Considering the position of others
Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 7:33 pm
Considering the position of others
13 October 2008 Lloyds List
ASK any seafarers of more mature years (and there are a lot of these old chaps around) whether the standard of accommodation aboard ship has improved, or deteriorated. Sad to relate, it will inevitably be the latter for which they will opt. If they have been fortunate enough to sail in new, or almost new, ships, they will almost all suggest that this ‘standard’ tonnage, while it may fulfil every regulation to the letter, is lacking in every sort of ‘generosity’.
These are ships built against a price and the builder will do everything he can to minimise his costs. Everything will be of the cheapest, and that certainly goes for the standard of fit in the crew accommodation. And if this offends both the owners who write the cheques, and the builders who eagerly try to sell their tonnage, so be it, but there is no denying the views of the ‘users’.
Builders take pride in their ‘value for money’ ships which they can offer to shipowners who are probably more interested in performance criteria than the sort of accommodation that will be welded onto the capacious hull. Years ago, I remember going around a new tanker in a Far Eastern yard, which the owner was selling as an ‘economic’ vessel for the carriage of oil. The designers were so proud of the various features which they had incorporated, and which would lower the price of this ship.
A couple of these ideas I recall, was a single (as opposed to two) cranes for handling hoses, and one fewer decks in the accommodation island. There would thus be absolutely no spare accommodation at all, and unless you stood on a step ladder or, if you were very tall, you could not see the horizon ahead from the bridge with the vessel trimmed evenly fore and aft.
For a couple of years afterwards, I sort of kept the name of this ship in my mind in my daily scan of the casualty columns, half expecting to see that she had been involved in a head-on collision, caused by the lack of agility of the watchkeeper, in rushing from wing to wing of the bridge, to see if there was anything under the bow.
The point was that the yard was proud of this utilitarian ship, and the owners queued up to buy it. And several years on, lots of yards are offering such bog-standard vessels, in which the crew spaces will be built to the rulebook, but without a cubic centimetre of extra space. Seafarers will have to share cabins, and on an increasing number of ships, washing facilities. There will be almost no recreational space. We are, in fact, going back 40 years, for in the 1960s there were ships where a great deal of thought, and space, were given over to the crews.
Some of my best friends are naval architects, but I cannot see how they can design ships in which the accommodation is a multi-decked island perched abaft the stern frame right aft, or the same sort of affair right forward atop the forecastle, where it serves as a sort of breakwater behind which the deck cargo can shelter.
I sailed in pre-war cargoships where the crew was in the forecastle, and it wasn’t fun for them. That’s ships which were probably designed 80 years ago! But there again, some of the greatest architects of the day built the 1960s tower blocks — which they regarded as hives for the proletariat — although they knew that they would never ever have to live in them. Therein lies the clue to this regrettable mismatch.
I have written of the UK’s Human Element Advisory Group before, and the way in which it is seeking to draw importance to the human element — the people — as the glue which holds every ship and shipping company together. Our latest meeting, a couple of weeks ago, took in the issue of ‘habitability’. Hosted by ABS, we were fortunate to have some powerful speakers on the subject, specialists in this important but somehow neglected area.
Habitability, said ABS human factors manager Kevin McSweeney, could be defined as “acceptability from a human performance perspective”. And, of course, there is an additional dimension. Unlike shore premises, where many of us still work in badly ventilated and ill-lit conditions, packed like battery hens but who can escape when the day’s work is done, ships are a home to their crews who have to live aboard them for months on end.
So it is good that classification societies like ABS look closely at what Dr McSweeney called the “supporting task requirement” with a range of standards that would make seafarers more comfortable. One sort of felt that not many other people would bother, as all the financial pressures crowded in.
ABS has developed a whole suite of different tools for guaging the suitability of accommodation standards. They looked at noise and vibration and they considered the range of facilities that were available. They considered whether the sort of motions to which the crew was subjected would induce fatigue, and applied a range of international standards. They looked at lighting and its adequacy, and the ambient climate as produced by the air conditioning and ventilation.
ABS offers two notations for operators who are concerned with ensuring their crews have acceptable conditions of habitability: Hab and Hab+. Depressingly, while the offshore industry was hugely interested in habitability criteria, clearly for the advantages in retention and recruitment which a high rating would confer, there was not nearly such a high take-up from the shipping industry. Why am I not surprised?
Human factors engineering is another important aspect, and Dr McSweeney makes a convincing case for getting the specialists in this discipline into the design loop at the earliest time. You cannot enforce its use, and owners can always think of reasons why they should not spend money on HFE, but there are so many reasons why it makes good sense.
