COLUMN | John 11:35 – Fatigue caused by shipboard alarms and why anyone would weep, too [Tug Times]

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

John 3:16

Michael Grey has already written about the recent report by Lloyd’s Register Research that digitisation of maritime operations has led to the number of bridge alarms increasing by 197 per cent in less than two decades. They rightly pointed out that too many alarms can lead to poor decision making.

"The alarm, to use a figure of speech, has been raised on these matters for some time," according to Mr Grey. With typical modesty, he did not point out that he has been one of the people raising the topic for at least the past couple of decades.

What puzzled me about the report was the amount of shock it created in the maritime industries, because I had assumed we were all aware of the problem. Apparently not, and it is sad to relate that we no longer seem to have any corporate memory, at least in some of the higher grades of management. I suppose the constant job-hopping that goes on at senior levels means people no longer really know the industry in which they study the balance sheets and announce (as all their predecessors did) that there is a need to reduce overheads.

The tradeoff of digitalisation

We should consider ourselves fortunate there are still so many towage and salvage companies that are run by families or by people who know the business inside and out. With luck, we will never be faced with 74 alarms per hour on the bridge or up to 22,500 alarms every day in the engine room, which is what some of our colleagues on larger vessels are said to be dealing with.

Lloyd’s Register pointed out that digitalisation has led to increasing numbers of technologies and sensors being fitted to ships, often with alarm functions. They obviously see this as a bad thing, but at about the same time as they issued their warning, the Chairman and CEO of ABS was singing quite a different song.

At a forum in London he claimed that digitalisation, data, and AI are creating a new equation for a new safety protection frontier at sea.

"AI’s ability to generate real time insights, risk assessments and behaviour monitoring will improve hazard detection through visualisation. Digital twins will be used to provide an operational representation of current performance and to project forward. This predictive ability allows us to tackle the major boundary condition of digitalisation and decarbonisation – the unintended safety consequences of rapid technological advance...

"Safety going forward will not be defined as just the absence of accidents but as the new equation of capacity and capability over demand. The new equation has systems thinking, well trained people, and percentage usage of digital in the numerator representing capacity and capability.

"Demand is in the denominator representing the complexity of an evolving decarbonisation trajectory and rapidly changing technology environment. Our future safety protection frontier is defined as the place where capacity and capability equal demand."

There was no mention of alarms, so far as I am aware, but I have quoted the speech at some length so readers can decide for themselves whether the man from ABS is a genius or whether he is about to be taken away by people in white coats.

Alarms were also not a problem for the officer of the watch aboard the tug John 3:16, according to a recent NTSB report (and to assist readers with the meaning of this tug’s rather unusual name I have written it in full above). The tug was engaged in collecting barges on the lower Mississippi and moving them to an area where they were rafted together for onward transportation. The master and the deck officer (or pilot, as the officer is known in those parts) were standing 12-hour watches, and there were two deckhands on each watch to secure the barges and carry out housekeeping duties.

Unfortunately, the pilot was feeling the effects of "an accumulated sleep debt," and he had been able to get less than five hours sleep in the previous two days because he had some personal issues to deal with. The wheelhouse was fitted with a watch alarm and motion detectors, which worked perfectly, and woke the pilot up just seconds before his tug, which was running free at the time, hit a passing jetty.

The NTSB report says a great deal about fatigue, but ignores the fact that bridge watchkeepers were alone in the wheelhouse for periods of 12 hours at a time. Perhaps they felt unable to comment because some regulator somewhere had approved the manning, but I consider it to be a rare failing by the NTSB.

In a similar report recently published by the MAIB in the United Kingdom, the catamaran ferry Alfred grounded on an island off the west coast of Scotland when the captain nodded off for about 70 seconds. He, too, had been dealing with personal issues in the few days before he returned to duty, and had woken in the early hours to drive to the port to take command.

