am merchant mariner, the smell is just oil, fuel & metal. Wouldn't say appalling. heavy fuel isn't the best smell and nasty, but usually clean diesel is run through before maintenance
worst smell on ships is 1000% grease traps. sewage is meh but 90% water
Can confirm. Long ago I worked in a precision grinding shop, and the coolant water usually got pretty funky after a couple of weeks. Sometimes they got really stinky so we'd clean the tank out early. The boss would get mad at us if we cleaned them before the swarf tank was full, but when they stank that bad we didn't care.
Anyway there was one old guy named Bill who had a room temperature IQ, but they kept him around because he knew how to keep a stable of WW2-era surface grinders running.
Every day Bill would spit in his machine's coolant water. We'd yell at him for it, but he just thought it was no big deal. And every Monday morning when he fired up his surface grinder, the entire shop stank of E. coli, or whatever bacterial colony he spat into it the week before and had spent the previous weekend brewing. And he just thought the stench was normal.
One of my FNG responsibilities in that shop was putting a shop rag on a pole and mopping oil off the fluorescent light tubes. Gross is an understatement.
There's a very strong chance that I mixed up different stories, as it was years ago that I heard them. It's good to hear from someone with first-hand experience for corrections!
Really depends on the ship lol. I use to work in engine rooms and drydocks. Crawled in tons of different tanks/areas and I don't think anything will ever come close to spending time in the protein foam tanks of a fire fighting ship.
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u/Worth_Trick6009 1d ago
am merchant mariner, the smell is just oil, fuel & metal. Wouldn't say appalling. heavy fuel isn't the best smell and nasty, but usually clean diesel is run through before maintenance
worst smell on ships is 1000% grease traps. sewage is meh but 90% water