Watchkeeper: Shallow waters

The global insurer Allianz has recently pointed out that in terms of marine-related claims, those involving grounding now represent the most expensive. This perhaps should not be surprising, as the costs nowadays are invariably magnified by those of wreck removal, with the authorities having realised that salvors now have quite astonishing abilities in this respect. Accordingly, wrecks which would once have been dismissed as total losses and left on the sea bed are now the subject of removal contracts. That of the Costa Concordia, it can be assumed, has had a major effect upon the statistics.

At the same time, the question perhaps ought to be asked about why, in an era when the navigation of ships has been more precise and easy than ever before, we are afflicted by grounding casualties? It is a matter that has recent provoked comments from the UK Marine Accident Investigation Branch, whose Chief Inspector has noticed something of a rash of groundings in which Electronic Chart Display systems were being used by the navigators of these ships.

In that the industry is still in something of a transitional state from its traditional paper-based navigation to the screen-based variety, such accidents might be expected as ships’ officers become accustomed to a very new sort of navigation and chart-work. There may be something of a problem in that senior officers who have been trained and accustomed to paper charts, are now sailing with junior officers, who may have known nothing other than ECDIS in their shorter careers.

Whereas the Master might have been extremely competent in the old dispensation and well able to mentor the juniors to his own exacting standards, he may lack the experience to ensure that his “generation Y” junior, such an apparent expert on the ship’s electronics, has not done something stupid in the voyage planning; something that was a factor in one of the most recent groundings reported on by the MAIB.

It is not helped that the “generic” training which is undertaken ashore, might be difficult to transfer to the equipment afloat, with complaints often made about the inability of the manufacturers to develop any sort of commonality or standardisation in their equipment. Just as it is possible to “get by” with a low level of expertise on a personal computer, it is clearly possible to operate ECDIS without being fully competent in all its functions. Accidents have been caused when inexpert people have “edited out” aids to navigation, obstructions and even sandbanks, or have employed the wrong scale.

Hopefully, this will be a phase that better training and greater familiarity with the equipment, will eventually eliminate. It might be recalled that the arrival of radar, arguably as revolutionary a development as electronic charts, gave rise to the “radar assisted collision”, which persisted for some time until everyone had been trained in the use of this new navigational aid.
Source: BIMCO