evacuation
Evacuation process on way
to becoming more efficient
The Safeguard project’s real-life trials pave the way to more accurate passenger ship evacuation
PASSENGER ship evacuation procedures are on their way to becoming more realistic and efficient after a ground-breaking project used real-life scenarios in order to paint as full a picture as possible of the process.
The semi-announced trials - meaning passengers knew that a drill would happen while they were on the ship but did not know the exact time - were summed up by Professor Ed Galea of the University of Greenwich (a partner in the project) in his presentation at a Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA) seminar on the Safeguard project. He said: “The results were credible, relevant and realistic because they were on a real ship at sea.” There is little available real-life data on human behaviour in a maritime emergency because evacuation simulation software is usually deployed. Prior to Safeguard, an effort was made to improve this situation: full scale passenger response time data was collected on a ship at sea, leading IMO to revise its protocols for passenger ship evacuation analysis. But this did not provide a complete picture of human behaviour: all the data was collected was on a ropax ferry (the Eurostar Roma) and so was not representative of all passenger ships. What is more, no validation data was collected, meaning there was no data on how long it took for passengers to reach their mustering stations. So the Safeguard project was born, with backing from
the UK, France, Norway, Greece and Canada as well as nine partners including Bureau Veritas, BMT Group, Canada’s Marine Institute Offshore Safety and Survival Centre (OSSC) and the University of Greenwich fire safety engineering group. The project was funded through the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and by the Canadian authorities. Starting in April 2009 and finishing in November 2012, Safeguard’s objectives were to collect data on the length of time it took passengers to respond to the alarm (defined as the
42 I Passenger Ship Technology I 2nd Quarter 2013
time between the sounding of the alarm and the moment when a passenger started purposeful movement to a mustering station) and on how long it took them to assemble at their mustering stations.
Five passenger evacuation trails were carried out in
2010/2011 on three ships: SuperSpeed1, a ropax ferry with no cabins operated by Color Line that can accommodate 2,000 passengers and crew as well as over 700 vehicles, Jewel of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean International (RCI) ship, which can accommodate 2,500 passengers and 842 crew members and the Olympia Palace, a Minoan Lines-operated ropax ferry with cabins that has capacity for 2,182 passengers and 600 cars. Each of the ferries held two trials and the cruise ship carried out one trial. Video cameras were deployed to determine passengers’
response times, while infrared technology was used to collect data on assembly. Participants were also asked to complete questionnaires. A total of 4,300 passengers participated in the trials, which were voluntary. The Jewel of the Seas trial stood out as it was the largest full-scale evacuation trial involving passengers ever performed on land or sea. The results heralded some important conclusions: data
gathered from Color Line’s ropax vessel with no cabins showed that the two trials carried out on it were statistically the same, so could be combined. Commenting on this at RINA’s Safeguard seminar, OSSC head of R&D Rob Brown said: “This is a powerful result, which means that if we repeat the trial on a similar ship, we expect the same result time distribution (RTD). This means that we don’t necessarily have to do the tests any more for this type of ship, as these results are fairly definitive for this type of passenger ship.” Strikingly, when compared with the current RTD standard, based on the Eurostar Roma, both sets of data are statistically
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