One of the real scandals which has disfigured marine safety for several years has been the terrible loss of life and serious injury that has occurred with accidents involving lifeboats and launching mechanisms, mostly involving the on-load release hooks which seemed such a good idea at the time. It took far too long for the industry to agree the mandatory guidelines for the release and retrieval systems now found in MSC.1/Circ.1392; several years of fruitless arguing, during which time a lot more seafarers and others were killed and injured in needless accidents.

But at least there is now a requirement for all operators to test the equipment they have fitted to their ships, and to replace it where necessary, and the manufacturers have also had to comply with far more rigorous testing than hitherto. The manufacturers Schat-Harding helpfully point out that these rules apply to new boats from 1 July 2014, but there are also tests to be applied to existing hooks and if they fail to meet the set standards, they will have to be upgraded at the first drydocking after this date, but no later than 1 July 2019.

This major manufacturer has now completed testing its SeaCure lifeboat release and retrieval system, and also developed a Secondary Safety System for this hook. It seems likely that other reputable major manufacturers will be also ensuring that their equipment meets the new criteria.

But it is worth pointing out that there are literally hundreds of types of on load hooks in service, often supplied by shipyards, which is of course one of the problems, and which has contributed to this loss of life and injury among the people who ought to be able to depend on their LSA in extremis. There will be thousands of hooks which, although accepted by owners in good faith when they took delivery of their ships, will be potentially dangerous and require upgrading. There is also scope to kill and maim quite a lot of seafarers before the mandatory dates of 2014 and 2019.

Good shipowners will not be waiting for these “test and replace-by” dates but will be hurrying to ensure that their own equipment is thoroughly safe, just as soon as it is possible. Schat-Harding tells us that more than 100 owners have already re-hooked their lifeboats with their equipment. Good shipowners all!

These risks are merely the latest problem for companies and individuals engaged by ship operators in providing (1) armed security guards, and (2) facilitation and intermediaries in making ransom payments, among other things.

The Eritrean incident seems to have begun in December, when the SEA SCORPION, a ship used as a floating accommodations for security guards, had an engine room fire, resulting in an unplanned call at the port of Massawa. Everything went downhill from there.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, the UK Department for Transport has announced that it is considering amendments to existing rules, that would allow armed security guards aboard UK-flagged ships.

What form these amendments would take is unclear. In the meantime, Cyprus has announced that security firms will be permitted to protect Cyprus-flagged ships, but that these service providers will be “vetted by the Cyprus Maritime Administration”.

In addition, the president of the Cyprus Union of Shipowners has stated that “guards will not be allowed to fire first”.

It’s clear that the entire situation regarding security guards remains indefinite, to say the least.

An international convention on the suppression of piracy would be a big help in clearing the air, and giving some protection to security teams and others working to free the seafarers that have been taken hostage.

So it was understandable that all manner of aspects of greener shipping were discussed in the British Columbian city, which itself prides itself on its environmental enthusiasm.

But there are all sorts of nagging questions which refuse to disappear around this worthy topic.

There is the matter, for instance of slow speed as an excellent method of reducing CO2, which additionally provides a sort of auxiliary function in soaking up some of the excess capacity caused by wild and over-enthusiastic ordering.

But just as soon as the economic clouds disperse, will we not see shipping speeding up again, the green consciences of operators stung by the goads of the shippers, who would rather their goods were sped to market like they used to be at 26 knots?

There’s a conundrum.

But are not the users of ships- tender and environmentally conscious flowers like Walmart and Ikea, who like to present their own corporate social responsibility and green credentials to the people who shop in their stores, not anxious to avoid accusations that their own supply chains are polluting the planet?

Will they not happily agree that the pedestrian passage of the ships carrying their goods can be approved, even though their inventories grow hugely?

Nobody can answer that question either, although some have their suspicions.

And if a cleaner, greener shipping industry is required to use low sulphur, nearly no sulphur, or expensive distillates in its lean, green diesels, will not charterers who have to pay for the costly fuel happily acquiesce in this environmental improvement?

Might they even go halves if an owner wishes to retrofit an enormous scrubber in his exhaust system? After all, everyone surely has a vested interest in saving the planet? Or is this a case of wishful thinking?

These are serious points if we consider that a large container ship is likely to spend 10 times its capital cost on something to bung into its bunker tanks – possibly a billion dollars worth- during its lifetime of oceanic steaming.

And that’s the rub – where is the cashflow coming from, in an industry in which the customers grudge paying for their transport, that is going to buy all these environmental add-ons? There are great commercial opportunities in being green, we were told.

Great, just as long as the current plunging markets can be survived.

The industry wanted to do the right thing, to stop this seemingly endless bloodletting with lifeboat accidents, and to do it once and for all. The regulators, alas, went only half way, in a peculiar compromise which (to put it bluntly) will enable Death to stalk the davits until 2019!

