I am a student studying Navigation and Maritime science at Plymouth University now researching on the topic of factors that lead to unsafe act onboard ships.
This research aims to find out factors that mostly drives seafarers to take unsafe act in order to, perhaps, prevent similar future errors.
If seafarers who…
work onboard a merchant vessel within the last 5 years, and
a. possess a CoC issued by one of the EU state country, or;
b. work for shipping company registered in one of the EU state country
would like to participate in my “Motivations Leads to Unsafe Act Onboard Ships” survey, please click on the survey link below. https://goo.gl/forms/GslmjEngyYKDz0pg2
Your support with completing the survey will be very valuable to this research.
Thank you :^)
All information you provide to us will be treated with the strictest confidentiality and only for research purposes.
I think you will find the factors are exactly the same as those in every other industry or human activity ever performed since the dawn of time. Just because the activity is at sea doesn’t change a single aspect of the drivers of that behavior.
Pardon me for being cynical but this reminds me of the thousands of “research projects” on fatigue that have been conducted for generations. The findings are always the same because humans are involved, the results are the same because humans are involved.
There is more money, food, sex, comfort, glory, or status to be had by ignoring risks that are not assured to be 100 percent fatal in their outcome.
I agree that a lot of fatigue studies are nonsense. but marine transportation does have it’s safety quirks. For example till it happened it didn’t occur me that an agent would lie about the weather conditions and the availability of tugs to entice me to enter port.
It does say for EU only but I just took it out of curiosity.
I was outbound once and port control told the the channel was clear (one way traffic only) but when I came to the last buoyed leg out there was a small inbound ship. I called port control and told them, their response was don’t call us, call the inbound and tell them to get out of the way.
I admit that the statement “improve seafarer training program in the future” is improper.
The main purpose of this research is not put the blame on seafarer as the operator but to reveal the reason behind an error.
As Kennebec_Captain’s commented, seafarers may take unsafe action base on information provided by the management team of the company due to whatever reason, and they did not know such an action is not safe until they finally understand the situation.
That’s way the company and its culture is a matter in this survey.
By the way, thank you for your comment
…and sorry for reminding you that those disgusting incident = operator’s error survey.
The agent stood to gain money, status, and all that accompanies those gains by lying to you.
Port control stood to gain comfort and avoid further work and the risk of being part of a potential conflict by passing the problem along to you.
Same old stuff, been working that way for thousands of years. All the studies in the world will not change it. Fatigue studies are the poster child for this stuff … until management and those who wish to risk all to climb the ladder for personal gain of the types I mentioned in my first post suffer the same fate as those they command, nothing will change.
I see a lot of this stuff right up there along with the idea that “education” can reduce drug abuse. Who has more education about the risks than the reported 15 percent of physicians who abuse drugs?
I think that there is a big gap between how things work in the maritime transportation world and many people’s perception of how things work.
To some extent the reason why problems like fatigue are not being solved is becasue it’s not in the intrests of some people to solve it. But there is also an element of poor understanding of the problem. None of us has the power to change that but each of us can chip away a bit at the lack of understanding.
And starlight lit my lonesomeless when I set out for Lioness one hundred miles away - once professinal mariners set out to sea they know that millions of things might happen which they never encountered before. And they know that their decisions for problems remedies are seldom out of the books. What drives a Master to stay on the bridge 30 hrs. and more under certain conditions ? And what drives the Cheng to stay in the ECR during Suez channel transit or bad weather too ?
There is one important thing to consider - keep the chain of decision and responsibility short and give your crew the confidence, that all things are in hand at the right place.
Nobody will deny seniour offcs.using the settie on the bridge or a camping bed behind the main switchboard.
Mariners are taking higher risks far out at sea because they cannot call specialists, they lack sophisticated devices and they have no time. Medico help is probably much better but I am no expert on this. Let’s go on with the discussion.