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STS guidance adds stop-work and fatigue measures
Interview captured support for stop-work, learning and fatigue provisions in OCIMF’s second-edition STS guidance
The second day of the LNG Shipping & Terminals conference in October 2025 focused on changes in the second edition of OCIMF’s ship-to-ship (STS) transfer guidance, with attention to a formalised stop-work provision and new language on learning and fatigue.
Smit Lamalco project and business development director Andrew Brown said he had reviewed the new edition and compared it with the first, drawing out elements he regarded as material for day-to-day operations.
He highlighted a section that set out how to stop work when something is going wrong and how organisations should encourage such interventions at all levels.
He described the intent as universal within the hierarchy: from an able seafarer to executive management, individuals should feel able to call a halt on safety grounds.
Mr Brown welcomed the explicit wording. “If you see it’s wrong, then you stop work,” he said, adding the guidance gave personnel “a process and a policy” to follow.
He noted the aim as cultural as much as procedural: confidence to intervene needed support from the top down and back up again.
He also pointed to an emphasis on learning: guidance asked practitioners to consider what was learned during operations – good or bad – and what they then did with those lessons so that issues were not repeated and efficiency could improve.
The theme, he suggested, depended on implementation discipline: collecting experience, acting on it and embedding the changes.
A further addition he noted concerned fatigue. Many mariners travel long distances to join operations and could arrive tired; expecting immediate work after such flights risked degraded performance.
The guidance, he said, recognised this and set out how organisations should approach fatigue before operations commence.
He linked all of these elements to safety in an industry where risk existed and could increase if procedures were ignored.
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