The IMO was found to have the large

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.