Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM) fined AZ Marine Offshore Services of Singapore and its operations manager $152,000 and $61,000 respectively, after an engineer lost his life in 2016 at a shipyard.
According to MOM, AZ Marine was hired by Pan-United Shipping for the berthing of two vessels at the shipyard. The engineer, Lim Meng Hoe, was thus hired to engine health checks and supervise ship crew for minor repairs.
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When the accident happened, Lim had to go over four vessels to reach to his destination. When he tried to climb across one of the vessels, his left hand slipped and Mr. Lim fell through a gap and into the sea.
As MOM said, AZ Marine did not manage to provide appropriate safety instructions regarding vessel-to-vessel access within the shipyard, as well as ways to identify designated crossing points.
The operations manager was responsible of ensuring workers’ safety at the shipyard, but did not take measures when he learned that workers were entering the vessels unsafely.
The operations manager himself was accessing the vessels in the same way, increasing non-compliance of safe practices at the shipyard.
Till to date the yard is no proper access to and from the vessels. 2nd incident will bound to happen soon unless MOM conduct more detail inspection of this yard. Alao so many vessels in this yard is lay up with no crews on-board. They are at the river mouth, should something happen these immobilized vessels will create big mess to the traffic in this river.