Possible Catastrophic Events if seamen fails !

Have you ever wondered that,

How ships are being navigated at a busy port?

What are the rules and regulations do seafarers got to obey and comply while navigating a vessel to the port?

I am sure that you don’t read collision between ships, a capsized vessel or even a grounded ship near the shore in your daily mail. Right? 

collision between vessel

capsized Ro-Ro

Grounded vessel

capsized container vessel

If any of the above incidents occur at the coastal waters or in an open water, the impact to the marine sector is extremely huge especially to the fishermen’s and this will directly affect the country’s economy and all surrounding countries too! The stock market can plunge leaving those shareholders to bankruptcy. The bad news doesn’t stop there, we have IMO (International Maritime Organization) which is a branch from the UN (United Nations) to investigate all sorts of maritime pollution and jail those seafarers, the secondarily affected countries may impose economic sanctions to the ship’s nationality, and not forgetting WWF (World Wildlife Fund) questioning on the oil spillage cleanup cost to reduce further the damage on the marine wildlife.

Just imagine tons of tons of crude oil is spilled into the sea and the entire ocean is covered with thick black oil. A catastrophic damage to the marine wildlife, to the entire world in general and this can’t be undone except to mourn over our losses.

Even birds are not excluded

The damage to nature is too huge to be contained 

Polluted beach

Onboard fire is the worst nightmare for seafarers

How do we seafarers curb these nasty incidents? As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. Yes, its 101% true and I couldn’t agree more. But in order to have prevention, some bad incident actually took place in order to enlighten and basically to remind the entire marine industry that there is still a certain aspect of safety we humans HAVEN’T THOUGHT ABOUT IT. It’s like it never had crossed our 1.4kg brain.

So, here comes the main question. Are the sailors truly skillful and incredibly competent to prevent accidents or are the rules and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedure) are too strict with severe punishment if failure to comply? THE ANSWER IS BOTH.

Just like cars and all land-based vehicles, every driver has to obey traffic lights and traffic rules to prevent accidents and in general to prevent loss of lives. Same goes for ships and it doesn’t matter size or length.  RULEs FOR ALL.

There are many marine rules such as:

1. Junction Rules:

If to your starboard Red appear, It is your duty to keep clear.

Green to Green or Red to Red, In perfect safety, go ahead.

2. Small boats should stay clear from Large Vessels

3. Safe speed

4. Look out

All these rules are the guideline to the crew as they are approaching port but how do they exactly know that they are getting close to the land every nautical mile?

And that is a whole new topic for a new blog post ........ stay tuned :)

 

OceanHolic,

-Stay Curious-

*all images and logo are taken from google