Getting Home Safe

20 March 2008 14:32

How can cruise shipping manage the issues of size? New ships being planned today will carry well over 8,000 people. How can they be kept safe and evacuated if there is a fire, collision or grounding?

IMO has set down new regulations which are aimed at protecting core systems and allowing the ship to get safely to port after an incident. MSC82 agreed amendments to SOLAS which detail the casualty threshold concept that is the amount of damage a ship must be able to withstand and still safely return to port. The amendments also provide regulatory flexibility so that ship designers can meet any safety challenges the future may bring, extending the alternative design provisions implemented in Ch II-1 and III. These new concepts of casualty threshold, safe return to port capabilities and safe area will apply on new ships having length of 120m or more, or having three or more main vertical zones.

Although the amendments come into force in 2010, it is ships under project now which will have to comply, to give series builders time to gear up. There are two key areas which class, authorities, owners and yards will have to work on. The first is to improve redundancy. There will have to be more systems and better boundaries between systems, so that the ship can maintain power and movement even after sustaining quite bad damage. And there will have to be a much greater focus on risk analysis to clearly examine and define what the risks are, opening the way for innovative solutions to layout and construction which will raise casualty thresholds.

Bureau Veritas is already working on these concepts, applying its extensive experience of risk analysis in many industries. And BV is also a class leader in the Safecraft working party, which is setting criteria to evaluate new, high capacity evacuation systems. Size can be managed, and big ships can be safe, but there are some big challenges ahead for everyone in cruise shipping.

Bureau Veritas is one of the largest classification and certification society worldwide (2nd in terms of number of ships classed: 8,000 in 2008). Its interventions are carried out by more than 1,200 exclusive marine surveyors located in 330 survey centers in 140 countries.

The objectives of Bureau Veritas are to improve and maintain maritime standards of safety, security, quality and protection of environment in providing a large range of services in the maritime field:

• Classification of ships and offshore units
• Certification and issuance of statutory certificates on behalf of more 125 Government and Flag authorities
• Technical assistance services and consulting by its subsidiary Tecnitas
• Information systems and services with its VeriSTAR familly software and its specialised website
• Training facilities in the marine technical and regulatory field

Bureau Veritas class around 16 per cent of the new passengerships under construction , with some significant orders being a fourth 1.275 cabins Musica-class cruise liner for MSC to be built at Aker Yards St Nazaire, and two 65.000GT cruise vessels for Oceania Cruises at Fincantieri Sestri with delivery in 2010 and 2011.

Another significant order was the ro-pax vessel for Louis Dreyfus Armateurs, 950 passengers and 1,500 lane meters to be built for the first time at Singapore Technologies Marine Ltd.

Deliveries in 2007 included the 2,550-passenger MSC Orchestra, which was built at Aker Yards, St Nazaire as the second of now four sister ships. It is already in service in the Mediterranean cruise trade, where its Comfort Class and CleanShip notations are proving their worth in practice.

Aker Yards St Nazaire is currently building two 3,300-passenger vessels of over-panamax size to BV class for MSC Cruises, the MSC Fantasia and the MSC Splendida. They will be the first cruise ships with BV's highest environmental notation, CleanShip-Super-AWT, when they are delivered in November 2008 and spring 2009.