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Occupational risk assessment of Bunkering Operations on Merchant Marine Vessels

Kakouris Georgios

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Summary

Globalization is constantly increasing the need to transport raw materials and products between countries; a substantial proportion of world trade, almost 90%, is carried out by sea. As bunkering is one of the most basic functions of ships, its importance is readily apparent.In the period from 2014 to 2022, 542 cases of pollution were reported: 290 (53.5%) cases for cargo ships, 86 (15.9%) for fishing vessels, 82 (15.1%) for service ships, 71 (13.1%) for passenger ships, and 13 (2.4%) for other types of vessels (European Maritime Safety Agency 2023).What is common about these accidents is the fact that they are not due to the leakage of cargo oil. Instead, marine pollution by ship’s bunkers (fuel) and other pollutants (e.g., cargo residues, lubricating oils, or hydraulic oils) corresponded to 64.2% of all pollution. From 2014 to 2018, an unsettling trend has been observed by many P&I clubs: the majority, an estimated 18%, of all pollution incidents handled by their claims teams were caused by bunker spills (Gard 2019) (UK P&I 2018) (Japan P&I Club 2021). This figure represents the majority of oil spills due to marine casualties. It is evident that, while the measures currently in place have steadily reduced the occurrence of accidents, there is still room for improvement regarding the understanding and implementation of a safety-oriented mindset. In this study, an occupational safety hazard analysis of the bunkering process will be conducted by utilizing the method of hierarchical task analysis and visualizing the results via bowtie diagrams to illustrate the inherent risks of the procedure, the preventive measures currently applied, and their efficacy. Finally, the findings will be applied to a number of case studies to verify the results of the thesis.

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