The Safety Strategy for the “Dormant Ship”

Reporter Liu Xiao

How long will the hibernation period for ships last? It is dif fi cult to predict at present. But how to deal with properly the safety problem of such a large amount of idle capacity is a matter of concern and deserves the attention of the industry.During the interview, Xue Yingchun, the captain from Shanghai Youhong Shipping Co., LTD told reporter that the shipyards did not know what to do and they are looking for high-cost and high-risk terminals on lease to put and seal up ships to be delivered; some terminals that are chosen by the shipping lines as the ports to keep lay-off ships are experiencing an unconventional congestion. Under a variety of chaos, the safety risks are gradually revealed.

According to the introduction of relevant personnel,lay-off ships can be divided as hot, cold and long-term lay-off ships. Under the current situation, many ship owners will choose cold or long-term ones, choosing a relatively safe anchorage for lay-off ships is therefore very important.

Captain Xue introduced the anchoring approach of Maersk to the reporter for industries’ reference. He said that all anchored vessels have a turning circle, but the turning circles for different vessels are not necessarily the same. A safe distance must be kept, when the typhoon comes, the safe distance needs to be increased, so the number of ships that can be kept in a certain water area is very limited. Maersk’ s approach of sealing lay-off ships as shown in the graphic below is worthy of recommendation. He added,ships of similar size have to be put with the bow of one ship immediately after the stern of another. Each ship should be anchored and one group of ships is watched by one group of crew on duty, so that they can deal with situations at any time. In case of strong wind attacking head-on, two anchors for each ship would suffice, and the ship will not turn around,thus more ships can be kept in the same water area. The only high requirement is that the fender must be of high quality in order to prevent the collision and friction between ships.

At the same time, ensuring the safety of idle ships should rely on the regulation of maritime authorities.The experts suggest that the maritime authority needs to put emphasis on the following three aspects. Firstly,taking advantage of some effective methods such as site patrol inspection, VTS, AIS, CCTV monitoring and visiting shipping companies to master the condition of long-term lay-off ships in their administered area and strengthen dynamic supervision. The second is improving site inspection to keep regular cruising inspection of the anchorage, ensuring good anchoring order and environment, investigating and correcting illegal anchoring behavior and the emission behavior that violates the pollution prevention management regulations, investigating and correcting the behavior of long-term idle ships which violate the manning requirements. The third is strengthening the emergency watch and emergency response capability. Effective measures of strengthening emergency watch, deploying appropriately emergency response force and preparing for the handling of various risks should be implemented according to the categories of possible risks, time and location of occurrence of such risks.