Professionals or amateurs?

Accidents, errors and bad judgment happens, or as I posted a couple of posts ago: “Things happen; by chance, as a result of a threat or because somebody makes a mistake. This has always been the case, is the case today and will always be the case”.

At the moment I know almost nothing about the initial cause of the accident off South Korea were several hundred are unaccounted for and most probable dead. No matter the cause I’m surprised that it still (today with supposedly enlighten crews) is possible to misjudge the situation so dramatically.

Lifeboats are hard to use when the ship is heeling, that has been known for many years now. Good alternatives for passenger ships are hard to find. Ordering people to their cabins can’t be a solution. A ship operator must make sure that these situations are prepared for and that crews on passenger ships are well prepared and trained. I would hope that it is what one does in case of an emergency that seperates professionals from amateurs.

My writing, what is it about?

A word cloud based on my post headings (counting phrases instead results in the following popular phrases in my headings: ship security; security analysis; off Somalia; Costa Concordia; armed guards;and arctic waters).

What do we know about the conditions for maritime security?

I recently gave a talk about Civilian shipping in peace, crisis and war with a northern Europe perspective.

Europe is as all other regions of the world dependent on shipping for support of cargo in general, but also for essential goods such as specific types of food and medicine. Without this cargo the way of life as well as quality of life will be affected. This is clearly expressed in for example the US Quadrennial defense review report (Department of Defense, 2010).

Our ports are relatively stationary and can therefore without too much effort be included in the maritime security measures implemented by states to decrease the effects of potential security incidents. This is however a fairly new area to be handled structurally and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) didn’t get involved for real until the introduction of the ISPS code in 2002 (IMO, 2002). Also, the approaches are to a great extent borrowed from airport security which has its limitations when applied to ports and harbors. Therefore, there is still reason to be somewhat skeptical about the efficiency of the port security efforts of today and how much we know about how to assess the efficiency.

Shipping of today is an international business and a ship owner offers his services in the area in the world where he can make good money without too many uncertainties. The shipping in northern Europe has a relatively high quality because the money is good and the uncertainties are low.

But, in the event of a maritime crisis (or simply when maritime security no longer can be guaranteed) when there really is a need for maritime security efforts also including ships of the coasts off Europe:

ð  the uncertainties for ship owners also increase and the high quality ship owners will start operate somewhere else (because they can),

ð  therefore, the conditions for maritime security will drastically change, and

ð  we cannot prepare for maritime security based on the situation of today

So, what do we know about maritime security in time of crisis and based on which assumptions can we study it? Not based on the lessons from the waters off Somalia, that is an entirely different situation.

Refrences
Department of Defense (2010) Quadrennial defense review report. Washington DC: United States of America Department of Defense.
IMO (2002) The International Ship and Port Facilities Security (ISPS) Code. Safety of Life at Sea, Chapter XI-2. London: International Maritime Organisation.

August 10: Dramatic sinking in central Stockholm

The ship had just left for its maiden voyage when it capsized and sank in front of the huge crowd. Onboard were not only crew, but also VIPs and family to the crew. Almost one third of the 150 persons onboard died in the accident. The accident was of course a result of a great amount of errors in the design, construction and preparation processes. No one has been blamed yet, and no one probably will. However, conflicting and too specific requirements are regarded as contributing factors.

Now, closing in on 400 years later, the ship is the central piece in one of the world most visited maritime museum: The Vasa Museum in Stockholm. The ship sank in 1628 and was salvaged 333 years later surprisingly intact (the biggest damaged was done in the years after the sinking when the canons was salvaged).

Vasa at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Photo: H. Liwång

The ship was commissioned by the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf, who also set very high demands on the ship. Gustav II Adolf was committed to protecting Sweden’s Lutheran confession with wars in many places in northern Europe. The wars also laid the foundations for Sweden as a great power in Europe in the seventeenths century. Vasa was therefore built in a very international environment with a king almost always abroad in one of his many wars, but also built for a king accustomed to giving precise directives and expecting them to be followed to every point. As IMO writes in the HSC code prescriptive directions are only effective for basic design, not for novelty. That also seemed to be the case 1628. Vasa was built under new strategic and tactical challenges and was therefore bigger and with more cannons than was the case for other ships of the time. Dutch expertise was hired to build the ship and with that came a tradition to build ships without drawings and only based on quantitative relations and rules. Therefore the design was done under a lot of does and don’ts probably not suited for the intended ship size.

