AMSA safety purge on high risk vessels

Citation

Galbraith, S. (2001), "AMSA safety purge on high risk vessels", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 10 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2001.07310aab.005

AMSA safety purge on high risk vessels

AMSA safety purge on high risk vessels

The board of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) last week approved a radical change of policy in terms of the manner vessels will be targeted and inspected when visiting Australian ports.

David Baird, general manager maritime operations, revealed that AMSA plans to refocus its targeting system into areas where it believes the highest risk ships exist.

This may include relocating inspectors from big-city ports to more remote areas from time to time and the safety authority planned to launch in December an initiative aimed at vessel operational issues.

These moves are a result of a comprehensive analysis of inspection data gathered between 1995 and 2000.

Captain Baird said AMSA has gained a clear understanding of the correlation between what makes up a detention and the various components within that and the chain of responsibility.

"There is a very strong correlation between a detention and age," he said. "Because of our existing targeting system we have inspected a lot of younger ships.

"We are going to take some resources away from there and refocus on older ships over 15 years of age."

In addition to the PSC programme (which essentially focuses on hardware), AMSA is going to institute three specific category targeting programmes every year.

These programmes, each lasting four months, will be targeting a particular operational issue and will be advertised by Marine Notice. These programmes will apply to all ships, whether due for an inspection or not.

The first will be a "see and be seen" campaign focusing on the issue of bridge visibility for ships carrying deck cargo.

AMSA will be looking at blind spots, the ability of ships to maintain an effective radar watch and the ability of ships to display the proper navigation lights.

Mobile

Captain Baird said AMSA inspectors would be more mobile than in the past. Last month, for example, AMSA inspected ships under Port State Control at 34 ports, but there were 42 ports where there were eligible ships. Therefore, for one reason or another, the safety authority had not been inspecting ships in something like 25 percent of eligible ports on a regular basis.

"We are going to re-deploy our resources into high-risk areas, into the more remote ports," he said.

"We are going to make our surveyors much more mobile than they were in the past and we will be taking people out of areas like Melbourne and Sydney and putting them into areas where the high-risk is identified."

Captain Baird said they would likely be going to those areas on a rotational basis. AMSA management was working through those issues with the staff.

Analysis

Detailed analysis of ship inspections over the past five years was helping AMSA build useful profiles on flag, operator, ship type and charterer so that it could direct its resources to where it is needed, he said.

"We are going away from the basic model, which has served us well, for there has definitely been an improvement in the quality of bulk carriers coming here."

However, the AMSA ship safety chief emphasised that this does not mean AMSA is easing the pressure on bulkers, which still represent the majority of detentions.

A recent incident highlighted floating production, storage and offloading vessels as a potential weak point in the system and while AMSA acknowledges that access to the FPSOs can be difficult and expensive, the new risk-focused inspection policy meant they would be targeted. Australia had to beware rogue tankers that had been rejected in the USA and European markets, said Captain Baird.

"We are going to be doubly sure that we are not going to get any fallout, out of Europe and the USA. If it is going to be expensive to get to those locations, then that is what we will have to do."

Captain Baird added that AMSA was not going to be numbers-driven in terms of PSC inspections. It would be a question of quality rather than quantity.

"We are changing our instructions to surveyors and we will be much more risk-focused. We will be endeavouring to inspect a lot more ships at the older end of the market, which is where we believe the high-risk is. We will be inspecting fewer ships in the area of zero to four years old."

Captain Baird said there would still have to be some focus on younger tonnage as there are still a lot of ships' crew that are incapable of operating their GMDSS systems properly.

This causes AusSar a lot of headaches with false alerts and pointlessly expends valuable search and rescue resources, he said.

Sandy GalbraithLloyd's Casualty Week, Vol. 322 No. 6,3 November 2000