The IMO was found to have the largest number of fire reports which gave times to control and times to extinguish fires on ships. Over a period of 25 years, IMO has received a total of 382 fire casualty records reporting on ships' fires from all over the world: the shortest fire recorded was extinguished in one minute and the longest in seventy-one days. This produced an average time for a fire of 26 hours while the ship was in Port and 19 hours while underway. With such a range of duration times, these average figures are only of mathematical interest. From the IMO and the MAIB a total of thirty reports were found for fires on RO-ROs/Car Ferries (Car Ferries and similar vessels have been included because of the difficulty in identifying true RO-ROs from the earlier reports). The most frequent figure reported was the time taken to extinguish the fire, so this was used to calculate the average time to extinguish a fire on a RO-RO/Car Ferry, and it was found to be 2 hr 20 mins.