At a shipping and trade conference in Stamford Connecticut, USA, Tor E. Svensen, COO of DNV Maritime, asked the whole industry to look into the mirror before blaming others. "Substandard ships and substandard performance by flags, owners and class has to be handled better," he said.
Tor E. Svensen was invited to speak at one of the main sessions of the recently held CMA (Connecticut Maritime Association) conference. CMA is recognised as one of the most important annual maritime conferences and exhibitions in North America. Delegates, sponsors, exhibitors and visitors from almost 50 countries were present, including Peter Swift, managing director of Intertanko, and representatives of flags and shipowners from throughout the world. Their challenge was benchmarking and measuring the value of regulations, business practices, systems and codes.
Although Svensen cited figures well-known to DNV Maritime, which indicate that DNV is the class society against which our competitors benchmark themselves (figures confirmed by those issued by Intertanko), Svensen insisted that DNV has to improve its performance.
"We need to measure our performance in order to improve. Benchmarking is useful," he said. "The main reason for safety improvements is systematic learning from past experience. I am satisfied with our safety figures and the reductions in accidents and fatalities over the past few years. But we cannot relax at any point. Everyone has to search for continuous improvement and listen to people outside the industry. A critical press is important, as are the general public and their reactions."
An important statistic regarding accidents at sea is that about half of them happen due to bridge system failures, commonly described as 'navigational errors'. DNV's breakdown of these figures shows that 7 percent of incidents result from contact, 20 percent from groundings and 22 percent from collisions.
"Class societies focus on structural standards because it is our job, but we've found that human error is even more important," Svensen said. "We used to say that 80 percent of accidents were related to human failure while 20 percent were due to technical problems. My impression is that this has moved more in the direction of 90 to 10. When we looked into the mirror, we realised that we had to put more effort into managing human error onboard vessels."
In his address, Svensen noted that DNV has developed a set of notations governing bridge design called NAUT. So far, figures show that bridge-related casualties have been reduced from 40 accidents per 1,000 ship-years to about 21 per 1,000 due to NAUT, a 50 percent reduction.