Managing Maritime Safety

Helle Oltedal, Margareta Lützhöft, Helle A. Oltedal, Margareta Lützhöft, Helle Oltedal, Helle A. Oltedal, Margareta Lützhöft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138559226
• eBook ISBN: 9781351363921
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Shipping is a pillar of global trade, with 90 per cent of the world's trade in goods and raw materials carried by ship. Despite the economic benefits this delivers, maritime operations can be dangerous, and when accidents occur the consequences are serious. Consequential outcomes from hazards at sea include serious injury, death, loss of cargo and destruction of the marine environment.

Managing Maritime Safety will give you a thorough understanding of contemporary maritime safety and its management. It provides varying viewpoints on traditional safety topics in conjunction with critical discussions of the international safety management code and its application. The book also offers new perspectives on maritime safety such as ship and equipment design for safety and the relevance of safety management systems, in particular the application of the International Safety Management code to remote controlled or autonomous ships. The authors all work in the maritime industry, as practitioners, in education, research, government and classification. The combination of wide-ranging and extensive experience provides an unprecedented span of views with a strong connection to the real issues in the maritime domain.

This book sets out to provide much needed consolidated knowledge for university level students on maritime safety management, incorporating theoretical, historical, research, operational and design perspectives.

1
Setting the stage for maritime safety management

Helle A. Oltedal

Introduction

‘Never before have so few done so much for so many’. When opening the Year of the Seafarer in 2010, these words, a quotation paraphrased from one of Winston Churchill’s most famous speeches, were strikingly declared by Efthimios E. Mitropoulos, Secretary General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) (Oltedal, 2011). The profession of seafaring and shipping is crucial in our society. The worldwide population of seafarers serving in international trade is estimated to be approximately 1,545,000 people, representing virtually every nationality. Worldwide, there are about 90,917 vessels, registered in over 150 nations, which carry about 90 per cent of the world’s trade; thus, these more than one and a half million seafarers are transporting goods for the benefit of the world’s 7.49 billion people (United Nations, 2016). The seafarers’ and shipping industry’s global importance is commonly highlighted by the phrase ‘without shipping, half the world would starve and the other half would freeze’.

Seafaring is seen as a high-risk occupation, and due to the nature of seafaring, the risk factors differ from those found at a traditional on-shore workplace. Some of the characteristic stressors and risk factors are known to be long-term separation from home and family, social isolation, long working hours along with high workload and reduction in number of crew members, lack of shore leave, fatigue, high levels of work-related stress, accidents and maritime disasters, exposure to hazardous substances, dangers from piracy, and environmental stressors such as ship motion, noise and vibrations which may impact work performance and thus risk and safety (Slišković & Penezić, 2015).

When something goes wrong – and at some time all organizational systems will experience unwanted events – the maritime transport system is also distinct with respect to handling and investigating such events. When on the ocean, rescue personnel, fire squads, medical assistance and the like are not as easily available as for shore-based industries. Moreover, when accidents happen on land, there are normally crash scenes with bits and pieces that may support understanding of the chain of events leading up to the accident. Within the maritime sector, the accident scene may very well be nothing but water, with the vessel in bits and pieces somewhere on the seabed, kilometres below the surface.

In maritime safety research, human and social aspects have gained less attention than the technical ones (Hetherington, Flin, & Mearns, 2006), even though the human element is said to be the major causal factor in unwanted events (Butt, Johnson, Pike, Pryce-Roberts, & Vigar, 2013). However, it is gratifying to recognize that this kind of research has been gradually increasing over recent decades.

This book intends to present a critical review of contemporary maritime safety research, and this chapter will discuss the safety concept itself along with the historical development of safety theories and safety models in order to set the stage. While this first chapter presents and discusses the historical development of safety theories and models at a general level, the following chapters aim to present in more detail the state of the art and challenges in safety management at organizational and operative levels, the importance of safety culture, risk perception and the human contribution. When managing safety, making strategic decisions and developing new safety measures, it is crucial that one has a basic understanding of which fundamental rationale the theories and models of use are founded on as well as their limitations, to ensure appropriate understanding and application. Thus, in the following. safety management will be discussed on a conceptual level, providing the reader with a brief tour of the history, and how theoretical and practical limitations and challenges are driving further developments, starting with a presentation of three attributes around which the safety management system should be designed.

