Among others, the best preventive means are the training programs
which, despite being of the theoretical type, will place people in better conditions to
face the responsibilities that the maritime adventure carries.
All the aspects and criteria mentioned constitute the day to day
routine for prevention and general safety of the ship, and especially the one
corresponding to fire; however, they are possible actions which are expected to be
adequate to known risks, since only minimal measures have been followed, which are
compelled to be fulfilled by logic and/or the experience of the marine and above all by
the legislations and technologies that are being incorporated into the maritime activity.
In case of fire, the extraordinary conditions created aboard condition
the human factor in such a way that a certain disability to learn by acting is manifested.
All happens too rapidly, the phases of the fire permit to live only the immediate second,
always counting that panic confusion and the impotence of seeing what is escaping from our
hands do not appear.
Later, supposing that fire is controlled and extinguished, the usual
knowledge of the current officialdom does not permit to assume the arduous task of
investigating the causes, unless these are evident and hit you in the eye. That should not
be seen as incompetence but rather as the need of restoring, as soon as possible, the
minimal conditions in the ship to return to safe navigation, with which unwillingly,
proofs that might have led to the detection of the real causes are destroyed.
Whatever the reason, the case is that finally, when the maritime
accident report due to fire is carried out, only the most evident is complimented, many
times without relevancy and only valid to provide information of the journalistic type,
always without reaching the depth and rigor necessary to be used as a data base which
could be analysed with reasearch attitude to obtain profit for actions that could be
widely applied in the sector.
The official forms in use, even when wanting to know the case in the
necessary extension depth, only permit to show the superficiality of what should
constitute an investigation due to fire, quite different from what is accomplished in
similar cases in other industrial activities with expert researchers.
Therefore, it is necessary to have new criteria that can be considered
by the people responsible in Maritime Administrations and especially by the affected in an
accident (officialdom of the ships and their shipowners), so that both groups provide
solutions of a positive character to the current risk situations that mercantile ships
suffer (still insufficiently known), for the benefit of a manifest reduction of the large
losses in materials, goods and human lives.
STATISTICS
As the most meaningful datum previously cited, and in general terms, it
is demonstrated that in a very high percentage (22,47 %), the registered accidents do not
envisage neither the exact cause nor even an approximate one that motivated the accident,
what induces to think that, if the information received is just an amount of computer data
and computer crossings, the subsequent investigating phase to any