The MAIB also had a lot to say about fatigue, but in addition, they criticised the vessel for habitually operating with only one bridge watchkeeper. Ironically, the master was not alone in the wheelhouse, because the engineer was sitting behind him monitoring the engines and machinery spaces. The engineer was not considered part of the navigational watch, quite rightly, and presumably he had his hands full dealing with all the alarms!

The officers involved in both those cases appear to have been honest professionals, and both admitted they had nodded off at the critical time. In my view, they deserve our sympathy.

There is a very good article that covers the latest thinking about fatigue in CHIRP Maritime’s Annual Digest 2023 (page 65), and it is available on their website. In it, the author points out that airline pilots will not fly if they have not achieved their mandated rest periods, and in many countries the same is true for heavy machinery operators, train drivers, and truckers.

No time to rest?

Why, then, do we have a cultural belief that such refusals to work are not acceptable for officers at sea? I suggest it is because we traditionally see ourselves as men, and real men just get on with the job. Perhaps attitudes will change when we have more female officers at sea, but I doubt it because they will be too busy proving they are just as good as the men. In any event, rest might not be possible with all the alarms going off.

It seems to me that our industry is particularly vulnerable to fatigue because we normally operate with very small crews, but we need to start taking the subject seriously. One obvious problem is that regulations take very little notice of what happens when people are not on the bridge. The fact that an officer might have to deal with serious personal problems or family emergencies is not really covered.

Perhaps we could start with an instruction that anyone who feels they are not sufficiently rested must report it. The company could then immediately order a crewmember to stay with the officer until a replacement can be organised. Perhaps this is one of the things people mean when they talk about "kind leadership".

Interestingly, the CHIRP article contains a Watchkeeper Fatigue Assessment tool that ranks the factors that may induce fatigue. They are classified as low, medium, or high severity factors, and if a watchkeeper scores four medium or one high severity factor, then it is recommended that the captain or chief engineer must intervene.

Among the high severity factors is being on watch for more than six hours at a time. Thus, the watchkeeper on John 3:16 may not have breached the existing regulations regarding hours of rest, but recent research suggests he was guaranteed to be affected by fatigue. Food for thought, I hope.

Remembering Mike Lacey

I was sorry to learn that my old friend Mike Lacey passed away recently.

Mike went to sea in the early 1960s as an apprentice with Shaw Savill Line, and sailed with them until he obtained his master’s certificate. He traded mainly between the UK and Australia or New Zealand in the golden days when the British merchant fleet was a force to be reckoned with.

Having obtained his master’s (and his delightful wife, Liz), Mike went ashore and found himself in a well-known law firm. After a number of years, he took the almost unprecedented step of going back to shipping when he became Managing Director of United Towing, at that time the UK’s leading ocean towage and salvage company.

Later he returned to the law, and when I first met him he was acting as Special Adviser to the International Salvage Union. One of Mike’s jobs was to compile the annual statistics of all the salvage jobs done by members, and the amount of pollution prevented. This information is still compiled and published in the same format as he devised so many years ago.

His other claim to fame at the time was that he invented the term "SCOPIC" to describe a concept that was being discussed in those days.

Mike was later appointed Secretary General of the International Salvage Union, a post he held with great success for a number of years. There are always plenty of big personalities and, dare I say, big egos in salvage, but Mike’s quiet, competent demeanour and thorough knowledge of the business managed to keep everyone in line without causing offence.

At social events and on sightseeing trips, Mike and Liz were very good company, and popular with everyone they met. I have happy memories of jaunts to Soochow in China and Cape Point in South Africa in their company, and they were a delight to be with.

In later life, Mike Lacey wrote a volume of memoirs about his time in Shaw Savill. Entitled Full Circle, it is one of the most interesting and detailed records of those times I have ever read. I thought he had at least two more volumes in him, to cover the rest of his remarkable life, but sadly they will not now be written.

I will miss Mike, and my thoughts are with his family, but his was a life well lived and he would not have asked for more.

Note: The Bible verse John 11:35 stated in the title simply reads "Jesus wept."