Three attributes of safety management

To manage safety in any domain, it is essential to gain an understanding of how and why accidents and incidents occur in the first place and what makes an organization safe. There are various theoretical models of accident and incident investigation, with different explanations for sources of risk and safety, which provide guiding principles and constraints for the development of safety actions and an overall safety management system.

It has been suggested that safety management in any domain should be designed around three attributes of organizations and their environments (Grote, 2012), which are:

1. The kinds of safety to be managed: process versus personal safety.
2. The general approach to managing uncertainty as a hallmark of organizations that manage safety: minimizing uncertainty versus coping with uncertainty.
3. The regulatory regime within which safety is managed: external regulation versus self-regulation.

These three attributes, and their relevance to the domain of managing maritime safety, will be discussed in depth in Chapter 3 and briefly addressed below.

It has been pointed out that the choice of theoretical approach towards safety management should depend upon the kind of safety to be managed – distinguishing between process safety and personal safety – due to differences in the visibility and complexity of risks (Grote, 2012). In process safety, the risks and uncertainties to be managed are directly linked to the primary work task of the organization, such as transporting goods and people. Potential damage results from failures in the execution of processes linked to this task, such as the processes of designing the vessel, maintenance or navigational failure. Breaches of process safety do not necessarily cause harm to the human operators involved. For instance, in May 2015 the cruise vessel Hamburg ran aground off Scotland and suffered considerable raking damage to the hull. The accident caused no injuries to passengers or crew (Marine Accident Investigation Branch [MAIB], 2016b). However, when running aground there is always a potential for larger-scale accidents, and that potential is a feature which distinguishes process accidents from personal accidents.

In personal safety, on the other hand, potential damage always concerns the human operator(s), but is not necessarily directly linked to the primary work task. This could be a seafarer tripping on a ladder or falling into the cargo hold. Throughout this book, we refer mostly to process safety.

Another reason why it is important to distinguish process safety from personal safety is the use of key performance indicators. Within shipping – and other high-risk industries – it is common to use key performance indicators that are related to personal safety as an indicator for both personal and process safety, such as lost working days due to injury or number of reported personal accidents, non-conformities or near misses. We have not found any maritime accident reports clearly discussing this, but it is known to have been an underlying problem both in the BP Texas City Refinery disaster in March 2005 where explosions and fires killed 15 people and injured another 180 (US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, 2007), and the Deepwater Horizon Incident in April 2008 where 11 people were killed (Deepwater Horizon Study Group, 2011). Both organizations had a person-oriented approach towards safety, at the cost of process safety, and did not pay sufficient attention to underlying strategic organizational decisions, training, risk assessment or risk management. Both organizations were operated by BP, and both incident reports point to a poor organizational safety culture, which is further elaborated in Chapter 4 of this book.

The two quotes below are taken from the two incident reports, pinpointing the problem:

One underlying cause was that BP used inadequate methods to measure safety conditions at Texas City. For instance, a very low personal injury rate at Texas City gave BP a misleading indicator of process safety performance. In addition, while most attention was focused on the injury rate, the overall safety culture and process safety management (PSM) program had serious deficiencies.

(US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, 2007, p. 19)

The Deepwater Horizon had an outstanding record of preventing lost-time incidents. In 2008, the Deepwater Horizon had received an award for its safety record, and on the day of the explosion there was a ceremony on board the rig celebrating seven years without a lost-time incident.

(Deepwater Horizon Study Group, 2011, p. 38)

The second attribute to be considered when managing safety is related to the general approach organizations have towards risk and safety, with the distinction between minimizing versus coping with uncertainty. When minimizing uncertainty, the organization to a large degree relies on central planning, a high degree of standardization and little operative freedom. The shipping industry is known to be highly proceduralized (Oltedal, 2011). For instance, the investigation into the Hoegh Osaka incident – a car and truck carrier that developed a severe list and stranded in January 2015 – did address the extended use of detailed procedures and checklists (MAIB, 2016a). In this case the five checklists used for discharging and loading combined a total of 213 tick boxes. Several of the critical items were ticked off, but not completed, which highlights the problem with this approach – the possibility for critical work operations becoming lost among a large number of minor tasks.

