[BITList] Fwd: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague

[Michael Feltham]

How many coasters have to run aground while the watchkeeper is asleep  
before action is taken ?  See Michael Grey's article below.

Begin forwarded message:

From: enquiries at lloydslist.com
Date: 23 February 2009 07:52:50 GMT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague


The below article was sent to you from Mike Feltham (mj.feltham at madasafish.com 
) with the following message: I thought you might be interested in the  
article below.

FIGHTING FATIGUE
Monday 23 February 2009

THERE is such a thing as the last straw, the final occurrence which,  
while of itself is not that significant, nevertheless promotes a major  
policy change. In the case of the UK Marine Accident Investigation  
Branch, the grounding on a gently shelving beach of the 3,696 dwt  
general cargo vessel Antari may not appear to have been a  
“significant” casualty. There was no great spread of oil to lay waste  
to sea life, or broken bodies lying in the surf.

It was an alarming experience for a North Ireland motorist who was  
driving along the coast road and saw the shape of a large ship parked  
on the beach by dawn’s early light and raised the first alarm.

The damage was not that desperate — a small hole in a ballast tank and  
the requirement for some 25 tonnes of new steel to the bottom — and  
the ship was able to make it under its own steam to the next port of  
call and subsequently to the repair yard in Poland.

The grounding of the Antigua and Barbuda flag Antari, while not  
qualifying for anything other than a footnote in the great catalogue  
of marine disaster, might nevertheless mark a major change in the way  
we regard watchkeeping responsibilities, adequate crewing and what we  
really mean by an “adequate” lookout.

Because the Antari was the latest in a long line of casualties, which  
have been caused by the officer of the watch falling fast asleep in  
the comfortable chair thoughtfully provided for him by the owners,  
with no separate lookout posted, the watch alarm turned off, and all  
the evident symptoms of fatigue that are almost endemic in a small  
ship with the master and mate working watch and watch.

This, you might think, makes the accident all the more unremarkable,  
albeit that the case was a particularly bad one, the evidence pointing  
to the fact that the officer of the watch fell asleep shortly after  
taking over from the master off the Scottish coast at midnight and did  
not wake until the ship came to a grinding halt on the Irish side of  
the North Channel more than three hours later.

But just as the slumbers of the Russian mate were caused by the  
accumulation of insufficient rest over a long period throughout the  
intensive patterns of the small ship’s trading, it is the cumulation  
of similar accidents which has persuaded the MAIB to recommend that  
the UK authorities take what we might consider the nuclear option and  
unilaterally clamp down on the scandal of these hard worked,  
undermanned ships which represent such a menace to themselves and to  
other users of the sea.

It’s not even remotely hard, if you have ever kept night watches at  
sea, to put yourself in the place of the exhausted officer of the  
watch. It was a calm summer night, with the ship rolling gently in the  
westerly swell as it ran south down the western shore of the Mull of  
Kintyre, with its full load of scrap from the Highland port of  
Corpach, bound for Ghent.

The two wheelhouse doors were shut despite the warm summer night,  
there was the comforting burble of the exhaust and the hum of the  
electronics, the hypnotic rotation of the radar scan on the screen in  
front of the OOW’s chair.

Why would he not fall asleep in such circumstances, and sleep soundly  
too, after months of a disturbed sleep pattern that had even seen him  
spending two hours engaged in chart corrections, with the ship  
alongside when he might have been getting a full night’s sleep?

I often think that the chances of meeting such a ship with anyone  
awake in it during the midnight to six watch would be fairly slim  
these days.

This ship was operated by Briese, one of the biggest shortsea owners  
in Germany, and very efficient it is too, although its efficiency  
seemingly did not extend to discovering that all the hours of rest/ 
work sheets had been completed in advance of the event, and that  
lookouts were not being posted at night, despite their written  
instructions.

The sailors and the cadet who was carried as an ‘extra’ on the minimum  
crewing scale had plenty to do in keeping the ship smart and all the  
other duties in connection with the cargo and hold cleanliness,  
without the bother of keeping a night lookout. As for the watch alarm,  
they liked to have it off, because it otherwise would disturb the  
watch below. This seems to suggest that it tended to be activated  
rather a lot, but maybe I am reading something I shouldn’t into the  
MAIB report.

To a certain extent, they were very lucky, as it could have been a  
whole lot worse, with the mate fast asleep and missing the alter  
course position at the southern end of the Mull of Kintyre, just 11  
miles into his watch. The ship picked a gently shelving beach upon  
which to ground itself, when it could have dashed itself to pieces on  
all sorts of razor sharp rocks on the Antrim coast.

