Evacuation chute breakthrough for workboats
The Lengre chute enables safe and efficient evacuation from heights between 3 and 20 metres.
For the first time a Marine Evacuation System (MES) been developed for special purpose vessels such as offshore support craft.
These MES, which consist of a slide or chute where passengers can evacuate straight into waiting life rafts, can often be found on modern high speed craft and passenger ships, where weight, space and evacuation times must be kept to a minimum.
However, a close relationship between Norway based Brude Safety AS and Ulstein Design has lead to a new type of space saving chute being designed especially to fit vessels such as support ships, enabling safe and efficient evacuation from heights between 3m and 20m.
The system consists of the evacuation chute and mooring system plus life rafts for 65 and 150 people as well as optional additional life rafts for 10, 30, 50 or 150 personnel.
The new space saving chute is said to improve safe evacuation compared to davit solutions and to be easy and cost effective to install. All the system’s operations are manual and they can all be carried out by two persons, meaning there is no need for electrical or hydraulic supply, while service costs can be kept to a minimum.
The design has instantly lead to a major order to supply all six new vessels for Polarcus currently being built at Drydocks World Dubai, with the first in the series, the Polarcus Nadia, having been delivered recently. The second vessel, the Polarcus Naila, is to be delivered early this year. Of the series of six vessels, four of them will have one deployment frame and chute combined with two 65 person life rafts and one 10 person life raft on each side. Two of the vessels will only have one deployment frame and chute combined with two 65 person units on each side (ample for the 65 crew members on board).
All components are made of marine aluminium. The system container is bolted to the deck of the vessel and designed to hold the launching ramp and chute in a deployed position. The container door is opened by means of two gas cylinders. When the container door is in the open position, the launching ramp and chute are ejected and lowered into the deployed position in a controlled manner.
The evacuation chute is made up of separate cells with sloping slides, enabling safe descent and transfer from the vessel to the evacuation rafts. It is possible to climb out of the chute from any of the cells.
The system raft in the Brude MES SPS, has so called upside-down functionality. This means that the raft will stay in the correct position regardless of which side is facing up after deployment. Additional rafts can be moored to the system raft to achieve the desired evacuation capacity.
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