A Framework Addressing Major Accident Risk in the Maritime Industry

Abstract

Avoiding accidents and ensuring the safety of on-board personnel represents one of the most complex challenges faced by the maritime industry. A common misunderstanding in the industry has led to a focus on occupational accidents to reduce lost time injuries in the belief that this would also lead to a reduction of major accidents. The complexity related to preventing and mitigating major accidents requires an understanding of the differences in occupational risk compared to major accident risk. An ever increasing complexity in systems and operations calls for increased vigilance with regards to safety. Rather than focusing on individual components, the industry would benefit by embracing a more comprehensive approach to safety, one that establishes effective barriers that prevent or mitigate the impact of accidents. The oil & gas industry has a long experience in handling complex operations and major accident hazards and offshore vessels can document significant lower incident rates than conventional merchant vessels. Introducing the concept of barrier management from the oil & gas industry to the maritime industry can provide the framework this industry needs to better manage major accident hazards.

Maritime operational risk management using dynamic barriers

“…Transforming information and data into barrier performance knowledge is a step-wise process that evaluates relevant functions, identifies functional failures (failure modes), function criticality, failure mechanisms (degradations), failure symptoms and how application of sensor data can enable monitoring and enhance the control of selected functional failure modes as well as replace or support traditional maintenance tasks. To address the corresponding major accident hazards, the data flows and sensor systems need to have traceability (feedbackloop) and consider the condition of barriers preventing escalation of incidents (structural and watertight integrity, corrosion protection, oil spillage collection, fire detectors, fire water system, structural fire protection, piping, cables, means of access, alarms) (Astrup, King and Wahlstrøm, 2015). Most importantly, the effect of continuous improvement becomes evident by the establishment of control loops at different levels and presenting barrier performance knowledge on a real-time basis to the sharp-and blunt-ends (Figure 14).…”

“…Where hazards cannot be avoided, vessel design and operation should be aimed at prevention where practicable by reducing the number of leak sources (flanges, valves, vibration monitoring, etc. ), removing or relocating ignition sources, simplifying operations, avoiding complex or illogical procedures, amongst others (Astrup, King and Wahlstrøm, 2015).…”

“…This requires detailed models of all barrier functions and associated systems/elements (for instance modeling bowtie structures with Bayesian networks which are furnished with real-time data) that can reflect different states of the barrier elements, as well as the effect of compensating measures. Ideally, all this information should be reflected in some overall risk model that takes into consideration the status and criticality of each element and all dependencies and interactions between these elements, to be able to estimate the overall risk (Astrup, King and Wahlstrøm 2015).…”

“…Although long-term storage typically will be in a shore-based data centre, it is useful to keep a certain data history on-board the vessel, delegating local analysis and decision support as well as aggregation and compression to avoid unnecessary usage of a ship-shore communication link which may be costly to use and not always available. To keep track of data and to structure the storage and processing of sensor data, there is a need for a unique identification of sensors as well as the components systems and functions subject to monitoring by the sensor (Astrup, King and Wahlstrøm, 2015).…”

“…Figure 15: Dynamic barrier management basic constituents for a maritime application. Source: Astrup, King and Wahlstrøm (2015).…”