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Cocktails and cock ups

Published November 7, 2007 in misunderstood, Tankers, accident and From the ship. 0 Comments

I read a report the other day about a tanker that had mixed her cargo onboard involuntarily. It’s not the first time a cargo cocktail has happened and probably won’t be the last either. In this particular case there was a valve open that should have been shut, a case of misunderstanding between the mate and the pumpman. The misunderstanding cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time and used a savage amount of paper for all the report writing which hindsight is so good at. The valve that was left open allowed one grade to mix with another, for example petrol with diesel, ok if you are driving a Soviet WW2 tank but not great for performance cars. On my last ship every valve had an electronic tell tale, so if the valve was open it was green on the control panel, and shut it was white and in between it was a % figure, and any problems there was a warning flashing red alarm. In the above case there was some kind of manual up-dating which was obviously not working. The electronics are not fool proof but they help, there is no idiot proof system, but if the idiots slow down they become normal. When I was cadet about 15 years ago when one of the ships I was on simultaneously pumped diesel up a petrol line and petrol up the diesel line, destroying 2 shore tanks full of their respective products, this incident brought about more control of events and name tags on manifolds and a pre-cargo operations meeting agreeing which pipes were connected to where and what was going to happen when, reducing the likelihood of the same thing happening again.

It happened again in our new report from the other day, on a modern ship. Why? Trying to do things quickly and not in a controlled manner, the pumpman opened a valve that would be needed later, trying to save time, or save himself opening and closing the valve a few times. One of my colleagues a Captain retiring in a week or so after 45 years at sea said of the incident “you never hear them say, take your time boys and get it right, we prefer to have a slow turn around than a load of paper work after an incident” all you do hear is buzz phrase generator speak about quality systems and ISO 5 million and 1. All the quality systems in the world won’t stop incidents due to hasty actions.

Buzz

Buzz phrase generator, combine one word from each column. Sound familiar?

Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

Stone deaf

Published June 21, 2007 in misunderstood, Language and On the ship. 0 Comments

One of the crew was pronounced deaf by 2 of the officers, they had apparently deduced this fact because they claimed he did not respond to them when they spoke to him directly. The fact of the matter was that he was not deaf at all, he just hadn’t a clue what was being said to him, so he got nervous and froze. Unfortunately he froze for the same 2 guys at different instances. He also asked them to repeat what they had said, so they did but he still didn’t understand and he had a facial expression to match totally spaced out looking with a wrinkled brow and eyes darting about like goldfish in a small bowl. They of course added this to the list of evidence of deafness. But he just didn’t understand their dialect, so he would ask others to explain too scared to ask again because he thought they would shout if he asked too much, of course they would shout, they thought he was deaf!
He was a bit nervous at the best of times anyway, he got a bit of spray splashed onto his face when climbing the foremast and he thought the ship was sinking! The sun was shining and the weather was beautiful he just got a few drops of spray on his cheek, but it was enough for him to get a panic attack and he wrapped himself arms and legs around the mast and called for help on the radio, but he had the receiver volume turned down so he didn’t hear the bridge calling him back and asking what he needed help with, this time the old man witnessed the event and heard the previous damning evidence. So the mate had to go up and get him down from the mast, when he got there he started shouting at the small figure clinging to the mast (because he believed him to be deaf) the sailor of course figured he was getting a bollocking so he said nothing of course! He was hauled down like a sack of spuds, then he started bawling crying out of the shame of being manhandled in front of the whole ships compliment.
When I tried to prove that his hearing was ok, it was already too late, his detractors had already made his supposed deafness a reality. Maybe he should put in a claim for a hearing aid? What?