Groundhog Day

I have in front of me an article from Lloyd’s List that refers to a UK Department of Transport report on fatigue among seafarers. Michael Grey’s article is titled, “Fatigue facts jolt shipping’; the report Mr. Grey refers to is written by Professor Ivan Brown of the Medical Research Council.


The author comments on the report, “its recommendations on the control of seafarer’s hours will probably ensure that it will regrettably disappear forever in fathomless archives, to appear after a decent interval only for the enjoyment of researchers and academics.”


What’s new, you ask? What is new is that the article is almost twenty years old. It appeared in Lloyd’s List on March 15, 1990. I found it amongst the junk I have collected over time.


Some of the academics here will point out, of course, that we had a STCW convention a few years later that addressed this problem. Some may even forget to remind us that not only these (and such subsequent) reports have disappeared forever from our consciousness, even the STCW convention as it pertains to fatigue rears its ugly head only at decent intervals these days, and is otherwise largely ignored. Compliance is routinely fudged; the record of watchkeepers working hours and rest periods at sea is often unadulterated fiction.


In 2006, quoting a comprehensive survey approximately a decade after the STCW convention first came into force, the ITF reported : “One in four seafarers said they had fallen asleep while on watch. Almost 50% of seafarers taking part in the study reported working weeks of 85 hours or more. Around half said their working hours had increased over the past 10 years, despite new regulations intended to combat fatigue. Almost 50% of seafarers surveyed considered their working hours presented a danger to their personal safety. Some 37% said their working hours sometimes posed a danger to the safe operations of their ship.” Things did not get better over time; as we know very well, they got worse.


Two years later, in February this year, the UK’s Maritime Accident Investigation Branch took the unprecedented step, after an investigation into the ‘Antari’ grounding, of a) directly blaming the IMO for failing to address this issue even after a similar MAIB safety report (concerning fatigue) was forwarded to it two years earlier and b) asking the UK government to unilaterally take action to address the safety and environmental risks in British waters caused by seafarer fatigue. The MAIB ‘Antari’ report was scathing; unusually strong phrases like ‘Seafarer working hours are close to slavery’, ‘Watchkeepers routinely falling asleep’, ‘Ships are unguided missiles” and ‘Just a matter of time before there is a catastrophic accident” were used in the report: a sign, perhaps of the frustration the MAIB felt.


What had the IMO to say in reply? Well, as usual, not a lot. It confirmed that the UK had submitted a proposal to the Safety Committee, fully two years ago, asking that “an auditable procedure for establishing vessels’ safe manning levels should be introduced”. That was all the IMO did, though I am sure some impressively worded correspondence has been produced in the interim. I am also sure that the matter is being taken seriously by the mandarins at the IMO even today. We must realise that only six months have passed after the MAIB report, and that these things take time, as the twenty year old report quoted in Lloyd’s List and the 2006 report quoted by the ITF proves. I read these periodic reports with bemusement: all the regulators really need to do is to visit a ship to know what is happening on the ground, and how commonplace fatigue at sea really is.


When it comes to the resolution of the fatigue issue, the sailor may be forgiven for thinking that he is actor Bill Murray in the movie ‘Groundhog Day’, doomed to living the same day over and over again for eternity. Even worse, there is no Andie Macdowell on the horizon either; an event that would help considerably in keeping him awake on watch, I think.


Of course, many industry bodies have raised the subject sporadically and anaemically. Pilot associations, Cargo and Classification society surveyors have complained about tired crews unable to function effectively. Port State Control officials have mentioned seafarer fatigue in some of their reports, and so have individual Superintendents and the like. Some organisations even have online and offline forms for reporting fatigue. Accident statistics are legion too: the high percentage of accidents caused by human error and the alarmingly high odds that a chronically fatigued seafarer will make mistakes and cause accidents have been underlined ad nauseum in a plethora of seminars across a spectrum that seems to cover all points of the proverbial compass.


