from the U.S. Maritime Administration’s Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet is being scrapped on the West Coast. What was once the SS Solon Turman — a 9,520-ton, 690-foot cargo ship built in 1961 — is now a shrinking cadaver.

Its ribs were showing last week; its bow, decks, holds and nearly all its superstructure have disappeared. The tops of tanks that once contained bunker fuel to drive its massive engines were ripped off, revealing thick, black gunk that is heated to liquefy it before it is pumped away for disposal as a hazardous material.

keep reading

Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) via sovietpostcards

Bibby Lines “Staffordshire” berthed at Birkenhead Docks on the night of 4/4/70

WW2 Air Raids Affected the Weather

Allied bombing raids leaving from Britain seem to have affected the local climatic conditions. Rob MacKenzie, now at the University of Birmingham, and Roger Timmis of the British Environment Agency looked at weather records from 1943 to 1945 and found that after massive air raids the areas the planes flew over were cooler than similar areas nearby.

“Witnesses to the huge bombing formations recall that the sky was turned white by aircraft contrails,” said MacKenzie in a Wiley-Blackwell press release.

“It was apparent to us that the Allied bombing of WW2 represented an inadvertent environmental experiment on the ability of aircraft contrails to affect the energy coming into and out of the Earth at that location,” MacKenzie said.

• keep reading on Discovery News
• see also: Physics Debunks Baseball Myths

Fightin’ Navy Comics no 77; Charlton Comics, October 1956.

Téléphone Homard Dalinesque – Deux versions

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110704.html (click to see larger version)

Southern Ocean Sky

Image Credit & Copyright: Alex Cherney (Terrastro); Music: Redmann

Explanation: Clouds and sky both show illuminating changes during this time lapse video from the south of Australia. In the foreground are scenes visible over a rocky coastline toward the Southern Ocean. Dark clouds flow across the sky, sometimes from different directions, sometimes blocking background starlight, but other times causing stars to appear to flare as they move in front. In the first sequence, looking toward the southwest, a nearly vertical band of zodiacal light is seen at sunset just before the band of the Milky Way Galaxy appears to settle into the sea. Soon the unusual dark patch of the Coal Sack Nebula can be seen on the Milky Way band, near the famous Southern Cross. Later, looking toward the southeast at about 2:10 in the video, Orion can be seen rising appearing nearly perpendicular to how it rises in northern skies. The composite video, winner of an award STARMUS astrophotography competition, took over a year to compile in 2009 and 2010 from over 30 hours of exposure.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

The Rocket Warship; see full size: Amazing Stories, May, 1944 – via thegildedcentury

Introducing: the new Scientific American blog network!

Yes!!! It finally happened! The shiny new Scientific American blog network is now live! We are excited to announce that 39 new blogs joined the network

Check out the press release and the blogs homepage. There are also some changes on the Scientific American homepage – more of those still to come.

Many of you (may already be) familiar with the eight blogs we’ve already had on the site for a while (Observations, Expeditions, Guest Blog, Solar At Home, Anecdotes From The Archive, Extinction Countdown, Bering In Mind, and Cross-Check).

That number has now grown to 47. Here they are »

Cable loading on Ocean Layer in London

H.M.T.S. Monarch with the California-Hawaii telephone cable:  Manufactured by Submarine Cables Ltd. (2030 nm) and Simplex Wire & Cable Co. (2380 nm), the 1957 telephone cable from California to Hawaii was commissioned by AT&T and the Hawaiian Telephone Co., and was laid by CS Monarch (4) and CS Ocean Layer.

Monarch commenced laying the cable from Point Arena (San Francisco) on 11 July 1957, and after laying 1900 miles met in mid-ocean with Ocean Layer, which put down the remaining 665 miles of cable into Hanauma Bay on Oahu. The first message through the cable was sent on 3 August 1957, and the ships then laid the eastbound cable, completing the installation in the Autumn of 1957.

CS Ocean Layer; History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications

Thomas W Lawson The World’s Only Seven Masted Schooner (by amphalon) – via sailorjunkers

Angelsey [Wales]; Antiently called Mona. Deſcribed 1608

BibliOdyssey: John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine is one of the world’s great cartographic treasures. Published in 1611/12, it marked the first time that comprehensive plans of English and Welsh counties and towns were made available in print. A slice of Tudor and Jacobean life in miniature, its influence was so great that it was used by armies on both sides of the English Civil War.

• A selection of the very rare hand-coloured proofs for the Speed atlas, produced between 1603 and 1611

from Close to the Wind by Peter Malone

The Cutty Sark and The Days of Sail - By Frank G.G. Carr. Produced by Pitkin Pictorials

The National Maritime Museum: Time and a Place: The National Maritime Museum’s £35m extension reconciles the rich architectural heritage of its Greenwich home with the need to provide thoroughly modern facilities. Building celebrates a building firmly anchored to its surroundings

Architects Purcell Miller Tritton and CF Møller have just completed a £35m extension to the National Maritime Museum: the Sammy Ofer Wing. “Obviously we were conscious of the world class location and heritage,” explains PMT project architect Elizabeth Smith, “but we remained committed to our core concepts, which were to present the museum with a new facade onto Greenwich Park, to provide a clearer link between the main museum and the Royal Observatory, to deliver contemporary architecture that was sensitive to its historic surroundings and to provide up-to-date facilities that allow visitors to experience the full breadth of what the museum can offer.”

keep reading – Official website of the National Maritime Museum

creatures of the deep on Bowsprite: A New York Harbor Sketchbook

this one laid in harbor mud, was salvaged, and now is the Waterfront Museum, the host of the Creatures of the Deep art show. Curated by Karen Gersch, the show is currently on view until August 22. The Artists’ Reception will be on July 22 at Brooklyn Bridge Park.