Would it not be better to have a ship designed aboard which you could actually get at the equipment for maintenance, without burning holes in bulkheads? Would it not be absolutely splendid if a human factors engineer went over a design for safe accessibility, ensured the logic of controls and labelling? It might even, somebody suggested, strike a blow for the greater use of standardisation. But here again, very few commercial shipping companies were buying into HFE, more’s the pity, despite the obvious advantages. It costs money, although it has the capacity to save lots. But, one muses, you will have to lobotomise the accountants who call the shots before this useful science can be widely applied.
One result of optimising habitability is a more comfortable ship that in some way will minimise the effects of fatigue.
MIND you, there is no universal agreement about what fatigue actually is, and fierce debates in forums such as the IMO about whether you try to ‘manage’ it in some way, or put a few more people aboard our ridiculously lean-manned ships. For the life of me, I cannot honestly believe that it is even remotely acceptable to have a largish, frantically busy ship with a master and mate working watch and watch.
“Two too few” is an excellent slogan thought up by the Nautical Institute, which is trying to campaign on this issue. There is a whole body of supporting evidence from professional casualty investigators who compile great lists of ships that have come to grief with an exhausted watchkeeper asleep in the wheelhouse. But there are administrations that seem determined to fight to the death on behalf of their owners who insist that it is perfectly acceptable and safe to run ships in this way. I think they should be named and shamed.
At the HEAG meeting, the MCA’s Roger Towner sketched something of the labyrinthine strategies that must be followed just to get this important matter debated. I just wonder whether we shall just have to endure some frightful accident involving an exhausted watchkeeper with vast loss of life or pollution, and universal maritime industry shame, before we see progress on this.
And as I have said before, if we are genuinely trying to recruit and retain people who are not actually zombies into commercial shipping, should we not start to behave in a more responsible fashion? But as Towner points out, it is not something a single flag can seek to impose, if it wants to retain any tonnage. It has to be an international prescription, bolted, as the NI suggest, onto the safety of life at sea convention.
We heard from Chris Rowsell, who runs the Confidential Hazardous Incident Reporting Programme, which has just celebrated its fifth birthday. Chirp is different from other schemes in that its director actively follows up the reports, to ensure that there is a result from the near-miss, or other incident. He points out that there are different perceptions of acceptable risk, as viewed from different ships and ship types in different situations. He offers good advice. “Always put yourself in the other person’s position,” he urges.
Perhaps it is a lesson that goes far beyond hazardous incidents, to those involved in ship design, with due regard to habitability, and those drawing up the manning scale for a container feedership.
13 October 2008 Lloyds List
ASK any seafarers of more mature years (and there are a lot of these old chaps around) whether the standard of accommodation aboard ship has improved, or deteriorated. Sad to relate, it will inevitably be the latter for which they will opt. If they have been fortunate enough to sail in new, or almost new, ships, they will almost all suggest that this ‘standard’ tonnage, while it may fulfil every regulation to the letter, is lacking in every sort of ‘generosity’.
These are ships built against a price and the builder will do everything he can to minimise his costs. Everything will be of the cheapest, and that certainly goes for the standard of fit in the crew accommodation. And if this offends both the owners who write the cheques, and the builders who eagerly try to sell their tonnage, so be it, but there is no denying the views of the ‘users’.
Builders take pride in their ‘value for money’ ships which they can offer to shipowners who are probably more interested in performance criteria than the sort of accommodation that will be welded onto the capacious hull. Years ago, I remember going around a new tanker in a Far Eastern yard, which the owner was selling as an ‘economic’ vessel for the carriage of oil. The designers were so proud of the various features which they had incorporated, and which would lower the price of this ship.
A couple of these ideas I recall, was a single (as opposed to two) cranes for handling hoses, and one fewer decks in the accommodation island. There would thus be absolutely no spare accommodation at all, and unless you stood on a step ladder or, if you were very tall, you could not see the horizon ahead from the bridge with the vessel trimmed evenly fore and aft.
For a couple of years afterwards, I sort of kept the name of this ship in my mind in my daily scan of the casualty columns, half expecting to see that she had been involved in a head-on collision, caused by the lack of agility of the watchkeeper, in rushing from wing to wing of the bridge, to see if there was anything under the bow.
The point was that the yard was proud of this utilitarian ship, and the owners queued up to buy it. And several years on, lots of yards are offering such bog-standard vessels, in which the crew spaces will be built to the rulebook, but without a cubic centimetre of extra space. Seafarers will have to share cabins, and on an increasing number of ships, washing facilities. There will be almost no recreational space. We are, in fact, going back 40 years, for in the 1960s there were ships where a great deal of thought, and space, were given over to the crews.
Some of my best friends are naval architects, but I cannot see how they can design ships in which the accommodation is a multi-decked island perched abaft the stern frame right aft, or the same sort of affair right forward atop the forecastle, where it serves as a sort of breakwater behind which the deck cargo can shelter.
