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!

No piracy left?

According to the NATO statistics there have not been a pirated vessel off Somalia since May 2012 and only 11 in total the last two years. The last two reported attacks were performed January 2013. This off course doesn’t mean that everything is okay in Somalia, but it off course takes some pressure of the people passing through the waters. But no one is interested in lowering the guard so that piracy seems worthwhile again… as I have written before this makes for a tricky situation for the decision maker.

This is however not the end of piracy and other sources report higher numbers for the waters off Somalia and also presents numbers for the rest of the world.

The International maritime bureau piracy reporting centre (IMB PRC), an independent body set up to monitor attacks, reports 176 incidents, including 10 hijackings, worldwide so far 2013. Out of these 10 reported incidents, including two hijackings, off Somalia and 28 reported incidents including two hijackings off Nigeria.  There are also still 57 hostages hold by Somali pirates.

The total numbers are lower than 2010, but security issues are still important and must be addressed more widely than has been the case for the last years when Somalia piracy has taken all the focus and let the situation get worse off Nigeria without getting international attention. It is clear that piracy arises as a result of situations on land but also needs special conditions at sea to grow.

The maritime community needs to more effectively identify emerging areas and factors on land and at sea that can let piracy to grow. Hopefully also the blooming security industry can be harnessed for the good of maritime security and assist in analyzing emerging problems, which however needs more openness in security matters than has been the case off Somalia...

Costa Concordia: parbuckling, blisters, a lot of cement and almost 20 months of preparations for an 8 hour job!

Giving good weather the salvage of Costa Concordia will be performed during September, nearly 20 months after the accident in January 2012. The accident took the lives of 32 persons of which still two are missing and will be search for when the ship is upright again. The legal aftermath is still going on; four out of the crew and one company official has been sent to jail in July and the ship's captain Francesco Schettino’s trial for manslaughter and causing the loss of the ship is still going on.

Around and on the ship there has now been a lot of activity preparing for the salvage including blisters for buoyancy and supporting the bow and a foundation made of cement to keep the ship from sliding away. But before that also a lot planning and preparing for a thing that only will be performed ones. That’s what I think is so cool with salvage operations, they are always unique and it really pays off thinking before you act and choosing an alternative based on setting safety and reliability first.

This very clear example of thinking before you act is off course also, especially for Costa Concordia, in bright contrast to the chaotic evacuation of the passengers and crew after the accident as well as the choice of unnecessary risky route for the ship.

But no matter the level of preparations; the salvage is still unique and unprecedented in size. I really hope that it will work smoothly!

"Is it rational to minimize the expected utility?" - The Northern Sea Route case

The Swedish risk philosopher S.O. Hansson published in 1993 a paper with the title “The false promise of risk analysis” were he discussed five problems with risk analysis as it was used then (and now). The fifth problem was that it has to be rational to minimize the expected utility, which among other things means that the risks discussed has to be comparable. One example of risks that are not comparable is two risks with about the same expected value (probability times consequence) but with totally different levels of consequence, i.e. one very unlikely catastrophic event compared to a rather common event with a low level of consequences.

The Northern Sea Route case:

At the moment the ice along the Northern Sea Route, from Asia to Europe to the north of Russia, is at its season low and the amount of ships passing thru the route this year is expected to be ten times the number of ships that passed through the route only three years ago. The northern sea route takes weeks off the voyage which off course saves resources such as fuel. The route also at the moment is pirate free. Therefore the northern sea route is a win for everybody (except for the ones making money on ships taking other routes) the ship owners, the consumers but maybe especially the environment. This is true until there is accidents on the route were the cold climate makes the consequence of an accident so much severe. An oil spill in cold waters is very problematic, but also other consequences of an accident are worse because of cold water and scarcely populated areas.

If we would calculate the environmental risks for a ship with the traditional route thru the Suez Canal and compare them to the risks with the northern passage my GUESS is that the risk for the traditional route is higher, but the risk with the northern passage is potentially more catastrophic. Which is worse? I don’t know but the environmental organizations in media seem to think that the northern route is the worst alternative.

So here we have a good example of a case where it is hard to compare the expected risks, but also where it is difficult to obtain reasonable utility estimates which is Hansson’s third problem with risk analysis.

Reference: Hansson, S. O. (1993). "The false promise of risk analysis." Ratio-New Series 6(1): 16-26.