CHIRP Maritime published its ninth Annual Digest of CHIRP Maritime reports, covering all the cases published during 2023, and articles on safety topics.
The Annual Digest for 2023-24 marks CHIRP Maritime’s 20th anniversary. It presents a collection of safety-focused incident reports, and insightful articles derived from real-life experiences in the maritime industry. The Digest is organized into themed sections, providing readers the flexibility to explore topics of interest.
Each anonymous report plays its part in raising awareness of important safety issues and wider trends and provides lessons for seafarers and maritime leaders alike to learn from.
… Adam Parnell, Director, CHIRP Maritime explained in a recent article. In regards to the Annual Digest, Parnell stated that the power that this compendium
of safety-focused incident reports and in-depth ‘insight’ articles draws upon is that they are all based upon the real-life experiences of our reporters.
Parnell also pointed out that reports span almost every part of the maritime industry and represent a broad cross-section of the topical safety concerns.
Human factors and port operations
In each section of the report, CHIRP identifies key issues that have come up through reporting. For instance, in regarding port operations, CHRIRP finds that of all the human factors discussed in this section, communications appear most often.
The is stressed that everyone needs to know what is going on, and this often requires informing not just their own crew but third parties as well. Additionally, contributing factors include alerting, fatigue, situational awareness, pressure to avoid delays, poor safety culture, and a lack of teamwork. These factors appear in more than one report, but most of them can be avoided with better planning and preparation.
Among the human factors identified are:
- communications
- the bridge team should affirm the pilot’s actions
- clear communication from the port authority is vital y closed loop communications are the safest option alerting
- do you provide the support the pilot needs? fatigue y elements of fatigue may always be present, especially at night y can operations be timed for daylight when the crew are better rested?
- situational awareness
- take additional care when working lines if other vessels are in the vicinity
- night operations require enhanced situational awareness pressure y time pressure can result in poor supervision y mooring operations must never be rushed
- poor safety culture
- company safety culture must empower employees to prioritise safety
- lack of teamwork
- check that all members of your team know what is happening
Furthermore, insight articles, written by experts, offer in-depth discussions on crucial safety matters. CHIRP encourages readers to study all reports, emphasizing the valuable lessons for both seafarers and shore staff.
CHIRP recommends… take 5 before your start!
- Practice scanning the environment and identifying things that may hurt you.
- Look for and recognize trip hazards, obstacles and other hazards.
- Now that the hazard has been registered in your mind, it is easy to control and avoid it.
- Continue scanning while performing a task; be aware of anything changing around you.
- If you find yourself drifting into “autopilot” STOP and take a look around you, refocus and continue to work.