I sailed in pre-war cargoships where the crew was in the forecastle, and it wasn’t fun for them. That’s ships which were probably designed 80 years ago! But there again, some of the greatest architects of the day built the 1960s tower blocks — which they regarded as hives for the proletariat — although they knew that they would never ever have to live in them. Therein lies the clue to this regrettable mismatch.
I have written of the UK’s Human Element Advisory Group before, and the way in which it is seeking to draw importance to the human element — the people — as the glue which holds every ship and shipping company together. Our latest meeting, a couple of weeks ago, took in the issue of ‘habitability’. Hosted by ABS, we were fortunate to have some powerful speakers on the subject, specialists in this important but somehow neglected area.
Habitability, said ABS human factors manager Kevin McSweeney, could be defined as “acceptability from a human performance perspective”. And, of course, there is an additional dimension. Unlike shore premises, where many of us still work in badly ventilated and ill-lit conditions, packed like battery hens but who can escape when the day’s work is done, ships are a home to their crews who have to live aboard them for months on end.
So it is good that classification societies like ABS look closely at what Dr McSweeney called the “supporting task requirement” with a range of standards that would make seafarers more comfortable. One sort of felt that not many other people would bother, as all the financial pressures crowded in.
ABS has developed a whole suite of different tools for guaging the suitability of accommodation standards. They looked at noise and vibration and they considered the range of facilities that were available. They considered whether the sort of motions to which the crew was subjected would induce fatigue, and applied a range of international standards. They looked at lighting and its adequacy, and the ambient climate as produced by the air conditioning and ventilation.
ABS offers two notations for operators who are concerned with ensuring their crews have acceptable conditions of habitability: Hab and Hab+. Depressingly, while the offshore industry was hugely interested in habitability criteria, clearly for the advantages in retention and recruitment which a high rating would confer, there was not nearly such a high take-up from the shipping industry. Why am I not surprised?
Human factors engineering is another important aspect, and Dr McSweeney makes a convincing case for getting the specialists in this discipline into the design loop at the earliest time. You cannot enforce its use, and owners can always think of reasons why they should not spend money on HFE, but there are so many reasons why it makes good sense.
Would it not be better to have a ship designed aboard which you could actually get at the equipment for maintenance, without burning holes in bulkheads? Would it not be absolutely splendid if a human factors engineer went over a design for safe accessibility, ensured the logic of controls and labelling? It might even, somebody suggested, strike a blow for the greater use of standardisation. But here again, very few commercial shipping companies were buying into HFE, more’s the pity, despite the obvious advantages. It costs money, although it has the capacity to save lots. But, one muses, you will have to lobotomise the accountants who call the shots before this useful science can be widely applied.
One result of optimising habitability is a more comfortable ship that in some way will minimise the effects of fatigue.
MIND you, there is no universal agreement about what fatigue actually is, and fierce debates in forums such as the IMO about whether you try to ‘manage’ it in some way, or put a few more people aboard our ridiculously lean-manned ships. For the life of me, I cannot honestly believe that it is even remotely acceptable to have a largish, frantically busy ship with a master and mate working watch and watch.
“Two too few” is an excellent slogan thought up by the Nautical Institute, which is trying to campaign on this issue. There is a whole body of supporting evidence from professional casualty investigators who compile great lists of ships that have come to grief with an exhausted watchkeeper asleep in the wheelhouse. But there are administrations that seem determined to fight to the death on behalf of their owners who insist that it is perfectly acceptable and safe to run ships in this way. I think they should be named and shamed.
At the HEAG meeting, the MCA’s Roger Towner sketched something of the labyrinthine strategies that must be followed just to get this important matter debated. I just wonder whether we shall just have to endure some frightful accident involving an exhausted watchkeeper with vast loss of life or pollution, and universal maritime industry shame, before we see progress on this.
And as I have said before, if we are genuinely trying to recruit and retain people who are not actually zombies into commercial shipping, should we not start to behave in a more responsible fashion? But as Towner points out, it is not something a single flag can seek to impose, if it wants to retain any tonnage. It has to be an international prescription, bolted, as the NI suggest, onto the safety of life at sea convention.
We heard from Chris Rowsell, who runs the Confidential Hazardous Incident Reporting Programme, which has just celebrated its fifth birthday. Chirp is different from other schemes in that its director actively follows up the reports, to ensure that there is a result from the near-miss, or other incident. He points out that there are different perceptions of acceptable risk, as viewed from different ships and ship types in different situations. He offers good advice. “Always put yourself in the other person’s position,” he urges.
Perhaps it is a lesson that goes far beyond hazardous incidents, to those involved in ship design, with due regard to habitability, and those drawing up the manning scale for a container feedership.