The Human Element in Safe Shipping: What Sort of Research is Needed?

I wish to thank the organizers of this Mare Forum session for the opportunity to speak on a subject that is somewhat new and different: what sort of research do we need to undertake, to determine the challenges faced by the crews themselves?

All of us have heard of the growing tendency to regard crew members a fungible commodity.

Most of us are familiar with the ceremony that takes place when a merchant vessel is “named”, just before it leaves the shipyard in which it was built. It is customary to propose a toast to “the ship and her people”. Or, perhaps I should say, “its people”.

We also know that seafarers are subject to increasingly oppressive treatment in many port states, particularly since the inception of the war on terrorism.

The transportation of hydrocarbons – particularly, but not exclusively, liquid natural gas – is subject to increasing regulation, and not only at receiving terminals.

It is an acknowledged fact that operations in extreme climate zones place an additional demand upon the stamina and skill of each seafarer, in all departments of a vessel.

As we have just heard, significant environmental concerns place many stresses upon the vessel, its crew, and call for the attention of coastal and flag states.

Are we doing enough, on our own, and in the international arena, to analyze and respond to these challenges?

Put another way, are technical standards, and the existing international conventions, adequate to meet expanding traffic and growing demand?

How do we monitor the performance of “the ship and her people”?

There are thirteen areas that I would suggest need to be focused upon:

1. Specialized needs, and the extent to which governments may subsidize the training of more merchant mariners;

2. Training of crew by the private sector, including shipowners and charterers;

3. Attention to the impact of changes in the chain of liability, extending beyond the ship owner, as instanced by, for example, the ERIKA judgment in France, and the prospect of more aggressive legislation against third parties in the United States and the EU. As Rob Lomas, Intercargo manager, remarked recently,

   “The charterer increasingly sets standards for age, and if it is no long cost-effective for the owner to pay for upgrades and repairs on bulk carriers of a certain age, and charterers are no longer willing to hire such vessels, then the laws of demand and supply take over, and the vessel is withdrawn from service.”

4. The need to increase the understanding and engagement of crew and shore based personnel regarding environmental rules and regulations, and sensitivity to the ecology of the oceans including northern seas;

5. Utilization of research, and particularly in-depth interviews, analyzing inter alia, their response to increasingly sophisticated equipment;

6. Promotion of enhanced means of communication, and language fluency, among the members of the crew, and with other personnel such as harbour pilots, terminal personnel and coast guard;

7. Standardization of equipment, controls, symbols, terminology, and bridge and engine room displays aboard modern vessels. As Michael Grey has written in the December/January issue of Lloyd’s Ship Manager,

   “[The COSCO BUSAN] was a modern ship, with sophisticated navigation equipment available to the team on the bridge. The clue, perhaps, is in the word “sophisticated”. It would not be the first accident that has at least been contributed to by equipment that was too clever for its own good. Professionals, including hundreds of pilots who handle strange ships in confined spaces, have complained for years at the seeming inability of the bridge equipment manufacturers to standardize the controls of vital equipment, like radar, ARPA, or electronic chart systems. It is mostly all different. It is, nevertheless, complicated and it makes life unnecessarily difficult in extremis, as somebody tries to work out with a few seconds to spare whether the radar display has defaulted to head up, or gone off tune. The issue of familiarisation is a serious one that commercial shipping has never actually taken seriously. Because of this lack of standardisation, and because of the increasing complexity of equipment, it is more crucial that somebody on the bridge knows precisely how the equipment works. E-navigation might be the navigation of the future, but basic issues such as this need to be sorted out first.”

8. Greater operational input, from those who go to sea, in the specifications and design of controls, symbols, terminology displays, particularly at the International Maritime Organization (IMO);

9. Enhancement of special training programmes for shoreside personnel, so that they are conversant with specialized cargo containment and safety systems, and with emergency response systems. As Adm. Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, observed last October:

   “Industry growth and increased complexity over the last ten years have outpaced commensurate growth in the Coast Guard Marine Safety Program, resulting in a performance gap.”

10. Awareness and development of effective evacuation and survival equipment.

    Admiral Efthimios Mitropoulos, the Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization, has observed that:

    “… The current system, whereby the primary responsibility for ensuring safe and environmentally-friendly ships lies with flag states and shipowners, is sound, though implementation can always be improved. In this context, we must continue our efforts to harmonize the Port State Control procedures and activities of various regional Port State Control regimes… Also, our work on goal-based standards for the construction of new ships is expected to have an impact on re-defining the roles of flag state administration and classification societies over structural rules. And, furthermore, the IMO Audit Scheme should help considerably in this respect, by identifying any inadequacies in national systems, as well as the necessary improvements to be made, … The main driver is the general understanding, within maritime administrations and the industry, that, firstly, the roles of IMO and the maritime administrations in the setting of ship construction standards and in their application should be revisited; and, secondly, that IMO regulations should set goals, objectives and functional requirements for the construction of new ships, while also establishing a procedure to verify that the structural rules of classification societies comply with these.”

11. Familiarization with onboard manuals, navigational equipment, controls, symbols, terminology and displays, as a part of handover procedures to the “new” crew during relieving or “crew change” procedures;

12. As Michael Grey has pointed out, hundreds of pilots, who are highly trained professionals, must handle ships with which they are naturally unfamiliar, in confined and congested navigational conditions. Often, tide weather can be unpredictable or uncooperative. How often does the industry consult with them? As I have hinted in connection with the ERIKA judgment, there is a growing awareness, however untutored, that we are moving toward an understanding of the impact of charterers’ decisions upon the operation of vessels, and their vulnerability to casualty losses as a result. As cargoes have become more valuable, and ships become more costly to insure, private parties as well as governments become less tolerant of what we lawyers used to call “nautical fault”, or “errors in navigation”.

13. While these problems are most visible with container operations, numerous moves between berths in ports and terminals, long pilotage periods, and difficulty in the maintenance of mandatory hours of rest for the crew in an increasingly competitive environment, often regardless of weather conditions, have contributed to a growing sense of urgency in the management of not just a ship, but the ship’s people.

Marten Koopmans, the head of the Traffic Management Division of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, recently observed that “the public, the market, governments and insurers all say they want more safety, but nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is.”

Even with the best of care, ocean going bulk vessels generally reach the end of their life cycle after 25 years of service. This, in general terms, is roughly the time that costs of maintenance and repairs outweigh the financial benefit of keeping these older vessels in service. Accordingly, for an older vessel, service standards will often suffer. As seen in cases similar to the ERIKA and PRESTIGE, the stresses and demands upon members of the crew tend to increase greatly.

Energy transportation, like shipping in general is an increasingly demanding and competitive business. For many years, maritime labor may have been considered to be something of a commodity, with the internal accounts departments of charterers often imposing wholly unrealistic schedules upon vessels, without, as one observer puts it, “the slightest input from those who actually operate ships”. The fragmented and geographically diverse nature of our industry has contributed to this. What is new however is that the current approach is actually driving up balance sheet costs as well as social penalties – the price we all pay in environmental degradation and quality of life aboard ship.

Where we will, I hope, end up is with a recognition in that one of the main stakeholders in our supply chain is the seafarer, and that seafarers must be more closely engaged in the maritime transportation process as a whole. How we go about this is a question for another day!

Thank you.