Enhanced operational safety

摘要

Concerns over safe ferry design were raised at the 38th Interferry Annual Conference, which was hosted in Malta from 5-9 October this year, where speakers reminded delegates that "prevention is better than cure". Maritime safety authority Professor Dracos Vassalos, of the UK's Strathclyde University, welcomed the introduction of goal-based rather than rule-based damage stability regulations, saying that this opened the way for life-cycle risk to be addressed at the design stage. He expressed alarm, however, over the grandfather clause' exempting existing ships from the new rules. "As a result, the bulk of contemporary knowledge is channelled to new ships - 1% of tonnage - leading, at best, to marginal safety improvements for the whole fleet," he claimed. "This is a huge regulatory gap that undermines and inhibits progress on vulnerability to flooding - and the disparity between old and new ships is increasingly becoming a chasm."