However, all this, again, is academic; because all of us, at sea or ashore, need no reminding that the problem exists. Compiling data is not an alternative to solving the problem. In addition and as far as the commercial industry is concerned, there is no real problem. A fatigued seafarer is the least of their concerns anyway.


I am afraid that the maritime industry has become immune to this issue; Groundhog Day has played out too often. The repercussions of following the STCW convention on fatigue are seen as too expensive. The requirements of additional officers and crew, or even (gasp) an additional Master (or, perhaps, taking some administrative functions ashore) that would undoubtedly be required to fully comply with the rules is seen as unnecessary. I cannot see any Owner doing this unilaterally, raising operating costs and making his ships uncompetitive in today’s bloody marketplace. Which means that, as usual, additional requirements will have to be mandated from ‘above’. I do not see that happening easily either: the benign nexus between industry bodies and the commercial world is usually at the expense of the seafarer.


The only way we will get some traction to begin addressing this burning issue (that has been ablaze for two decades or more, as shown) is this: We need a series of spectacular and catastrophic accidents, the root cause of which is found to be seafarer fatigue. We need to see these well publicised in mainstream media, as they probably will be if beaches and seagulls coated with oil are a result. Only then will there be sufficient pressure put on the industry, including the regulators, which will make everybody act immediately. Remember the ISPS code that happened within weeks of 9/11? That worked. Something spectacular. Something that presses all the buttons in a way that a fatigued mariner never will, even if he suffers long term health deterioration as a result of chronic fatigue. We in shipping are famous for post disaster regulation: maybe that is the only way we know. Alternately, we can prepare to relive Groundhog Day for another twenty years.


In 1990, Michael Grey commented on Professor Brown’s report thus: “Perhaps the report is a signal to start off with a completely clean sheet and try to adapt the way of a ship to the working practices of a human crew rather than the other way around”.

Sorry, Mr. Grey, the cleanest sheet we have been able to arrange, after two decades, is the murky spreadsheet recording individual watchkeeping working hours at sea; it may interest you to know that not only are the figures routinely doctored, fudged sheets are sometimes even photocopied for use next month!

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Inhuman Error

Twenty ports a month in the North Sea, English Channel, Mediterranean and off the Bosphorous. Thick fog almost all the time off Northern Europe. Master living on the bridge at sea. A small short manned ship. No pilotage except when compulsory. High winds in almost all Mediterranean ports. Pressure to meet schedules. Inexperienced third mate, fourth engineer and two AB’s. Not enough competent crew to steer the ship even while under pilotage. Specialised ship, so almost the entire deck officers and crew involved in cargo, including unlashing and lashing alongside, during approaches and in rivers and locks. Almost weekly inspections or statutory surveys, port inspections and others, the ship having been just taken over from a previous management who let it run down as usual. Company refusing Master's urgent requests for an additional experienced navigator. Charterers used to running their own ships where the European crew works on a two week rotation and permanent wages and expect similar initiative from the crew. Our crew on board working on a nine month contract, officers 4/6 months. Cold as a witches unmentionables in winter. High seas in the Bristol Channel, some Mediterranean ports and in the North Sea, resulting in some ports being occasionally closed, and ships steaming at slow speed for a day or two in heavy weather just off port. No sleep. No rest for the wicked.

This has happened to many of us, including me.

And this relentless stress, fatigue and constant multitasking is, I firmly believe, one of the main causes of human error.

Recent insurance and P&I statistics highlight the increase in casualty rates and, since money is involved, ring alarm bells. Insurance companies are tightening up, statistics are being compiled and premia and calls recalculated. The complex financial structure that makes for insurance at sea is worried.
Human error is usually cited as the biggest cause of casualties; and though fatigue, stress and other such factors may be sometimes mentioned in passing or obliquely, this is not really dwelled upon. It literally rocks the boat, asks uncomfortable questions and is best left swept under the carpet. It also costs shipowners money to fix this problem. It is almost as if human error is taken in isolation; it seems like a well rested and not overstressed seafarer has made a blunder because of his innate stupidity, contributory factors not being mentioned too loudly.

