Seamless evacuations for all passengers
How new tech is addressing accessibility for people with restricted mobility.
After a couple of stormy years, the international cruise ship industry has been enjoying a calmer ride this year. Numbers from trade body CLIA suggest passenger volumes could recover and surpass 2019 levels by the end of 2023. Yet an increased appetite to go cruising brings with it a renewed focus on health and safety: as the management of Covid risks recedes as a priority, some are wondering at how fit-for-purpose current evacuation procedures are for today’s mega-size cruise liners, which can be a floating home to more than 9,000 people (the world’s largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas, can accommodate 6,988 passengers and 2,300 crew).
As one IMarEST member recently pointed out to Marine Professional, the cruising population can include mobility impaired passengers, such as infants, the elderly and people with disabilities for whom current evacuation processes may prove challenging. And safety experts say there are already issues with existing lifeboat and evacuation equipment, including a lack of standardisation, maintenance errors or poor configuration of equipment, which can put crew at risk.
Lifeboat drills
InterManager, the international trade association for ship and crew managers, for example, says that seafarers die needlessly in lifeboat drills as a result of the very equipment that is intended to keep them safe, often due to problems with the release mechanism, davits and wire rope failure. According to InterManager, which has collated details of 419 deaths involving lifeboats, 346 serious injuries and 116 minor injuries since 1981, cruise ships, which use their boats more often, record the most accidents.
Work is underway to address these issues. Survitec has developed Seahaven, the world’s largest inflatable lifeboat, capable of taking 1,060 people, which was recently certified by Lloyd’s Register for use on cruise vessels. It’s the first lifeboat to have completed an exhaustive reliability testing programme that far exceeds the mandatory testing requirements set out by SOLAS, says Richard McCormick, the company’s AES and MES Product Manager.
Seahaven can evacuate 1,060 people is under 22 minutes. Credit: Survitec
“We can evacuate 1,060 people is under 22 minutes,” he says, highlighting the speed of evacuation using Survitec’s fully-enclosed helical slides. “This was tested with a broad demographic. We advertised in the local paper for volunteers to test it, in return for a donation to the charity, and so we got people of all ages, sizes and weights.”
The system is intrinsically safer, says McCormick, because there are no hazards involved in lowering the lifeboat and the automatic release takes away the risk of human error. “It’s a step change in performance, which is needed because this is quite a conservative industry and any leaps in innovation tend to be a direct result of a disaster. But we’re not waiting for an accident to drive innovation and are moving forward to deliver better safety for seafarers and passengers.”
There are additional advantages, says McCormick. He highlights Seahaven’s compact design and higher evacuation capability which can free up to 85% of deck space usually taken by lifeboats and davits, yielding premium outboard space for cruise operators to enhance the passenger experience and generate additional revenues.
Rescuing all demographics
Looking further ahead, researchers are examining safe evacuation from passenger ships in a world in which crewing may be reduced or even eliminated as a result of automation. Sweden has a number of projects underway, including Safe Evacuation at Sea, funded by the Swedish Transport Administration, which involves studying a realistic passenger demography including variations in terms of mobility, vision, hearing, cognitive capabilities and culture. Although focused on passenger ferries, there are learnings for other shipping sectors.
“Vessel design and its interior certainly affects effectiveness and efficiency in evacuation, and passengers with different types of reduced capability may be disadvantaged in the evacuation chain,” explains project manager Julia Burgén. “Of course, there are regulations and recommendations in place to protect passenger safety, even with respect to disability, but these instruments do not seem to produce consistently accessible ships.”
Amy McLellan is a journalist and author. She was previously editor of Energy Day. Twitter @AmyMcLellan2