Sometimes safety becomes unsafe when it's carried too far. A new study by Lloyds Register reveals that ships, especially cruise ships, have so many alarms going off on the bridge that it's overwhelming crews and creating unsafe conditions.
When I was living aboard ship, I knew a yacht owner who was a real safety freak. He knew every safety protocol, drilled for every conceivable emergency, and collected every single piece of safety gear imaginable.
You would have thought him to be the most secure sailor born, and he was.
Because he never left the pier.
The problem was that he had so much safety gear stowed and installed that his boat was un-sailable. All that gear and all those contingency plans got in the way so thoroughly that it was too much of a pain to even take the sail covers off. It wasn't that safety was a bad idea. It was that it got out of hand and turned counterproductive.
You can see similar problems in everyday life. There was a time when there was a huge concern about safety regarding fuel pumps at garages. Regulations came that demanded putting stickers on the pumps prohibiting smoking. Then more to warn against using cell phones. Then ones about getting back in the car. And so on until there were so many stickers that patrons simply ignored them.
Now we're seeing a similar problem with cargo ships, cruise ships, and similar vessels. The new study of 11 operational vessels taking over 2,000 days and involving more than 40 million alarm-related events showed that automatic alarms are really getting out of hand, to the point where the shipping industry is having trouble holding onto officers, who are burning out with depressing regularity.
How bad is the problem? According to Lloyd's, alarms on the bridge are going off at an insane rate. We're not talking about a dozen or so a day. It's more like, in the case of cruise ships, up to 4,691 alarms in 10 minutes.
It isn't a case of the boy who cried wolf. It's become the boy who cried wolf, bear, moose, badger, wombat, elephant, natterjack toad, mandrel, meerkat, blue whale, lesser skink, prairie dog, ferret, wildebeest, dingo, tree kangaroo, sloth, anteater, blue-footed booby, Norwegian Blue, and half the catalog in the Museum of Natural History.
The result of all this is that crews are suffering from alarm fatigue and are seeing up to 63% of their rest periods disrupted responding to alarms. In all, the number of alarm events has jumped 197% over the past 20 years, leading to a cacophony of alerts where watch-keeping officers are pressing the Acknowledge button at a rate of over once a minute instead of handling actual situations.
Added to this, crews are finding ways to get around this unacceptable situation by ignoring alarms and even rewiring systems so the alarms never sound in the first place. It has also resulted in incidents like a ship almost grounding in 2019 because the crew were so distracted that they overlooked a critical depth alarm in the confusion, and a fire broke out on another ship because a fuel overflow alarm was missed. Yet another ship was almost lost because of a cooling system malfunction.
The report says that the problem has arisen because of the proliferation of digital alarms, especially those designed to detect emissions to comply with Net Zero goals, and autonomous systems. Every one of these new bits of hardware introduced a new set of uncoordinated chatter of alarms that simply produced noise.
This is compounded by digital sensors that are of the all-or-nothing variety, where the only two states are "no problem" and "emergency." This means that starting up an engine and waiting for it to come on line can not just set off an alarm pointlessly, because there's an emission or temperature issue that's just part of the engine's normal operation, but a fast succession of alarms that cancel each other out in a matter of seconds.
The report recommends that these alarms could be reduced by 50% by focusing on fixing the 10 alarms that produce 39% of all alerts. Another factor is dealing with improper commissioning, faulty sensors, fixing poorly configured valves, and putting a delay in sensor loops to avoid minor incidents setting off alarms.
One ironic factor is that modern alarms are a bit too, well, modern. The digital alarms with their on/off nature are less suited to shipboard work than analog sensors that can ignore minor fluctuations and avoid creating a "digital landfill" of data.
Even more fundamental is the fact that many alarms aren't installed to actually increase safety but to avoid liability – a situation very similar to the fuel pump scenario. The result is an overly complex system without a clearly defined goal that is prone to deterioration.
"Our research found that alarm systems, when poorly managed, have themselves become a safety risk," said Duncan Duffy, Lloyd's Register's Global Head of Technology. "Without decisive industry action, alarm fatigue will continue to undermine situational awareness and increase the likelihood of serious incidents. If the maritime industry is serious about safety, it must commit to continuous performance measurement, objective evaluation, and a human-centered approach to alarm system design. Only then can alarm systems fulfill their intended purpose – supporting crews, safeguarding lives, and ensuring safer voyages for all."
On the plus side, remember this when the Service Engine light comes on in your car, and count your blessings.
Source: Lloyd's Register
