Saturday, November 01, 2008

THE INTERNATIONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT CODE

(A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY TO THE BIRTH OF ISM)


In 1912, on her maiden voyage, westbound across the Atlantic Ocean, the Royal Mail Ship Titanic collided with an iceberg, and in a matter of hours sank with the loss of hundreds of lives. Hopefully you saw the movie, and understood what can happen when a series of errors occurs and may result in tragedy.

For those who did not see the movie or never got past the fictitious love story, the following a brief description of the events leading up the disaster.

The RMS Titanic was constructed with the most up-to-date technology and materials available at the time. So confident of the vessel’s design, the owner’s declared her to be “unsinkable”.

This sort of boast was not without merit. The vessel had a radical new design, which incorporated transverse bulkheads along the length of the vessel. These could be made watertight by sealing each compartment by use of watertight doors fitted to every access through the bulkhead.

Unfortunately, the bulkheads did not go all the way up to the uppermost continuous deck (usually well above the normal waterline), so as one compartment flooded, the water was able to pour over the bulkhead and start to fill the adjacent compartment. This continued until the vessel lost enough buoyancy to sink.

The ship designers wanted to make the ship look pleasing to the eye of prospective passengers. Therefore, they determined to provide only sufficient lifeboats in davits to accommodate first class passengers. Some additional lifeboats were secured above deckhouses, which they determined could be used on existing davits, once the original boats had been launched. There were still not enough boats to accommodate the entire ship’s compliment.

Vessel's sailing across the North Atlantic generally took the shortest route to make the quickest passage. In a time when air travel was not yet possible, passenger ships were built for speed, and this element was marketed to prospective passengers. During the spring and early summer, on the route taken by the Titanic, it was not uncommon to encounter icebergs and pack ice. When ships of the time were made aware of ice on their route (generally by ships traveling in the opposite direction), it was customary to stop the ship during the hours of darkness, to avoid hitting any ice floes etc. Radar was not invented yet, so eyesight was the seaman's only tool to detect icebergs.

As was seen in the movie, the ship owner wanted to make a big impression on the maiden voyage passengers, by making a very fast passage to New York. The Captain was pressured not only to continue passage during the night, but also to increase speed as much as possible.

With 20/20 hindsight, we can all see that the Titanic's Captain issued the orders to proceed at speed at night, and as a result collided with an iceberg. Aware that the full responsibility for these orders was his, he is assumed to have followed the honorable tradition of "going down with his ship".

The iceberg was spotted moments before the collision. Had the ship hit the iceberg right on the bow, the ship may have survived, having damaged only one or two compartments nearest the bow. However, the officer on watch, having been informed of an iceberg ahead, attempted to avoid it by putting the rudders hard over. All this accomplished was that the ship slid down the side of the iceberg, sustaining damage to the hull in several compartments.

Once these compartments had fully flooded, the ship was low enough in the water that the flooded compartments overflowed into the next intact compartment and the fate of the ship was sealed.

In 1914, the leading maritime nations met and developed a set of international regulations called SOLAS Regulations (Safety Of Life At Sea). Lessons learned from the Titanic tragedy were incorporated into the regulations, such as:



• Enough lifeboats for everyone onboard, and able to be easily launched;

• Watertight transverse bulkheads reaching all the way up to the uppermost continuous deck;

• Cross flooding capability for passenger ships, to enable them to remain upright and trimmed so that all lifeboats can be launched safely.


Over the years, the SOLAS regulations have been upgraded as a result of improving technology, but also in response to other tragic incidents up to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise.

The formulation of international regulations for safety and pollution prevention were taken over by the United Nations. All nations with maritime interests join together to form the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Their headquarters are in London (UK), and they have various sub-committees in different parts of the world that specialize in some aspect of marine safety or pollution prevention.

Over the years since W.W.II, there has been a rise in offshore oil exploration and production. Starting in the shallow waters around the Gulf of Mexico, these operations have moved further offshore to waters over 7,000 feet deep, and the expectation of operating in over 10,000 feet in the near future.

This offshore exploration/production industry has not been immune from catastrophic tragedy. An oil production platform named Piper Alpha caught fire and resulted in the deaths of many offshore oil workers, most of which were not traditional seafarers.

Prior to the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, the prevailing wisdom in the formulation of safety regulations was to focus on the technical and hardware aspects of potential causes for disasters.

Research had been conducted on accidents and incidents in many industries and their results concluded that:

• 20% of recorded accident/incidents were hardware related (i.e. technical failures)
• 80% of recorded accidents/incidents were software related (i.e. human factors)

However, safety and related regulations were:

• 80% hardware related
• 20% software related

Obviously, the existing regime of inspection and enforcement of regulations related to mostly hardware. The level of compliance to safety and environmental protection was not up to the anticipations of the drafters of these regulations.

Additional regulations such as mandatory Safety Case development for offshore exploration and production facilities in the North Sea were produced in the aftermath of the Piper Alpha disaster. This 'one size fits all' approach was not embraced enthusiastically by companies forced to comply. Additional costs were being expended for little positive gain.

This type of regulations created by individual countries, increase financial expenditures of 'for profit' companies and have a direct effect on their 'bottom line'. In the wake of the Exxon Valdez incident, the U.S. government produced the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA-90), which has increased the costs of tanker operators, operating in US waters.

This legislation had the effect of forcing most 'oil majors' to divest themselves of their own tanker fleets in order to protect themselves from possible unlimited liability in a pollution incident. Other tanker operators have decided not to trade to US waters to avoid the additional expenses and liabilities.

In the aftermath of the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, it was clearly not in the interests of the international shipping community to be subjected to the same type of regulatory requirements imposed on the offshore and oil tanker industry; especially in an economic climate that could not support higher freight rates to pay for additional safety equipment and assessments.


Maritime governments and leading maritime experts, under the auspices of IMO concluded that in order to avoid further unilaterally imposed legislation being forced upon the marine industry every time a tragic incident occurred in some country's territorial waters, the marine industry should develop an international standard of maritime safe working practice and management to regulate themselves.

In 1989 IMO came out with Resolution A647, which adopted the ISM Code. The principles of the code are for the safe operation and management of ships and pollution prevention.

The maritime industry is very diverse. In order for companies to operate passenger ships, bulk carriers, tankers, MODU's and high speed ferries under the same set of guidelines as a traditional freighter requires that the actual wording of the code be general and flexible to allow it to be incorporated into the existing management and safety culture of each ship and corporate structure.

As there was already an internationally recognized standard for quality management for the manufacturing and services industries (ISO-900 Series), it made sense to use the appropriate elements of the existing standard to formulate the ISM Code.

The ISM Code consists of a preamble and 13 separate elements:


• Preamble
• General
• Safety and Environmental Protection Policy
• Company Responsibilities and Authority
• Designated Person
• Master's Responsibility and Authority
• Resources and Personnel
• Development of Plans for Shipboard Operation
• Emergency Preparedness
• Reports and Analysis of Non-conformities, Accidents and Hazardous Occurrences
• Maintenance of Ship and Equipment
• Documentation
• Company Verification, Review and Evaluation
• Certification, Verification and Control

The ISM Code is a set of guidelines on how to develop, implement and monitor a Safety Management System to ensure safe operation of ships and pollution prevention. From these guidelines, a prudent and safety conscious ship manager will incorporate all the elements into his/her existing management system.

1 comment:

Ken E Beck said...

Good post. I had never seen the 80% 20% ratio before, very interesting