SOLAS fire drill requirements

Last updated August 2026

This article isn't legal advice: your DPA, your flag state and your management company are the authoritative sources for what your vessel must do. What follows is the SOLAS Chapter III baseline that applies to most commercial vessels, including most professional yachts, and what it looks like in practice on board.

How often

Every crew member must take part in at least one fire drill every month, alongside at least one abandon ship drill. Passenger ships work to a tighter cadence, and a crew change can pull the next drill forward — if more than 25% of the crew has not drilled on board in the previous month, drills fall due within 24 hours of leaving port.

The monthly requirement is per person, not per vessel. A yacht that ran a fire drill every month of the season has still missed the requirement for the deckhand who was ashore on leave for two of them. This is the single most common gap an auditor finds, and it is a records problem before it is a training problem.

What a fire drill has to involve

A fire drill is not a muster with a different label on it. Each drill should, as far as is practicable, be conducted as if there were an actual emergency, and should exercise the things that would actually matter:

  • Reporting to stations and the duties on the muster list for a fire
  • Checking fire-fighting equipment and appliances to confirm they are ready for use
  • Operating the equipment involved — pumps, hoses, nozzles, extinguishers as appropriate to the scenario
  • Checking communications and the alarm
  • Checking the closing arrangements: doors, dampers, ventilation stops and fuel shut-offs
  • The arrangements for abandoning ship, where the scenario escalates that far

Breathing apparatus wearers should be exercised, and the drill should move around the vessel rather than defaulting to the same compartment each month. A fire in the galley, a fire in the engine room and a fire in a guest cabin are three different problems on the same yacht — different escape routes, different equipment, different people first on scene.

Varying the scenario is a requirement, not a nicety

Drills are meant to prepare the crew for emergencies, which means the same rehearsed sequence every month stops satisfying the intent even while it keeps satisfying the calendar. Different compartments, different times of day, a blocked escape route, a key crew member declared unavailable — all of it is legitimate and all of it produces a more useful drill.

It also produces a better record. "Fire drill, engine room, port main escape blocked, 14 crew mustered in 3m 20s" tells an auditor something. "Fire drill carried out" does not.

What the record has to show

The drill has to be recorded. What makes a record defensible is that it answers, without anyone having to remember:

  • When the drill was held
  • What the scenario was, and where on board
  • Who took part — by name, because the monthly requirement is per crew member
  • What happened: how long the muster took, what was found, what did not work
  • What was done about it if the drill exposed a problem

That last line is the one crews skip and auditors look for. A drill that found a jammed damper and no follow-up is worse evidence than a drill that found nothing.

How The Muster App helps: a fire drill run on the iPad is recorded as its own session — scenario, timestamp, the crew who mustered by name, the running head count, and an event log of what happened as it happened. The optional audio recording captures the debrief, so "what did not work" is preserved in the words people actually used rather than a sentence written up afterwards. Filtering Sessions by fire drills shows the monthly cadence at a glance, per crew member, which is the view that answers the auditor's real question.

The yacht-specific parts

Two things make fire drills on yachts different from fire drills on a merchant ship:

  • Guests and charter. A drill during a charter is rarely practical, which pushes drills into yard periods and turnarounds, which is exactly when crew are changing. The two pressures compound: fewer opportunities, more new people.
  • Interior crew. Stews and chefs are often the first to find a fire and the least drilled on the equipment, because drills default to deck and engineering. A drill that never involves the interior team is not exercising the crew you have.

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