permit them to increase their horizon of perspective and the scope of
their management. However, in the maritime area the average presence of managers of
shipping companies does not reach the necessary minima, especially in the preventive
aspects of integral safety, applied to fire. An adequate policy in that sense, would
permit a practical approximation agreeing with the real needs that ships suffer and its
appropriateness to the efficiency levels for such emergencies, considering that the costs
and efforts applied in the preventive areas, are justified and amply amortized in view of
the large losses and damages emerged as a consequence of an accident caused by fire.
Any alteration on the negative aspects provides immediate benefits, as
it occurs with the preventive and protective measures applied in any of the fields of
safety. However, how much can a situation be amended without having sufficient judgement
elements to intervene in the correct sense and intensity?. The problems of safety are
treated almost always from an optic of consummated facts, that is to say, decisions appear
easily when damages are so worrying and reach such importance, that it is unavoidable to
intervene with some measure, applying temporary remedies patching things up, later
evaluated as insufficient.
Establishing inspection and maintenance programs, faithfully formalized
to the characteristics and needs of equipments, so that they were always in a good
utilization state, being ready to use.
The ship, subjected by her construction and the updating of her
equipment to the requirements of International Agreements, will have some facilities and
operation procedures that carried out strictly assure some minimal safety conditions when
faced with accident risks. Nevertheless, the whole set will depend on the real conditions
of the equipment, according to the preventive maintenance to which it will be submitted,
both in frequency and in the quality of its execution.
The knowledge of the state previous to an accident will only be
quantifiable insofar, between periods of maintenance, recognition inspections are made,
which at the same time, according to the kindness of the procedure, will permit to detect
deficiencies and anomalies long in advance to be corrected with their own means or with
those of specialized workshops at the first port of landfall.
This previous knowledge must not only be expected from the maritime
safety inspectors or from ship inspection through the specifications contained in the
Memorandum of Paris or others, but also from the internal management of the ship, in a
preventive zeal that increases the safety of life at sea.
For this, aids for avoiding improvisation will be specified having
specific checklists on adequate computer medium.
Meanwhile, the crew as the second internal determining factor, presents
the most important nuances of the topic, upon constituting the complex human factor,
abandoned to a second place some years ago, and later becoming the coldest and most tragic
current issue because of the recent maritime accidents, even though not always treated
with equality, at least in the first appraisals of the determining causes.