Proceduralization and standardization is also in stark contrast to the expertise that is required to handle the uncertainty that is found in maritime high-risk operations. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) argue that procedures and checklists are more helpful in guiding the actions of those that are under training and new to the work tasks at hand, and less for those that are considered as competent professionals. It is even argued that extensive use of rules such as procedures and checklists will hinder the development of the expertise needed to handle new complex situations, which often are characterized by a large degree of uncertainty (Dreyfus, Dreyfus, & Athanasiou, 2000). Such situations often require a different strategy which Grote (2012) calls coping with uncertainty.

However, the challenge is to balance these strategies, as both are needed, depending upon the part of the operation that is performed. Perrow (1999) suggests categorizing organizational systems into two groups, of either linear or complex interactions.

Linear interactions are those in expected and familiar production or maintenance sequence, and those that are quite visible even if unplanned. Complex interactions are those with unfamiliar sequences, or unplanned and unexpected sequences, which are either not visible or not immediately comprehensible.

We agree with Perrow (1999) that systems with complex interactions are those that are most prone to system accidents, which might be understood as equal to Grote’s (2012) term process accidents, but we argue that maritime operations are both, and the balance between linearity and complexity depends upon the operation that is performed. For instance, when sailing an anchor handling vessel to a location, the operation may be considered more linear than complex, but during the actual anchor handling, the complexity and uncertainty increases. There are still isolated tasks that might be considered as linear, but when seen in context the scene is different. Those who are particularly interested in how a standard operation may devolve into an uncontrolled complex situation are recommended to read the investigation report of the loss of the anchor handler Bourbon Dolphin in April 2007 (Norges offentlige utredninger, 2008).

Grote’s (2012) third attribute, the regulatory regime within which safety is managed, distinguishes between external regulation and self-regulation. We argue that the maritime industry is regulated in both ways. The international regulations provided by the IMO through the International Safety Management (ISM) Code fosters self-regulations. However the maritime industry – in particular petroleum and gas related activities – are also externally regulated, by their customers. The regulatory mechanisms are further elaborated in Chapter 3, along with safety management in general.

In the following section, we will expand on the history of safety management in order to give the reader an understanding of the historical background as well as enabling the reader to evaluate within which approach of safety management a given company operates. We start with a discussion of the concept of safety itself.

Safety as a concept

Systematic examination of the causes of accidents began in the early 20th century, and its early roots are to be found in the 1931 Herbert W. Heinrich publication, Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach (Heinrich, 1931). Based on his research, he proposed that 88 per cent of all workplace accidents were caused by unsafe acts by operators; however, he encouraged organizations to control hazards, not merely focus on human behaviour. Heinrich is also well known for proposing some of the earliest accident causation models – the Domino theory, which describes an accident as a chain of discrete events which occur in a particular temporal order, and the iceberg theory proposing that there is a proportional link between minor injuries and major accidents. Although Heinrich’s research and theories have been criticized in more modern research (Manuele, 2002) he should still be acknowledged for being a pioneer, placing accident prevention and investigation in the spotlight.

Since then, the focus on safety, in theory as well as in practice, has traditionally been on the outcomes or products rather than on the processes. The common concern is with what safety achieves, rather than with what safety is. Safety is generally defined as the freedom from serious and unacceptable outcomes or in some cases the freedom from unacceptable risks (potential outcomes). In recent years this has become known as Safety-I. Since this focuses on something that we should be without, something that should be avoided, the ‘obvious’ solution is to try to do just that: to eliminate hazards, to prevent things from going wrong and to protect ourselves against the outcomes in case it happens anyway (Hollnagel, 2017). From this perspective, simple linear or complex linear models are often used to identify system weaknesses, which may be organiz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the stage for maritime safety management
• 2 The history of safety management
• 3 Safety management systems
• 4 Culture and maritime safety
• 5 The human contribution
• 6 Risk perception
• 7 Design for safety
• 8 Autonomous ships, ICT and safety management
• Epilogue
• Index