event was not carried out by any of the involved parts (crew,
Classification Society, Administration) with the necessary involvement.
At the same time, in another 10% neither the place nor the ship
department in which the facts occurred, although both aspects are required by the OMI as
indispensable requirements that should appear in the report of an accident, even though
this obligation concerns to the relationship with the Administration and not with
particular entities.
Having analyzed different responsible sources that issue reports on
maritime accidents, the following conclusions stand out:
a) Some are based on technical and structural criteria studies, with a
good investigation of the causes and a preventive action in establishing recommendations
or procedures may avoid future similar cases, even though they make a short description of
the magnitude of the damages produced. Frequently, they do not make reference to the
action of crew to control the fire, fire-extinguisher agents used, time employed for the
extinction, result of the intervention, etc.
b) In other sources, the description of the damages reaches an
acceptable level by the details provided. The explanation of the actions carried out, it
is also of a middle level, though they do not give them special emphasis because they do
not put them in specific paragraph differenciated from other notable aspects. They offer a
paragraph with comments, achieving to detect defective points in the conditions and real
circumstances aboard related to the crew, even though the cause of fire is not always
determined they also recommend a specific training in that field and the improvement of
internal organization.
c) Finally, the third style shows a scarce description of damages, and
the determination of the causes is provided more by experience than by the investigation
of the event. Moreover, in a similar way to what was said for the previous case, neither
the aspects of the action nor the details of the intervention have a separate paragraph,
being included within the paragraph relating the causes, even though they have a greater
degree of details, though with few precisions of technical character on the equipment
used, etc.
Based on the mentioned comments, it can be said that the composition
and content of the three types of reports considered separately, do not provide a solid
support for the investigation of fire, while the desirable report would be the compendium
of the aspects that better promote each of them, that is, the technical aspects about
damages, the operation of the intervention, the investigation of causes and prevention
with the resulting regulatory procedures from the analysis from the other three.
In general terms, each piece of information provides a source of data
of interest for the achievement of certain objectives, especially for the own source that
has generated them.
Many of the people present have participated as experts at the request
of a third party or the judge in legal causes for the determination of civil or penal
responsibilities on account of maritime accidents. The report that we issued is based on
the written statements and reports presented by the people that lived the accident. The
greater the number of variables described, objetive sensations lived by their