Some factors impacting safety of navigation are well chronicled because they are easier to highlight. Drunkenness or inebriation. Poor seamanship, and here, the ‘ordinary practices of seamen’ is a catch all phrase, nothing being ordinary these days with seamen being relegated to administrative roles for much of their 'free' time. Other reasons sound good too: Poor navigation. Command breakdown.

Here are some others which I hope some of the braver casualty investigators have highlighted at some point in time: I believe these are major factors in declining safety standards at sea today.

· Lower professional standards of seamanship and navigation. Very limited use of doubling watches, since two times zero is still zero. Result, Master spending an absurd amount of time on the bridge on short sea trades.

· Poor training standards. The industry’s penchant for adding fancy course titles with poor content and delivery must be stopped at once.

· Navigating officers’ over-reliance on electronic gizmos and under reliance on common sense and basic navigation. The VHF and, increasingly the AIS, being used as a collision avoidance tool, basic navigational rules and common sense is being ignored too often.

· Masters and navigating officers’ incomplete understanding of the Rules of the Road

· Administrative overload. Enough has been written about this, ad nauseum. Maybe all feel that by ignoring the problem it will go away. It won’t; it will bite back.

· Management passing the buck to the ship, effectively daring the Master to use his prerogative to stop the ship with all the resultant fallout. In this respect, the catch all ‘Master’s overriding authority’ is being used by all shore personnel, whether in insurance, operations, ship management, Class, Flag States or the IMO, to simply pass the buck. At the same time, countries are backtracking from traditional maritime commitments, criminalising seafarers, adding ponderous, arbitrary and unilateral laws to their arsenal, and making the IMO partly redundant. This is a recipe for disaster.

· Shortmanning or inappropriate manning for the ship and run. Manning certificates are a joke, and one can short man ships to dangerous levels and still exceed the requirements by about twenty five percent. No allowance is made for the trade or mandated rest periods on a hectic run. The blind are leading the blind on this one.

· Poor communication and language difficulties with multinational crews. Poor ability to multitask in such an environment, which is essential in any emergency.

· Poor maintenance of machinery. In these booming days it is not the cost of repair which is a factor, but the time for repair. Ships are surreptitiously drifting just off busy sea lanes in areas of quickly changing weather catching up on machinery maintenance in fits and starts. There is no time in port. And, while there is no time at sea either, one can perhaps steal a couple of hours on charter to quickly do some maintenance. And hang safety for awhile.

· Commercial pressures resulting in ships reaching open seas in all kinds of weather before they are battened down and therefore seaworthy.

· Lack of dissemination of critical information, often intentionally by operations or charterers. I have been asked to call a small port in South America when everybody and his mother in law knew that there was no water in the channel. Except me, the Master. Also, nobody told me that the NAABSA clause had been added to the charter party, and it was customary for ships to sit on the mud at the berth. The agent was surprised, then bemused, that I did not know. The Chief Engineer was not, at least the first time I told him, in a hurry, to prepare for shutdown.

· Substandard or unsafe ports/berths. These days, anybody builds a finger into the sea and calls it a terminal. I could write a book on this one. How each call, every two weeks to a port, used to be a harrowing affair, with strong weather and incompetent pilots at a borderline unsafe terminal, the office communicating every ten minutes with me expecting immediate answers and applying commercial pressure. In actual fact, any sensible person would have agreed with me that that terminal was unsafe at that time of the year. We often talk about substandard seafarers. Perhaps we should talk of substandard charterers, management and terminals more often.

· Incompetent or inexperienced pilots.





Unfortunately, Safety is a culture and not a checklist. Besides, a concerted approach is required to address this, with at least Management working in tandem with the Master, and not second guessing him in real time.
The fact that communications is easier is a handicap; I have lost count of the number of times I have had to indicate to managers that I was too busy handling an emergency to be communicating. Sometimes I seem to be giving an almost ball by ball commentary to them by phone, email and fax.

