Q GREY MATTER


Saving your skin Michael Grey MBE


S 14


lips, trips and falls are responsible for the vast majority of accidents aboard ship and cost an inordinate amount in claims, in addition to all the pain and heartache. So, we should unreservedly


welcome any innovations that serve to reduce their incidence and make serving on ships less of a hazardous occupation. There are a lot of these bright ideas


around, which is a tribute to all those who sit around and design them, although many inventors would, if you asked, confess that trying to sell their inventions was quite hard going. If you are designing things that generate profit, the industry sits up and takes notice – but if you are ‘only’ helping to reduce injuries, even though there will be long-term cost savings, the product becomes more discretionary. It is far easier and cheaper to stick a health and safety notice up on the bulkhead, rather than invest in a bit of kit that might save the spillage of blood or broken bones. You only have to look at accident


trends to understand these complaints. How often do you read about


incidents in the machinery space, where some bright chap has decided to remove a plate or tank lid and then gone off for a cup of tea, or to fetch a spanner, leaving some careless and unsuspect- ing poor soul to fall into the bilges or worse, to the bottom of a tank? Yet, for a very modest sum, you can


buy stout plastic barriers – a sort of marine version of those that are assembled around holes in the road – that will prevent such an accident ever happening. There are barriers that can be erected around revolving machinery, or surrounding a space where the unwary might inadvertently stick a foot. There are light and easily built barriers that will stop people going into dangerous spaces, or tumbling down ladders or tripping over objects on the deck. I once dropped the business end of a chipping hammer down an engine room


skylight, occasioning nothing worse than rage below, but today you can buy modestly priced meshes that will catch objects dropped by people working at height. For just a few dollars you can purchase safety equipment that could save death, injuries and millions in compensa- tion, if only a more proactive attitude to the precautionary principle could be cultivated. Seafarers operating tugs can have a


If you are designing things


that generate profit, the industry sits up to take notice – but if you are ‘only’


helping to reduce injuries the product becomes more discretionary


heave the tow rope aboard, with the two moving craft a safe distance apart and the only risk I can think of being some careless able seaman getting his fingers in a propeller. The company hopes to patent the notion and I wish them well. A quay-launched drone might not be a bad


idea for sending mooring ropes ashore too, if you come to think about the present risks of being clouted by a weighted heaving line in some unprotected part of the anatomy. Indeed, I recall, many years ago, being


on the quay in Yokohama watching a very large ferry come alongside, with the linesmen firing a line-throwing rocket at the ship – thereby substituting one set of hazards for another. Mooring operations cause more than


their fair share of serious accidents, so we must hope that IMO initiatives which are designed to encourage less hazard- ous systems bear fruit. And have you ever wondered why


fishermen fail to wear life jackets and drown in considerable numbers when they fall over the side? I asked skipper Jimmy Buchan, one of the stars of the TV documentary Trawler, this very question, some time ago, and he told me that even the best life vests chafe the back of your neck when you are working on deck with spray coming aboard. I hope the inventors might have been listening. What other fertile fields might there


be for designers and inventors in the field of marine health and safety? The poor chaps who have to leap off windfarm boats and clamber up the insides of those enormous turbine stalks wearing so much protective clobber that they can barely squeeze through the access hatches and have to sit down for ten minutes would, I am told, welcome


hazardous life, with heaving lines whizzing around their heads as they try to get their rope aboard an incoming ship, the two vessels having to get very close to make the connec- tion. Thus, clever folk who work aboard Kotug craft have come up with the idea of using a drone to fly a light messenger line to the crew on the ship. They can simply grab this and


something rather more practical as their daily working gear. I have also been told that a survival suit without separate fingers and thumbs makes it almost impossible to manipu- late switches or levers in the escape apparatus. And if you wear your life jacket and survival suit, you won’t fit through the entrance of your lifeboat. In which case, you may not survive.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40