It is, of course, self-evident that any self-respecting ship operator, who can lay hold of some expertise, and ensure that his ship’s escape apparatus is safe long before this stupid date – indeed he could be doing it right now. Ah, he might say, how do we know, without specific IMO guidance, that the gear we have is safe and will not plunge a couple of seafarers to a violent death in the near future. How do we know that the replacement mechanism is safe, and that we won’t, at some future date have to change it all again?

This is perhaps where practical seamanship, experience and expertise comes in, probably more important a contribution than the theoretical, abstract and lawyer-infested world of regulation can usually make. And if one is still doubtful, it is well worth ensuring that there is some alternative insulation in the shape of some stout wire preventers. Is it really so complicated?

Sadly, like him, I was unable to come up with anything concrete other than agreeing that a new strategy is needed.

Whether that should be – as Intertanko has advocated – a change in the rules of engagement I’m not sure, but I think that just like the issue of employing armed guards onboard ship, it risks increasing the body count in the short term while failing to provide that long term vision of a Gulf of Aden without pirates.

But a recent article in The Economist on the International Criminal Court in Africa  set me thinking, or rather recalling a conversation with Peter Hinchliffe of the International Chamber of Shipping at the recent IMO MSC meeting.

Hinchliffe confessed himself exasperated beyond measure with the situation, expressed through his organisation’s strategy of reminding the industry that Somali piracy is not ‘situation normal’.

What Hinchliffe advocated was an arrangement with the ICC to open a court for pirates and bring them to trial. This would be a lower court than the war crimes/genocide mandate that the ICC was set up for, but could still provide some efficient processing of pirates for trial and incarceration of the guilty.

There would be issues with this still – not least the likely media backlash about transporting pirates to Europe for trial, a location they are likely to see as a better bet than the streets of Xaradheere. What happens to them if acquitted and after the sentence is served, must all be decided.

But without punishment, there can be no deterrence and if Intertanko, ICS, BIMCO et al want to do something about piracy, they may have to admit that the game in the Gulf cannot be won so long as they cannot bring the weight of international institutions to bear.

Hinchliffe further remarked that although the IMO process continues in parallel with the UN, the chance for real change lies as much with the UN Contact Group as it does with MSC.

And as he glumly but accurately observed, pirates seem to make very good risk managers. Faced with the naval presence they have adapted, sailing further afield and employing motherships in the worst of weathers if they feel there is a prize for the taking.

This is a stark truth and one I doubt will endear me to the letter writers but it suggests that shipping could try and learn from the pirates about new strategies. Because if a global, highly efficient industry cannot either mobilise government support for its position or generate an innovative solution, then this situation will never end.

The Economist article attempted to cast the ICC not as an post-imperialist body but rather a partner for African nations keen to establish legal legitimacy and bring the most obvious criminals to trial. With Somalia in pieces, the ICC will not be opening an office there any time soon, but its neighbours should listen to Hinchliffe’s ideas and start trying to get the western economies – so dependent on cargo through Suez, to take a bigger stake in solving the problem of piracy by legal means.

Enclosed boats, which had been cautiously adopted to protect tankermen from fire as they escaped damaged ships, became more generally fitted. And the concept of “on load” hooks, that enabled the falls to be released as the weight came off them when the boat reached the water became rapidly adopted.

No more would fingers be trapped as the bow or stern man tried to free the link of a heavy chain from a huge steel hook. No more would a boat be left hanging by a single fall, with way on the ship, after the man aft had bodged his release. The coxswain, with a single swipe of his lever, would free both hooks simultaneously, and the boat would move smoothly free.

Well, it should have worked like that always, but sadly it didn’t. And gradually we became aware of an increasing number of accidents happening to lifeboats, being prematurely released high in the air, to kill and injure the launching crews. Sometimes it was inadequate training, sometimes a complete misunderstanding, as when a crewman mistook a release lever for one of the engine controls, with fatal results.

Sometimes it was inadequate maintenance of poor materials subject to corrosion, in a vulnerable spot washed over by salt spray. Often the inquest or inquiry revealed that the hooks had failed to properly close when the boat had been last housed, and moreover, it was almost impossible to physically determine whether this was the case. And as the number of different types and makers of hooks proliferated, it became odds-on that a mariner joining a new ship would find the gear quite different to that of his previous vessel.

While the specialist lifeboat builders have tried to simplify and standardise their gear, shipbuilders have tended to buy equipment which was cheapest, and this has led to perhaps fifty or more different types of equipment “out there” at sea. Often, this cheap equipment has failed to stand the test of time, and has corroded or become unusable. Not infrequently, it has been identified as responsible after horrible accidents after boats have crashed onto the quay, or into the sea during drills and inspections.

Those older folk who had grown up with open boats, even radial davits with rope falls and simple hooks, and moreover who had become very familiar with their boats for recreation in a more leisured age, noted these trends with disbelief and dismay. They also noted the increasing fear with which mariners were regarding boat drills, which were the only chance they ever got to use boats in this high speed era. Too many different types of hook, not enough training, design flaws and inherent vulnerabilities, have been a fatal combination. The fact that lifeboats were killing and injuring more people than they ever saved was a statistical horror story.