But there is a whole series of awful scenarios which the smiling face  
of Lady Luck helped Antari avoid. It could have run down some yacht in  
the middle of sailing season, or a fishing craft with a crew  
preoccupied (as they are) in hauling nets in the middle of the North  
Channel.

Plunging south, it could have met another short sea ship, its OOW in  
exactly the same situation, in a fairly busy stretch of waterway.

It doesn’t require too much of a stretch of imagination to visualise  
this little ship, motoring along like a unguided missile, albeit with  
a precise autopilot keeping it on the straight and narrow, triggering  
a really frightful maritime disaster.

Conceive, if you will, a fully laden very large crude carrier,  
anchored for a couple of days for orders, while the cargo owners mull  
over the price of crude. This ship, just like another which has been  
in our minds lately, was anchored safely, with an alert anchor watch,  
in a legitimate and safe anchorage and the approval of the coastguard.

But then, despite urgent messages from the coastguard, and the OOW of  
the tanker over the VHF, the 10 knot missile, like a slower version of  
the suicide boat that blew open the Limburg off the Yemeni coast,  
ploughs into the side of the tanker.

The tanker is double hulled, but that is no great help as some 4,000  
tonnes of steel crunches through the plates into the great cargo  
tanks, hitting the tanker on a bulkhead so that two whole wing tanks  
can void themselves into the sea.

There is a roaring, incandescent fire of enormous heat, which  
incinerates half the crew of the big ship as they struggle to escape,  
along with the crew of the coaster.

This, in fact is the accident which the authorities have been dreading  
for years. It is also the scenario to which the shipping industry has  
been resolutely shutting its mind, despite the warnings about fatigue,  
and about crewing practices in an age of high operational intensity.

As the tanker blazes, and 100,000 tonnes of oil surges up and down the  
tidal streams of the IrishSea and its beautiful coasts, the shipping  
industries, and governments, and maritime authorities, and lawyers,  
will experience a wave of rage and revulsion that will set back the  
industry and its image for a generation.

This was not some extraordinary unforeseen circumstance coming out of  
the blue to provide something that needed to be learned. It was an  
accident which responsible and experienced professionals had been  
warning about for years and years and years. In not doing anything  
about these warnings, collectively setting its mind against the  
possibility of such consequences, and ignoring the reality of  
inadequately crewed small ships operating in a such a manner (which  
everyone in the business knew was the case), is not the industry  
condemning itself?

Not just the industry. Think of the determined efforts by Germany, the  
Netherlands and others to prevent the matter being properly taken up  
at the International Maritime Organization. Consider the role of the  
European Commission, and its power-seeking officials, forcing the UK  
and Denmark to withdraw important papers on crewing from the IMO,  
because it is something it jealously guards as its competence.

The guilt from this oily and fatal casualty will sweep over a very  
large number of important people, in both the industry and its  
regulators.

You might say, stop this at once. The casualty you extrapolate into a  
catastrophe was but another shortsea grounding. Why make it out to be  
more significant than it was? Well, the alarming frequency of these  
fatigue-related casualties has persuaded the MAIB to request the  
Maritime and Coastguard Agency to “press for an urgent review of the  
process and principles of safe manning at the IMO to reflect the  
critical safety issues of fatigue and the use of dedicated lookouts”.

Well you might say, that’s fine, but we have been here before and not  
a lot has happened.

Which is why there is an important interim recommendation — “to  
instigate robust, unilateral measures to address the fatigue of bridge  
watchkeeping officers on vessels in UK waters and to ensure that a  
dedicated lookout is always posted at night, during restricted  
visibility and as otherwise required in hazardous navigational  
situations”.

Note that word “unilateral”, because the UK doesn’t do unilateral. But  
also foresee a huge targeted clampdown on shortsea or intensively  
operated ships with port state inspectors poring over logbooks,  
worksheets, overtime accounts, standing orders and the like,  
interviewing seafarers, and (most importantly) detaining ships where  
there is a problem until the vessel is adequately crewed.

That is why we ought to remember the case of the Antari, and the  
sleeping watchkeeper; not because of the accident itself, but because  
of what it might have prevented. Ship’s officers everywhere, and the  
professionals of the Nautical Institute who have been promulgating its  
Two Too Few campaign, will be cheering their assent, if the MCA takes  
this important recommendation aboard.

If you forget all these tedious arguments about competition, and  
manpower shortages, the industry ought to be grateful too, if by  
properly tackling fatigued people, we avoid the horror of a major  
fatigue-induced calamity.

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