As to making a ‘quick’ report in writing as per some elaborate reporting format which has been designed without practical thought, I once had to tell a gentleman that if I made that report now as he wanted I would be making a longer one later since we were still in a pretty hairy situation, and I needed to concentrate there.
That seemed to strike a chord, or ring a bell, or whatever, but I did not get any more calls.

I have a term for this kind of communication which is detrimental to basic safety: Paralysis by communication.


Meanwhile, we prefer to pay higher premia and justify it on the bottom line. We prefer to ignore some of the root causes (a term we otherwise love with gay managementspeak abandon) of casualties. We prefer to jail seafarers for being on the wrong junk at the wrong time.


Maybe I need to remind us that, along with Human Error, there is a term in Maritime and Admiralty Law called 'Error in Management' too. And, as far as I can recall, limitations on liability are traditionally low or nonexistent with that one.


Maybe we should just call this one the 'Error of the Untouchables'. That should set the cat among the seagulls.









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Monster's Maritime Ball

In the last few weeks, panicked voices from the manning world within the Industry, like postcards written from the edge, seem to have become shriller. Perhaps this is an illusion; perhaps it is just coincidence that a few reports and surveys have been published recently. The Ship talk recruitment survey was one. The Drewry/PAL associates report, "Manning 2008" was another, and of course, Lloyd's Lists' "Seafarers 2008" event in Singapore was, perhaps, the icing on the cake, or the final nail in the coffin, depending on how maudlin we maritime folk were feeling.

And, depending on whom you read when, or what event you attended where, alarming figures are bandied about. Thirty four thousand officers short already this year. An additional sixty thousand required over the next four years. A thousand officers short in the Indian domestic market; after some time these numbers, like Bill Gates' billions, overwhelm and don't mean much at all, except, of course, that phrases like 'unprecedented manning crisis' stay in one's mind.

So, let us reduce all this cacophony to one statement: In the next four years, almost ninety thousand qualified officers are projected to be additionally required by our world's shipping fleet.

Additional to what we have, and seemingly out of thin air. No wonder there is an acute sense of panic out there. All seems dark and gloomy.

Now and to paraphrase Santana, all you sinners, put the lights on and take several deep breaths, because this is what I see happening:


One, as the honchos at Bear Stearns will tell you, every boom has a bubble and every rose has a thorn. With the world's largest consumer, the USA, in recession and with growth rates in India and China slowing down a bit, trade is likely to drop. Figures out of Europe and Japan are not too encouraging either; in addition, inflationary pressures and oil prices are high. The food crisis worldwide and upcoming elections in the USA and India will result in politicians becoming more protectionist: witness the Indian governments on/off policies in recent times on everything from cement to sugar to food grains.

Not good signs. I am not saying that trade will stop, far from it, but a slowdown is likely. Boom graphs cannot be extrapolated to infinity. The consequence of such a slowdown is likely to ease the pressure on manpower to an extent; how much, of course, remains the million dollar question.

Two, the Industry will press for, and win, even smaller manning requirements from Flag States. This process has already begun. Indian authorities have recently reduced the requirement for one navigating officer on bulkers "on a trial basis" (this probably means that unless there is a major accident with a consequent hue and cry, the shorter manning will continue). There are already rumblings about reducing the number of engineers on board. Questions are even being raised about the Chief Engineer's role. My opinion is this: we need a Chief Engineer like we need a Master, because we in the industry need a fall guy when things go wrong. Who will fulfill that critical role?

Three, we will drift inexorably towards 'Creative Manning'. Place a BCom graduate as admin officer and remove the third mate. Place two welders (call them fitters, though) and remove a junior engineer. No Chief Engineer available, can we sail short 'on dispensation? The aim of the exercise will be to reduce the number of certified officers and engineers on board at any given time to the bare minimum as provided for in the Safe Manning certificate.