Last month saw the IMO’s Design & Equipment Sub-Committee as covered by our friends at gCaptain, produce draft guidelines for the evaluation and replacement of lifeboat on-load release mechanisms. It will probably take a bit of time to work its way through the system before being translated into a SOLAS amendment, that will require replacement of dodgy gear, but it is an important step in the right direction. Decent shipowners won’t wait.

Marine fuel, once a relatively uncomplicated matter presided over by Chief Engineers in the quiet of their control rooms, is now a science in which industrial chemists and environmental regulators rule the roost. We have International Maritime Organisation requirements (which ought to be good enough for an international industry) thoroughly confused by directives emanating from Brussels, and made almost incomprehensible by Californians. It’s not ideal.

The same Chief Engineers now find that they are “fuel management systems operatives”, keepers of bewildering records that track the consumption of up to four different qualities of fuels, and which must be ready for inspection at every port. And while engaged in this bureaucratic catch-up, they must somehow keep the engine legal, discovering from the bridge whether the ship is likely to slip across one of the geographic boundaries that will require lower sulphur fuel to be coursing through the combustion system.

They must also keep the engine going, which is apparently not as easy as it once was, with the requirement for different fuels and appropriate lubricants, and an inability to make the boilers work on the lowest sulphur fuels. Meanwhile the purifiers are being forced to work overtime to try and ensure that the engine is not destroyed by an injection of catalytic fines that has come aboard in the latest few tankfuls from the bunker barge. Life has become very complicated, in the cause of a greener planet

Just recently in London, an audience of delighted marine underwriters was told by BMT Marine & Offshore Surveys’ principal surveyor Gerry Williams of a whole range of risks that have emerged from well-meaning green fuel legislation. Apart from that of stopping the machinery in a badly managed fuel changeover, and then not being able to start it again, the lower sulphur fuels produce a greater risk of damage from cat. fines, perhaps through poor fuel management or handling, rather than the fuel itself.

BMT surveyors had catalogued 30 cases of serious engine damage in the past 8 years from this problem, with very expensive repairs requiring renewal of pistons, liners and injectors, at a cost of between $1m to $3m. No wonder the underwriters looked gloomy.

We also are operating in the realms of the unknown with fuel of 0.1% sulphur, in that we don’t know if it will be available, or what it might do to engines that were designed to run optimally on something very different. We have biofuels coming along, with plenty of known unknowns in the risks of contamination, let alone those we don’t know about. “On board engineering skills are critical” said Gerry Williams.

Yet we hear of owners who are actually thinking of reducing further their engineroom complements on the grounds that “modern machinery requires little intervention”.

I suppose that the worry must be that one day a huge ship, disabled by fuel problems, will be washed ashore and cause massive pollution, causing the more thoughtful to reflect on the unintended consequences of environmentalism.

But there should surely be very great caution exercised before permitting the cost cutters to do their work on the training budget. To hack back on cadet training, or ruthlessly refuse to employ young people you have spent several years training is akin to desperate agriculturalists eating the seedcorn, and condemning themselves to starvation in the future.

The shipping industry has barely recovered its reputation from the last deep and long recession, much of which was self-inflicted, but which saw recruitment and training at a historical low for some 15-20 years. The effects of this were several, but all are with us still today.

Firstly, during this extended period when the industry was bumping along at the bottom, suffering from its surpluses, both sea and shore staff was infected with a relentless search for cheapness. This manifested itself in a failure to recruit the bright young people which an essential industry requires to replenish itself each generation, and the disgrace of the “minimum maintenance” regime.  Many of the talented people already in the industry left for pastures new during this period, in sectors where growth and prosperity, along with scope for their ambitions, were to be found.

Secondly, the passage of years have remorselessly seen the industry workforce age, as a result of this recruitment “holiday”, along with a situation where those companies which have still tried to maintain training have been outnumbered by those prepared to “poach” staff. Loyalties and esprit de corps have been strained if not destroyed, and there is a high degree of cynicism in what has become once again an industry dependent upon casual labour.

The situation, and the manning crisis facing the industry has been long recognised, and during the first years of the 21^st century, it might have been thought that determined efforts were being made to upgrade the status of seafaring as a career where quality, education, stability and reputation were seen to be important. There were moves to “sell” seafaring as a respectable entry point to a whole career in the maritime world. Cadet training berths, even  cadet ships were increased in number. The IMO’s “Go to Sea” campaign might be considered an important international endorsement, at the very highest level, of this genuine need to recruit the best possible people to sail on the growing world fleet.

All of which is being put at risk if the shipping industry starts to row back on its compulsion to train, to provide for a new generation of cadets and junior officers. Too many people recall the last disgraceful situation when even cadets were being laid off and an industry’s reputation for playing fast and loose with the careers of its young people was exposed. The reputation of an essential industry is at stake  once again, and more people need to be aware of this. Training is an investment for the future. Without it, there isn’t one!