Since becoming a Marine Consultant in 2010 I have been increasingly concerned about the drop in Seafaring Standards.
Admittedly, a Consultant deals with the poorer end of the scale, the collisions, groundings and the 'errors' in human judgment but various conversations with bankers, insurance companies, shipowners, equipment manufacturers and with other consultants/surveyors points toward an over-all demise of basic seafaring skills and the ability for any crew-member to think outside the box they have been put into.
I have previously highlighted the fact that this drop in seafaring ability was synonymous with the introduction of STCW and ISM and I standby this today. One Captain recently conversed to me that he could not understand why his company kept on asking him to maintain his vessel. As he put it "I am employed to operate the vessel, not to maintain it". What made this comment worse was the fact that he was British and should have been born under stricter surround, what is left of it that is.
STCW, ISM and ISPS have produced seafarers who live blindly within some of the rules that they can remember, who are handcuffed to checklists, forms and procedures and who no longer know how to react in an emergency, who bow to rash orders from a mobile phone rather than analyzing circumstance and who have diminished in authority when faced with the self-inflated importance of shore-based port state control inspectors, surveyors and ex-seafarers who now steer chairs in morbid management offices around the world.
Management companies and ship operators, the IMO and national bodies of governance will soon have to realize that crews dependance on navigational aids is neither legal nor correct, that flooding vessels with paperwork and control measures is restrictive and deflationary and that by telling seafarers that they should not work too hard is like saying "don't work boys, we will protect you". The end result being a vessel filled with 'operators' who can no longer work outside the box, who are suffused with mind-killing forms and laws and who have no affinity or loyalty to the company they work for.
Admittedly the idea of seafarers who are bound to smack other ships, night or day, who are unable to maintain there machinery in working condition and who consistently navigate their vessels around the world using a format of blind-luck and hope rather than skill is good news for maintaining a thriving consultancy but it is a hard pill to swallow.
It is also apparent, although obviously no statistics abound on the subject, that IMO and their relentless enforcement of mind-reducing control measures and procedures have not effectively reduced accidents at sea. To produce such statistics may go to show that safety and security is now at an all-time high in comparison to those years before they went overboard on it.
Security and safety will always be an issue when those being controlled lack the skills, brain power and integrity to take matters into their own hands and effectively mitigate or solve situations through fast-thinking reaction based upon extensive training and experience.
Of course, matters are not helped when companies fail to support their crews. A Greek company recently manufactured six magic pipes and sent them to six sister ships. On average each ship then successfully cheated on their bunkers to the tune of 70 tonnes per bunker stem. This defies belief, that this still goes on and more-so that out of those six vessels not one crew member thought to speak out or say something that was so obviously illegal and that placed them, not the company in immediate jeopardy if caught. The company though made the worst mistake; they sent the instructions for the fitting of the 'magic pipe' by email and forgot to install a 'self-destruct' measure once read.
0 comments:
Post a Comment