COLUMN | Too many bells and whistles: how alarms on ships can lead to fatigue [Grey Power]
It might be revealing my age, but I can honestly say that during my years as a watchkeeper, I was seldom bothered by alarms. The truth is that there were very few of them installed, even in the most modern of our ships.
If there was a power failure, the lights went out and the second mate would rush to the gyrocompass to clamp it up, lest it go into orbit, if it was unsupported for couple of minutes. If one of the navigation lights went out, it simultaneously was extinguished on a little panel in the wheelhouse, so somebody could replace the appropriate lamp.
And if fire should break out in one of our holds, an ingenious device involving columns of air supporting tiny ping-pong balls would precisely identify the source of the conflagration, should the watchkeeper have a heavy head cold and a blocked nose.
And that was about it. The engineers, of course, had more to worry about; the luboil alarms used to bother them in heavy weather, but they relied more on their senses to tell whether the engine was missing a beat, or a bearing running hot, as they patrolled their machinery.
It was fascinating to see them arise in a body, in saloon or bar, detecting (perhaps in their engineers’ inner ear) that there was trouble below.
"The cacophony of sounds and bewildering number of flashing lights are aggregating to confuse and dismay people who have other things to think about, such as avoiding navigational hazards."
These memories were triggered by a report produced by Lloyd’s Register Research. The report found a disquieting trend in the sheer numbers of alarm systems inflicted upon those afloat today. In the past twenty or so years, the number of alarms that are designed to alert bridge watchkeepers has increased by nearly 200 per cent.
All are considered important by the wellmeaning manufacturers of equipment, but the cacophony of sounds and bewildering number of flashing lights are aggregating to confuse and dismay people who have other things to think about, such as avoiding navigational hazards.
It is the “digitisation” of equipment, which, it is suggested, is largely responsible for this plethora of warnings, causing such irritation and distraction. It is easy for manufacturers to incorporate them into their equipment, so that is what they do, not admitting for a minute that some alarms are more important than others. The research offers the useful term “alarm flooding,” which can confuse and lead to poor decision-making.
The calmest individual on earth would surely be at least showing signs of irritation, having to cope with 74 alarms per hour, while wretched engineering staff will sometimes have to cope with 2,500 alarms per day, suffering what has been termed “alarm fatigue.”
"The alarm, to use a figure of speech, has been raised on these matters for some time, with a number of incidents pointing to the way that their sheer number is serving no useful purpose."
It is reported that some have had to endure peaks of 22,500 alarms per day, which must make for exceedingly irritated watchkeepers. And it doesn’t help the cause of sanity, if all the salient engine room alarms sound, or flash, in panels on the bridge, with unmanned machinery space systems in operation.
The alarm, to use a figure of speech, has been raised on these matters for some time, with a number of incidents pointing to the way that their sheer number is serving no useful purpose, and may make a situation far worse. The terrifying “near-miss”, when a large cruise ship was disabled and was within a whisker of being wrecked in heavy weather on the coast of Norway was a perfect example, the report into the incident pointing out that the engineers trying to work out why the machinery had stopped had been faced with more than 2,000 different alarms.
It is premature to suggest that this same problem might have afflicted those trying to restore power as the containership closed the Baltimore bridge, but such would be unsurprising a revelation. There is no doubt the situation is out of control and likely only to get worse.
It is far beyond my pay grade to suggest it, but you might wonder whether too much of this clever stuff being put aboard ship is insufficiently robust to cope with the harsh marine environment, it being a lot easier just to install an alarm function to activate at the drop of a hat.
It must also be hoped that the task force LR has commissioned to consider this problem can come up with a scheme that will somehow differentiate between the urgent, important, or nice to know amid the alarming scale of alarms. This probably needs to be done before the situation becomes, like the wretched watchkeepers, insane.
