On 1 January, in a new year message to Nautilus members – 23,000 maritime professionals, including ship masters, officers and other seafaring personnel – we remarked that nobody will need reminding that 2012 is the centenary of the loss of the Titanic. While a massive nostalgia industry is already in full flow, we needed to remind the wider world that the Titanic offers lessons for today and that contemporary resonances should not be lost.
Though we had always cautioned that it was a case not of if, but when a major accident involving a huge passenger ship would take place, we had not expected that it would come within the first two weeks of the year.
Perhaps the most commonly voiced reaction to the Costa Concordia accident is how can such a thing happen in the 21st century? For many of us working in the shipping industry, it is more of a surprise that it hasn't happened earlier. And nobody can say that the warning signs weren't there.
In 2000, in an address to a conference on the safety of large passenger ships, the then secretary-general of the International Maritime Organisation (the United Nations agency that sets safety standards for shipping) cited 12 passenger ship accidents in the previous six years and noted "… in retrospect we can see that it was to some extent a matter of luck – good weather, calm seas, and other ships in the vicinity, for example – that very few lives were lost".
Since then, however, the size of these ships has continued to rise inexorably. Cruise shipping has been a boom industry and – in response to market growth and to maximise the benefits of the economy of scale – the largest vessels have in recent years doubled in size from 80,000gt to over 160,000gt. The new generation of mega-ships can carry more than 6,000 passengers and 1,800 crew – the equivalent of a small town – and this alone has created equally massive challenges.
How can multinational crew members – many of them from developing nations and not sharing the language of the passengers or even fellow seafarers onboard – be expected to maintain command and control in such circumstances? Marine insurers and ship salvage experts have also raised concerns about the inherent difficulties in dealing with a disaster involving massive ships.
Seafarers have spoken of their worries in handling such ships. Some large passenger vessels have been built with a relatively shallow draft so that they can get in close to land and avoid the use of tenders. The number of decks has been increased, with additional leisure facilities, to increase revenue-earning capacity. Additional swimming pools, coupled with a number of slack tanks when in operational service, further reduce vessel stability.
There has also been a growing trend to operate ships in increasingly exotic locations – polar waters or remote tropical areas, for example. Not only do such waters often present testing sea conditions and navigational challenges, they are often far away from major shipping lanes or search and rescue facilities, posing an extra challenge in the event of an emergency.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of warning signals. These have included: the collision of the Norwegian Dream and the containership Ever Decent; the grounding of Norwegian Crown; the fire onboard Star Princess; the explosion and loss of power onboard the Queen Mary 2 off Spain in 2010, and a number of incidents involving large angles of heel when turning, including the Crown Princess and Grand Princess incidents.
Research shows that between 60% to 80% of accidents at sea involve "human factors". While the major cruiseship companies have a clear commitment to the employment and training of quality officers, the huge new ships raise questions about the quantity of operational crew not only to meet routine requirements but also to be able to meet the demands associated with intensive operations and emergency situations. And while the core crew in both deck and engine, including the officers, are trained to a high level, the bulk of the passenger and catering department receive minimal training, and their safety training is a fraction of that received by aircraft cabin crew.
Lifeboats have increased in size and mass evacuation systems have been developed to meet the increasing number of passengers carried. But while regulatory requirements have been met, the adequacy of such systems has increasingly been questioned. While occasional reference has been made to innovative systems – such as escape modules – the lifeboat and life raft have remained unchanged as the main means of evacuation and survival and the basic technology of many is little different from Titanic times.
The Titanic resulted in a huge overhaul of shipping safety standards and laid the foundations for the principles that govern maritime safety today. It should not have to take a modern-day Titanic to get the protection that passengers and crew deserve, and Nautilus believes the Costa Concordia incident should serve as a wake-up call for the industry and for the regulatory authorities.
Andrew Linington
The Guardian, Sunday 15 January 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/15/costa-concordia-disaster-transport-titanic
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