Alan Pollock of the National Transportation Safety Board characterizes efforts in several forums to improve cruise vessel safety in this way:
”We`re in a race with a catastrophe.”
What he means, he said, is that a cruise ship disaster would create overwhelming pressure for new safety regulations, but he would rather take preventive action.
Major steps in ship safety have followed great disasters: the General Slocum fire, which killed 950 people in 1904, brought tighter requirements for life saving gear and fire fighting equipment; and the Titanic, with its loss of 1,500 lives in 1912, brought rules on life saving devices and certifying of lifeboat personnel.
The Andrea Doria crash in 1956, in which 47 died, inspired requirements that ship hulls be divided by steel bulkheads.
When the Yarmouth Castle burned and sank in 1965, taking 90 lives, Congress banned wood construction on passenger ships. And the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations body with headquarters in London, enacted similar regulations when it overhauled the Safety of Life at Sea code in 1974.
Despite these reforms and improvements, Pollock believes that the cruise ship industry has been lucky there haven`t been more fatalities during the last decade.
Pollock fears that Congress, the Coast Guard and the International Maritime Organization are not moving fast enough to mandate safeguards.
Safety experts are primarily concerned with three issues: fire protection, particularly in the big atriums of new cruise ships; the ability of crew members in charge of safety to give instructions in a language that passengers understand; and the aging of the world fleet of cruise ships.
American passengers frequently assume that any ship they board in a U.S. port has met all Coast Guard safety requirements, an idea that is reinforced by ”Coast Guard approved” labels on most life jackets and fire systems on smaller boats and domestic ferries.
In fact, the Coast Guard gives four inspections a year to ships that dock in the United States, but when the vessel is registered in another country, the Coast Guard only makes sure that the ship provides whatever is required by international Safety of Life at Sea regulations: twice as many lifeboat seats as potential passengers, for instance, and life jackets for 125 percent of capacity, and that the equipment is in good condition.
Once a year, the Coast Guard observes an evacuation drill. If equipment is not in order, the Coast Guard can prevent the boarding of passengers until things are up to snuff.
The application of the rules is not universal: the older the vessel, the less stringent the requirements because Safety of Life at Sea rules have grandfather clauses.
A vessel need comply only with the rules in effect at the time the keel was laid or it last underwent a major reconstruction. When the rules were initially adopted by the International Maritime Organization, it was assumed that older vessels would pass out of service, but this did not happen, according to Marjorie Murtagh of the Coast Guard, the U.S. fire safety representative at the International Maritime Organization.
Of the 100 large vessels now operating from U.S. ports-all but two of them of foreign registry-72 are more than 10 years old, 23 are more than 20 years old and 26 are more than 30 years old, according to figures in the the Coast Guard magazine Proceedings of the Marine Safety Council. Thus, 70 percent of vessels visiting the United States need not meet the most recent international rules, enacted in 1974 to cover ships built after May 1980.
However, everyone who deals with these figures points out that age is not an automatic indicator of an unsafe vessel. For instance, the Britanis was built in 1932 of steel in a design that was not required until after the Andrea Doria.
Rear Adm. Joel D. Sipes, former chief of the Coast Guard`s Office of Marine Safety, testified in Congress this spring: ”We have been concerned for a number of years that the grandfather clauses create an incentive to bring more and more older ships back into service. We already see an aging of the fleet, and a resurgence in refurbishment without safety upgrading.”
However, the casualty rate on cruise ships has been low in recent years. The National Transportation Safety Board in 1989 published a study of 36 accidents in 15 years on vessels that touched United States ports. Of the 176 deaths listed, only five were aboard ocean-going cruise vessels under foreign flags.
William A. O`Neil, Secretary General of the International Maritime Organization, fears that may change, partly because of the leeway that the grandfather rules give for refitting. ”The average age of ships today is 16 years, which is already fairly elderly in shipping terms, and old ships need more maintenence and repair,” he said in a statement last month.
In May, the safety committee of the International Maritime Organization met in London and started the process of amending the Safety of Life at Sea rules.
The proposed amendments, which are supported by most of the member countries, require that new ships` atriums have smoke-detection systems, smoke-exhaust systems, two means of escape and an automatic sprinkler system. The committee also discussed phasing out the grandfather rules. One peculiar gap in existing regulations involves vessels built under the 1974 rules, which banned wood construction, but for the first time did not require sprinkler systems.
Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the United States have entered proposals to cover older vessels immediately, or to modify sharply the permissive rules.
John T. Estes, president of the International Council of Cruise Lines, which represents the owners of most of the ocean-going cruise vessels, said that his organization favored all the proposed new rules, but not the proposed effective dates.
When the safety committee met in May, it was considering phasing-in dates for the regulations beyond 1994 for new ships, possibly as late as 2010 for removal from service of vessels that cannot meet the new rules.
Estes said that to account for the lead time required for ship design, his organization favors 1996 for enforcing the rules on new construction and major reconstruction.
The 15 major cruise ships that call in New York have passed inspections without difficulty, according to Cmdr. Anthony Dupree, chief of the inspection department of the Coast Guard in New York. In U.S. ports, he said, any work usually is done quickly ”because passengers are the lines` meat and potatoes, and we can keep them from boarding.”
These inspections, done every three months, should reassure passengers, according to Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. John J. O`Brien Jr., the deputy chief.
”If you fly to another country to save a few dollars,” he said, ”let the buyer beware; you don`t know if it`s been inspected in the last year, or at all.”
On the other hand, when U.S.-registered vessels are inspected, O`Brien said, they are required to meet full Coast Guard standards, including expensive Type I life vests that are designed to be easy to get on. But there are only two U.S.-flag vessels in the cruise trade-American Hawaii Cruises`
Independence and Constitution, operating in Hawaii.
