Absorbing the takeaways from the UK Marine Accident Investigations Branch (MAIB) Safety Digest: Lessons from Marine Accident Reports 2020
MAIB provides a digest of the bullet points from some of the accidents and incidents investigated in 2020 in its regular publication Safety Digest.
In some cases, a mechanical failure led to a safety incident and in others, a lack of judgement was the cause.
Dodgy weight: A tug was attending a chemical/product tanker. The crewman on the tug’s deck indicated to the mooring party on the tanker that he was ready to receive the heaving line. The MAIB Safety Digest reports “The line was thrown, and the end landed on the tug’s deck with a loud bang. Attached to the end of the line was a heavy 0.5-kg steel shackle.”
The report concludes that even though the tug crewman wore a hard hat, the 0.5-kg steel shackle would have caused injury. MAIB recommends that under no circumstances are shackles, bolts, nuts or twist-locks to be used to weight a line. MAIB notes that only bean bags or monkey’s fist are to be used to weight heaving lines. In this case the tug provided two beans bags from its own stores to replace the shackle.
The above is just one of 25 cases used to illustrate different aspects of safety considerations that can be learned from MAIB’s investigations into maritime incidents.
The MAIB remit: Extract from The Merchant Shipping (Accident Reporting and Investigation) Regulations 2012 – Regulation 5: “The sole objective of a safety investigation into an accident under these Regulations shall be the prevention of future accidents through the ascertainment of its causes and circumstances. It shall not be the purpose of such an investigation to determine liability nor, except so far as is necessary to achieve its objective, to apportion blame.”
To receive the MAIB Safety Digest, email maibpublications@dft.gov.uk
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