Ship inspection strategies: Effects on maritime safety and environmental protection

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Abstract

Global trade largely depends on maritime transport, and appropriate ships are needed to protect cargo but to minimize environmental damage and to this end, flag and port state authorities expend considerable effort in ship safety inspections. This paper investigates the safety gains of current inspection rules as well as options for further developments. The analysis is based on a dataset of over 400,000 ship arrivals covering 2002–2007, and is complemented with data on port state control and industry inspections and casualties. The results indicate considerable potential for safety gains from incorporating casualty risks more explicitly in port state control strategies to select ships for safety inspections.

Introduction

Economic development and trade depend to a large degree on efficient shipping, which carries a large percentage of raw material and manufactured goods that are traded. In 2008, international seaborne trade amounted to over eight billion tons of goods loaded and 32.7 trillion ton-miles (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2009). Crude oil and oil products account for about 65% of all cargo carried, and with other important cargoes being dry bulk and containers. Maritime transport is relatively safe, but the personal, economic, and environmental costs of accidents can be huge. Loss of passenger ships at sea may involve high death tolls, and tanker accidents can cause severe and extensive oil pollution (Talley et al., 2001, Talley et al., 2008).

The shipping industry’s main regulatory bodies are the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO). There has been a change of emphasis over time in the focus of these agencies, with the former attention on technical safety measures shifting towards environmental concerns and the human factors of ship operations (Knapp and Franses, 2009). For example, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) now covers a wide range of environmental areas, including prevention of pollution from oil chemicals and other hazardous substances, ballast water treatment, the reduction of harmful paints, the reduction of emissions from ships, and ship recycling.

Because of the very high costs of accidents, flag state authorities and coastal states try to follow preventive strategies. Flag states differ in their enforcement of minimum safety standards that has led to loopholes in the regulatory system. The lack of harmonization has created substandard shipping, estimated at about 5% to 10% of the world fleet.2 Prompted by a series of tanker accidents in the 1970s, and to assist in the enforcement of international conventions, the concept of port state control (PSC) emerged. We examine the effect of PSC inspections on safety in terms of reduced casualty risk by combining casualty and inspection data and we investigate the potential safety gains that can come from explicitly incorporating the ship-specific risk of future accidents explicitly in designing ship inspection strategies.

Section snippets

Ship inspections

Port state control is the right of a port or coastal state to conduct safety inspections and to enforce the international measures on ships that visit its port. An inspected ship that fails the minimum standards is detained, and deficiencies have to be rectified before it is released. In some cases, a ship can be banned from re-entering ports if it has been detained several times. Ship owners wish to avoid detention because of the high economic costs and the possibility of increased future

Arrival and inspection data

The arrival dataset consists of daily arrival information of 14,115 ships between 2002 and 2007; some 400,000 arrivals. These data are obtained from port states that in 2008 accounted for 17% of goods loaded, 15% of goods unloaded, and 12.5% of the world merchant trade value.4 The dataset provides a

Survival gains of inspection strategies

The effect of PSC inspections can be evaluated in terms of reductions in casualty risk. To prevent over-estimation of the survival gains obtained by multiple inspections of the same ship within a brief period, we focus on eligible arrivals. This ensures that successive inspections of the same ship in the same PSC regime never occur within the same half-year. For each regime, ship type, and half-year, the inspection rate is fixed at the historical rate that applied for the set of eligible

Conclusions

The practice of port state control inspections is that, although they share the same objectives, information is not yet shared between them as the regimes effectively disregard each other’s inspections as well as inspections performed by the industry, such as vetting. This paper proposes at an inspection strategy based on combined data on ship arrivals, inspections, and casualties. The strategy is explicitly risk-driven: inspect ships for which inspections produce the largest survival gains. It

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous data providers for supplying us with information on ship arrivals. We thank Lloyd’s Register Fairplay for supplying casualty data.

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The views expressed in this article represent those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA).

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