Surge protective devices onboard vessels
The United States Coast Guard (USCG) published in April this year a Marine Safety Alert on surge protective devices. Subsequently, an updated and corrected version of this information was made available as Marine Safety Alert 03-13b. The alert covers the risk of fire arising from the misuse of certain voltage surge protective devices used in mains electric circuitry onboard vessels. A marine casualty investigation of two separate stateroom fires onboard a US flagged container ship revealed that the sources of the fires were attributed to the use of surge protective devices plugged into a lighting circuit.
Further information is available from uscg.mil/tvncoe/Documents/safetyalerts/SurgeProtectiveDevices.pdf
Safety Event
Published: 25 June 2013
Download: 
IMCA SF 10/13
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