The cruise industry trade organization, Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), announced with great fanfare a new lifeboat training policy. This is a result of what CLIA is calling the cruise industry’s "operational safety review" after the Costa Concordia disaster.
Every six months, the CLIA cruise ships will conduct lifeboat drills. The lifeboats will be lowered into the water either empty or with only a skeleton crew (probably one or two crew members) necessary to operate the life boat.
The lifeboat itself will otherwise be empty. As USA TODAY explains:
"The training will involve lowering a lifeboat into the water, filling it to capacity with crew members and then maneuvering it in the water to familiarize the crew to lifeboat operations. The crew will not practice lowering a fully loaded lifeboat."
The new policy is suppose ensure the public that the crew knows how to safely lower the lifeboats. But let’s be clear what this "new" policy is and is not about.
It is only after the lifeboat is lowered will it then be filled up with crew members (this is actually the same IMO policy which has existed for the past 4 years). The lifeboat operator will then practice driving the loaded boat around for a while. The crew will eventually get out. Then the lifeboat will be raised back to the cruise ship empty.
This means that there will be no training whatsoever in loading and then lowering a fully loaded lifeboat safely into the water. So when the next disaster strikes, that means that there is a 100% certainty that whoever is lowering your life boat has never practiced it while it is loaded.
It is hard to understand why the emphasis in the "new policy" is practicing driving the lifeboats around. Watch the Royal Caribbean video below of life boats from the Serenade of the Seas driving around and around. The video has wonderful music. Its a beautiful day in Pointe Seraphine, Castries, St. Lucia. The water is completely calm. What fun!
You will never see a real emergency in pleasant conditions like this. The last person overboard from the Serenade of the Seas occurred last week (largely ignored by the U.S. press and Royal Caribbean is staying mum). A crew member went overboard in the Adriatic early in the morning in high seas with winds gusting up to 100 kilometers. The ship didn’t even try and lower a lifeboat in those conditions.
The problem with the Costa Concordia disaster was that the captain delayed ordering the passengers off the ship until the cruise ship listed to an angle where it was impossible to lower the lifeboat. There was chaos trying to round up and organize over 3,000 passenger into their designated muster stations, especially because there was no muster drill in the first place.
The "new" CLIA lifeboat drills don’t mention crowd control issues, language issues or anything that might reasonably address the deadly confusion which took place on the Concordia.
There are no recommendations for simulation drills or intense training, while encountering a wide variety of emergencies and diverse simulated weather conditions.
Think if a cruise ship as large as the Oasis or Allure of the Seas needs to be evacuated, The Oasis has 18 lifeboats which can carry 370 passengers in each one. Getting that many people into the lifeboat in a timely manner and then lowering the boat safely into the water takes practice – something the "new" CLIA policy guarantees won’t ever happen.
The truth of the matter is that some cruise lines have essentially discontinued lifeboats drills (actually lowering the lifeboats) because of the numerous injuries and some deaths during the drills. 10 years ago Royal Caribbean experienced a disastrous accident where numerous crew members sustained serious injuries.
There is a saying that most lifeboats injure or kill more passengers and crew than save lives. Lifeboats can fall suddenly, get caught on the side of the ship or suffer malfunctions or failure of the cables and hardware. Consider the incident in the video at the bottom which, although not involving a cruise ship, is similar to others incidents where cruse employees were injured.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6NHgYJo09bs%3Frel%3D0
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jWXmHBoV2GM%3Frel%3D0
Photo Credit: EPA via Telegraph