The CHIRP Maritime 2020 Safety Digest has been released, an impressive 106 page report of the many incidents and cases it featured in its quarterly safety publications last year. The pdf can be downloaded at the end of the article. The following text is extracted from the introduction to the CHIRP Maritime 2020 Safety Digest, written by editor, Capt Alan Loynd.
Welcome to the fifth annual review of CHIRP Maritime reports, covering all the cases we published during 2020 and including a number of in-depth articles specially commissioned to highlight important safety topics. This has been a strange and disturbing year, dominated by Covid-19 and the global disruptions it has caused.
The impact upon shipping has been particularly severe, both as a result of infections and outbreaks at sea and because it has been so difficult to arrange crew changes. Many seafarers are still at sea months after they should have been relieved – they are continuing to shoulder their burdens with courage and fortitude. As I write this, our crew change problems have still not been resolved, and it is a tribute to the world’s seafarers that they have continued sending us their reports despite all the difficulties they are facing. At CHIRP Maritime we tried to do something for our colleagues at sea, and commissioned experts to produce guidance for serving seafarers. The guidance was published as a booklet entitled ‘Seafarer wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic’ which was widely circulated within the maritime community and the papers, including medical advice, are reproduced in this Annual Digest – where our Health section appears first to reflect its importance.
As always, we are guided by our Maritime Advisory Board (MAB) who are an outstanding group of men and women with over 700 years of combined shipping experience. They volunteer to vet our reports and provide comments and expertise, and also contribute many of the Insight articles which appear in the Annual Digest.
We continue to receive approaches from organisations around the world who wish to cooperate with us, which is proof that we are contributing to safety in many ways. Once again, we have divided the Digest into themed sections to assist readers to find the topics which most interest them, but we seem to be receiving even more reports which could be allocated to several different sections. I am not sure whether this means incidents are becoming more complex, or whether our analysis is becoming more sophisticated, but we urge you to study all the sections because they all contain reports which will be of interest both to seafarers and people in shore positions. One message which does come through, unfortunately, is that not all companies are able to demonstrate a robust safety culture, so there is still a great deal of work to do to reach our goal of ensuring that every seafarer returns home safely at the end of every tour of duty. Within most sections you will also find Insight articles that illuminate topics covered in that section or provide additional information. They are written by experts and are well worth reading.
All our videos, publications and databases are easy to access through our website, so we hope you will look at them when time permits. For more detailed and focused research, we recommend the searchable database on the website.
We hope you will find the CHIRP Maritime 2020 Safety Digest both interesting and informative. Your feedback and comments are important, and we read them all to ensure CHIRP Maritime continues to provide the information you need to make our industry safer.
Dowload the digest in pdf format: CHIRP Maritime 2020 Safety Digest
