CONTAINERSHIPS


More deck safety features for containerships, please


THE Royal Institution of Naval Architects’ recent containership conference* introduced several innovative technical features but also raised some key issues, particularly those relating to lashing and un-lashing of deck-stowed containers. Additional effort needs to be made by both owners and shipyards to provide better safety features.


A


PICTURE of a dead person on the screen during a conference presentation


is guaranteed to hush an audience, and sure enough it achieved the required effect at The Royal Institution of Naval Architects’ November conference on Containership Design and Operation. A final joint lecture by Brian Sherwood-Jones, a human factors consultant for Lloyd’s Register, and Roy Smith, safety manager (operations), for Hutchison Ports (port of Felixstowe), brought the conference to a suitable close, with a sobering reminder of just exactly what we, as naval architects, should be trying to achieve. The pair made no apologies for the picture


– it showed a crew member crushed under a container on a ship during port operations – and once again revealed the difficult and dangerous nature of shipping. The authors attempted – and succeeded in – making the point that naval architects and shipbuilders have not yet perfected the finer points of deck structures and fittings to ensure that stevedores (or crew members, should stevedores refuse to do the job, which apparently they sometimes do) can carry out their dangerous day-to-day work safely and efficiently. Roy Smith was a stevedore for 22 years


before being promoted to Felixstowe’s chief safety officer, so he knows precisely what he is talking about. He claimed that sometimes ships even left port with lashing rods not tightened securely because there was physically no room for a man to work between box bays to carry out the job. A speaker from the floor even alleged that on a brand-new series of large containerships, only just delivered, the first bay behind the accommodation block was not being used because it was impossible to lash containers properly at that position! Mr Smith told his audience that he had


listened carefully for two days as naval architects expounded on the theory of containership design; now it was time for them to enter his world – the real world of ship operation! It was a penetrating comment, which we fervently hope was not lost on those attending. What the speakers were requesting –


reasonable access space, modest platforms, or small extensions – could be achieved for a very limited cost, in terms of the expense of an overall ship. Some owners have made commendable modifications but access problems remain particularly acute when


58


Revealing what can easily be achieved: four illustrations showing a typical outboard lashing station on a containership before improvements (top) and the same area following successful safety modifications (bottom).


securing the outboard deck boxes, which, as readers know, are generally supported on substantial stanchions, and it is almost impossible to reach these safely. This is a subject that we have touched on


previously (The Naval Architect April 2004, page 6, while another paper on this subject was presented at RINA’s 2003 containership conference), but the message still does not seem to have fully reached those most concerned – naval architects, shipbuilders, and owners. Mr Smith did add a throwaway line that


perhaps hatchcoverless ships might be one answer but naturally did point out that fewer


jobs for stevedores would result! It might be useful to establish how many box-handling accidents have occurred on hatchcoverless vessels; perhaps Nedlloyd or another operator could also tell us how many containers have been lost overboard from such ships, taking into account the substantial lashing bridges that are often included - but that is another story!


Super mega liners Hopefully, these messages will be taken on board by those designers and builders of a class of containership which is still evolving: the super mega liner. While the conference


THE NAVAL ARCHITECT FEBRUARY 2007


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