Of course there was stability test, but it had to be stopped so that the ship didn’t capsize. So the crew knew that the ship was unsafe! But there were no one powerful enough to take the decision not to sail. Therefore, the ship capsized (or rather heeled so much that the open cannon doors filled the ship with water) at the first gust of wind and sank quickly. However, the sinking give us today an interesting snap shot of the development of complex or military systems in 1628.

What I have realized a couple of times, when using the Vasa case, is that surprisingly many aspects are valid also today; solving future challenges with yesterday’s technology and also that you don’t always needs new technology but need to apply known technology in new ways (there were also ships like Vasa was built at the same time without problems). One difference compared to today is the closeness between the political level (the king) and the building of the ship. However, this difference makes for an easier analysis of the ship design process.

The Vasa ship is a fantastic disaster that Sweden offers to the rest of the world as an attraction, but also as a case to get inspired by when taking on development of complex systems!

(The last time I visited the Vasa museum I got especially affected by how marked by life and sickness even the young and rich was, life can’t have been easy and the everyday pain must have been challenging at least)

Humans, best safeguards

Human may be unpredictable, we also cause accidents. However, when doing research on ship survivability I clearly see in my models the strength of humans in a system.

 

Things happen; by chance, as a result of a threat or because somebody makes a mistake. This has always been the case, is the case today and will always be the case.

 

When an engineer looks at a system there is a drive for getting everything controllable and predictable, these are considered important characteristics of a good system. Therefore, people in that system will be considered a problem, because they are not controllable nor predictable. However, recognizing the fact that things will happen anyway you will also need a system that is able to recover.

 

Nature (and humans) are great at recovering from things unplanned for (machines can if they are good recover from a limited set of problems and only if that problem is recognized beforehand and a solution is prepared).

 

I think the human errors are outweighed many times by the human recoveries and last minute prevention skills and the “human prevention” events are probably many more than the “human error” incidents. The problem is that no one is counting the human prevention events, but when you need someone to blame you identify, document and count the human errors.

GO HUMANS!

Good looking information... (risky business on the Baltic Sea)

I’ve always said that real research is done in black and white and when you try to do it more fancy you’re trying to hide a not so good research. But maybe I have to change my mind looking at this video on the ship traffic in the Baltic Sea made for a HELCOME conference where the ministers of environment in the region of Baltic Sea and other professionals were discussing how to protect the vulnerable and polluted sea in the future. HELCOM is the governing body of the convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, known as the Helsinki Convention. The Contracting Parties are Denmark, Estonia, the European Union, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Sweden.

The film visualizes the congested sea and also shows how complex the flow of ships (and passengers and goods) really is today. This is also, off course, a well monitored sea, but the potential hazards and threats are many. I’ll try to take away two lessons from this video:

(1) I’ll in the future put more effort in my visualization of quantitative research results, and
(2) that I did the right choice naming my blog risky business at sea.

Crowdsourcing for secure transports?

Good and wide enough information on multi disciplinary issues such as Piracy is hard to come by and understanding of these problems is even harder to find. An interesting approach is the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise, a collaboration between the US Office of Naval Research (ONR), Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Institute for the Future (IFTF). MMOWGLI is a crowdsource tool designed as an online game. The focus of the game is ideas and strategies that may provide insight to some of the US Navy's toughest problems.

 

MMOWGLI creates an environment were invited or the public (dependent on issue and task) are asked to share new ideas and collaborate with other users to earn innovation points and win the game. The web-based format allows more people to interact than what would be possible in a face-to-face setting. The game's first round, piracyMMOWGLI, in summer 2011 and centered around a fast-paced, geopolitical situation off the coast of Somalia.

ONR plans to run a series of MMOWGLI games on a variety of topics over the next year. Yesterday (November 4th 2013), ONR launched the third round of piracyMMOWGLI.

The focus so far has been on military strategies for reducing piracy off Somalia. However, such a tool would also be very interesting in the area of ship security and to collect ideas that could enable a faster and more diverse development towards securer transports around the World!