Four, and while still on the manning certificate, commercial pressure on Flag States to 'review' these certificates will increase. Review downwards, obviously. We will get creative here again, showing, on paper, non existent technical and operational shore support to persuade Flag States that skeleton crews will still be in line with all rules, including the STCW ones on rest periods. As things get worse, some owners may even threaten to change to more malleable Flags if their demands are not met.

Five and related, increased pressure on statutory agencies to do two things: Reduce sea time requirements for trainees and also pressure to pass them through the examination system faster. These pressures are already underway and are nothing new. We need certified warm bodies now, says the industry; we don't really care how competent they are.

Six, pressure on Class and internal auditors not to examine systemic non conformities too closely. We are short manned and it is tough to get good people, you know, so don't push things too much. Let the facade remain.

Seven, faster promotions, shorter contracts and higher wages on offer. We can have crews fatigued beyond the STCW convention but we can't have them burnt out. They have to return, though we will try fair and foul means to extend their tenures on board. Sometimes we prefer to burn them out even if they don't return to us. And we would rather promote before time even if it adds another less than competent officer to our fleet.
Seagoing wages will continue to rise till the business model can't take it any more, or till ….

Eight, China will, sooner or later, begin to supply manpower to the maritime world. The Philippines will increase its market share. Officers from the Philippines, some already under fire for perceived lower standards, will increase. This is because many Filipinos have the English language advantage which Indian crews often do not. Indian ship managers have already pointed to the Chinese storm on the horizon; given the disparity in the two (actually three, if you include the Philippines) nationalities wages and difficulties in getting new Indian bodies into the industry, this is just a matter of time.

Nine, many in the industry will revert to a bygone era's worst practices. Sitting on mariners' passports and documents, not relieving seafarers on time, promising the moon and delivering the gutter and poaching like drunken gypsies are tactics some are well experienced in.
Many seafarers will get more and more unreasonable; many of these prima donnas will skip jobs for a few dollars more, make outlandish demands and otherwise behave unprofessionally. This will feed the unprofessional on the other side of the fence; ship managers who will impatiently await a time when supply exceeds demand, so they can, in turn, treat seafarers badly. As children do, each side will bawl and say, "But he started it".

Ten and a critical assumption here, which is this: The Maritime Industry, with its present small resource pool of Officers, will fail to address, in the short term, the Officer crisis with any authority on its own. This is because of two main reasons (though I am sure we can all list several more)

a) It is fire fighting time now; issues pertaining to immediate shortages will consume the industry, not five year plans.
b) The maritime industry has no history of managing manpower well, and it does not seem to have the will or expertise to do so this time around either. Supply and demand have always balanced out in spite of our managers, not because of them. Maybe the Chinese will balance the scales this time.


In all this drama, my fear is this. At a time when ships are getting more complex, sea lanes are getting busier and casualty figures are rising, all these 'solutions', unplanned and inevitable as they may be, will cascade into an alarming downward spiral in safety standards. Less experienced officers, faster promotions, untested nationalities, pressures on statutory and non statutory organisations and cuts in present skeleton crews will all contribute to a world fleet which will be increasingly unsafe. Safer seas and cleaner oceans will remain a slogan and a pipe dream.

It is ironic that the industry, whether in boom times or bust cycles, always seems to lower quality; in a boom by leaning towards cutting corners in skilled manpower to keep ships moving and in a bust by cutting corners in ship maintenance to save money. Ironic, but not surprising, because we are conditioned to only looking at the short term. The long term doesn't matter, we think. In the long term we are all dead.


At the moment, the industry is in a bit of panic, like the man who dreams that a monster is sitting on his chest, trying to choke him to death. The man awakes in great fear, and actually sees the monster sitting on him! The man cries aloud "What is going to happen to me??!!??"



The monster grins at him and says "Don't ask me, it's your dream."




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published in http://www.marexbulletin.com/










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