This map is part of a series depicting the 40 largest cities in the United States (as ranked by CBSA). This series will run through the month of July.

An absolutely gorgeous mid-career Wellge birdseye of Norfolk, Virginia finds him at the height of his craft.

Easily one of my favorite birdseye maps. The sprawling harbor seems regal and stately; the layout and proportions are perfect.

For more map resources and imagery from this period in Norfolk’s history, check out the Virginia Historical Society’s website.

see full size on bigmapblog

Low Tide: Commercial Dock Pier; circa 1914 – National Maritime Museum UK  on flickr

The 5th International Marine Show, that is one of the leading shipbuilding shows in the world, finished its work. 350 enterprises from 28 countries (67 of them are foreign) took part in the exposition. Participants placed their items in pavilions with the total area of 13,000 sq.metres, in open exhibition areas, in the water area at moorings of the maritime passenger terminal and near the exhibition complex. Among participants there were all leading companies of the maritime industry of Russia. Manufactures of assembling equipment, devices, electronic components, informational technologies and dual-use goods occupied the most territory of the exhibition. 55 separate delegations from 47 countries also came to the show. 2 Defense Ministers, 7 Chiefs of the Navy and other high-ranking officials were included in these delegations. 496 journalists from 148 medias reported about the event. More than 29,000 professionals worked over the show.

• more on English-Russia

English Russia: Crowds of people in Moscow were watching a very strange object. It turned to be a “duck-car” that onlookers willingly photographed. See its adventures

Let’s Travel! – Dieselpunks – via theticketthatexploded

Judy Joins the WAVES (1951) was a give-away comic published by Toby Press, and distributed by the U.S. Navy. The WAVES were a World War II-era division of the U.S. Navy that consisted entirely of women. The name of this group is an acronym for “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service”

1931; USS Constitution Navy Yard, Boston

First time in 32 years has the capstan pulled the anchor up as it did years ago. (glass negatives)

 full size (top) – full size (bottom)
see also: USS Constitution Navy Yard, Boston (long shot of ship) — USS Constitution in South Boston drydock – and – USS Constitution in Navy Yard

Anton Otto Fischer; Your 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Picture of the Day on Michael May

OneEighteen has posted some new photos – Outbound, Houston Ship Channel. 8 second exposure

Lock City – Vintage postcard folder from Soo, Michigan – dated 1948

This Week’s Mystery Photo

taken by Andrea Sghedoni and labeled simply mostri marini (sea monsters)
Does anyone know what or where these things are? (flickr set of 6 photos)

‘Deep Sea Diving’ Cigarette Cards c.1930s on howtobearetronaut (49 images)

1905 swimming St Michel – vintage postcard

Deep Sea News – Why an Octopus is more awesome than your Mom

Hotel Portugal Luggage Label

Maritime Monday is compiled by Monkey Fist

Monkey Fist is a smack-talking, potty mouthed, Yankee hating, Red Sox fan in Portland, Maine.  In addition to compiling Maritime Monday, she blogs about nautical art, history, and marine science on Adventures of the Blackgang and The Scuttlefish

Submit story ideas, news links, photographs, or items of interest to her at MM@gcaptain.com.  She can also out-belch any man.

The Maritime Monday Archives

And while we’re at it, we’d like to give a shout out to a few of our Southie friends, Captain Dan Sheehan, and Mass Maritime engineers Sean McGillicuddy and Dale Bleicken.

This just in from the Boston Globe:

Firefighters battled through smoke and heat to quench a blaze early this morning in the bowels of a Navy ship in dry dock on South Boston’s waterfront.

The fire in the steering gear room of the Sisler, a cargo ship, was reported just before 3 a.m., said fire department spokesman Steve MacDonald.

Two firefighters and two civilians were taken to the hospital with minor injuries, said EMS Deputy Superintendent John Doyle. The fire caused an estimated $750,000 in damage.

Firefighters wearing air tanks dragged 600 feet of hose to reach the fire, which was in the ship’s stern, MacDonald said. He likened their job to fighting a fire on the third floor of a windowless 15-story building.

It took about a 30 minutes to find the fire and another half-hour to knock it down, he said. About 60 firefighters battled the blaze. Read More…

This gigantic ship, the USNS Sisler is the fourth Bob Hope Class LMSR (large, medium-speed, roll-on/roll-off ) to be built by NASSCO shipyard for the U.S.’s Military Sealift Command. The AMO union newsletter (story link) tells us the management contract of the ship went to American Overseas Marine Corp (AMSEA), a division of General Dynamics, in 2005 but we are unsure of the manning situation since the vessel entered drydock. (It is now managed by Maersk Line, thanks John)

We don’t know the cause of the incident but it sounds to us like the ships crew and local fire department did an excellent job containing and extinguishing this fire. If you have more information please email it to us at tips{at}gCaptain.com

UPDATES:

Not much new information but I picked up this gem: “Firefighters resorted to the use of special one-hour air bottles”

The Above footage was taken by the Coast Guard during a post collision inspection of the Boston Ferry “Massachusetts”. In an interesting post Panbo asks if AIS could have prevented the incident:

Interesting that an intrepid Boston Globe reporter figured out that AIS transponders might have prevented two Boston ferries from hitting each other in thick fog yesterday morning. This is the sort of thing that promotes public awareness of a valuable safety technology, and perhaps will encourage the FCC, USCG, etc. to move expeditiously on approving Class B and mandating its use on such vessels (or argue that Class A is worth the cost). On the other hand, operator error can not be ignored. Heck, these two boats both work for the MBTA. Wouldn’t you think that they’d know where each other was and be in VHF contact? Not that we all aren’t capable of mistakes. READ MORE….

Are you a U.S. mariner that has been injured while offshore?  Know your rights! Learn more about offshore injuries