Clay Maitland

On a quest for quality in shipping

Getting serious about risk management?

The Gulf of Mexico postmortems are landing with explosive force, even if the well has not yet been sealed. At what Churchill liked to call the root of the matter, there wasan inability to appreciate and apply a safety or risk management system to the drilling and operation of at least some exploratory and production wells on the U. S. outer continental shelf. Continue reading

Slippage, Risk, Quality and Liability

It is increasingly clear that the shipping industry faces an influx of cheaply and shoddily designed tonnage in the tanker, dry bulk and containerised categories; that was the talk behind the scenes at this week’s Mare Forum conference, here in Rome. Continue reading

Seafarers must be educated on new regulations

I am currently in Abu Dhabi where I have had the pleasure to take part in a conference about the Maritime Environment and the role Flag states will play in the implementation of the new IMO regulations i.e the new Audit Scheme. Continue reading

Clarifying the STCW issues

In June, delegates to the Revision Conference of the International Maritime Organisation on Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping will meet in Manila to take up 13 draft resolutions dealing with such issues as recruitment and retention, crewing levels, and the like. Continue reading

The ‘ramifications’ of training

In the run-up to the STCW Conference in Manila this June, India has proposed that there be mandatory space for training berths provided on all new ships. This will be one of the more heated issues to be discussed. Additional space to accommodate trainee cadets (which might become mandatory) is seemingly attractive, in light of the IMO’s current “Go to Sea” campaign. But there are, as is so often the case, ramifications. Continue reading

Weaving a web of education

In his New Year’s message, inaugurating 2010 as the Year of the Seafarer, Admiral Efthimios Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), identified three goals for the year: Continue reading

What price experience?

After several thousand years of training seafarers, one would think that mankind had some sort of a system in mind. Surprisingly, there is no formal training-at-sea system. Continue reading

Never forget the crew

In his message to the world’s seafarers, dedicating the year 2010 as the “Year of the Seafarer,” Efthimios Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the IMO, points out that it is the crew of each ship that makes world trade possible, and that 1.5m seafarers serve the daily needs of more than 6.5 billion human beings. Continue reading

The Audit Scheme – an IMO success story

As I was sitting in the back of the main conference room at IMO two weeks ago, a fellow delegate leaned over and said; “Every so often, something happens here that is really important.” Continue reading

Where Washington leads others follow

During the IMO assembly meeting last month, Secretary-General Mitropoulos made a plea for uniform solutions, arrived at internationally, through a process of collective agreement. In the field of oil pollution legislation – always politically sensitive – this is perhaps wishful thinking. Particularly in the United States. Continue reading

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