By Michael Grey*
Without delving too deep into any debates about gender, some of us are better than others at « multi-tasking ». But the arrival of hand-held, portable communication devices has led to us all, at some time, communicating, when our attention should have been upon something more urgent. It is why many governments now ban the use of mobile phones while driving a road vehicle; a thoroughly sensible idea until you wake up to the fact the daft digitisers in automotive design have inflicted touchscreens to further distract drivers from their main task of staying on the road.
In a maritime context, the potential distraction of mobile devices aboard ship has been a matter of debate, practically from the day they first went to sea. The list of casualties where such distraction has been a contributor, if not the sole cause, has lengthened over the years and still features in reports. Just recently there came a US National Transportation Safety Board report into a fatal collision in a US river, where a bulk carrier ran down a towboat causing the death of a crew member.
In this particular case, the pilot of the large ship had been engaged in an extensive nonwork-related conversation with a colleague over his phone, while simultaneously uttering helm orders. The bridge team were heavily criticised for tolerating this behaviour, although they seemed to lack the necessary confidence to ask the pilot to be more attentive to his duties. You do not need much of a memory to recall the vastly expensive grounding of a containership in another US port with precisely the same root cause, just a couple of years ago, so this message did not universally register.
Preventable cause of marine incidents
Distraction is surely well recognised by now as a regular but mostly preventable cause of marine accidents, some of them bordering on the comical, such as the recordings of a master giving his agent ashore a piece of his mind, as his second officer sought unsuccessfully to alert him to the fact that he was conning his chemical tanker onto a sandbank. It is not always communication that is the problem; well informed officers will treasure the report of the OOW carefully scrolling down the arrival checklist as the vessel prematurely arrived at the berth.
The saga of the garbage reporting form that was indirectly responsible for the cruise ship clouting a box-boat will live for ever in the archives. But lives have been lost, vast environmental harm has been caused and careers blighted by distraction, so we maybe should not joke about these things.
The multi-tasking factor
Distraction comes in many forms, but one fundamental is that too few people are trying to do too many things at the same time. It is welcome that at long last, the classification societies are trying to get some order into the proliferation of alarms from equipment, that drives people crazy at their particular coal face. If they succeed, it will be a blessed relief.
Is it sensible to institute bans on the use of mobile phones, as some operators have done, as a means of reducing the risk of distraction? The current Nautical Institute Seaways magazine has an excellent discourse on the subject where the author, Captain James Foong FNI suggests that the issue « is not the device, but the discipline ». It is a wide-ranging article, noting that distraction comes in manifold forms, from the more familiar problem on a busy bridge or engine control room, to somebody pre-occupied with their device walking into hazards on deck from falling objects or swinging loads. »In a high-risk situation, » Captain Foong points out, « divided attention can kill ».
But he also emphasises how many are the « business cases » for the use of the mobile phone, which convert the device from a convenience into an essential tool for all manner of functions. Sharing photographs of equipment, recording incidents, and in so many other ways, the phone has become invaluable. The phone, he notes « is an essential modern tool; a camera, notebook, calculator, torch, translator, communication device, evidence recorder and personal safety aid ». Discipline in its use needs to be enforced, and who could disagree with this commonsense approach.
(Dreamstime images of mobile phone and ship captain at helm)
*Michael Grey is former editor of Lloyd’s List This column is published with the kind permission of The Maritime Advocate.