Port States Announce Safety of Navigation Campaign

The Tokyo and the Paris MoUs have announced a joint Concentrated Inspection Campaign (CIC) on safety of navigation commencing from September 1.

The campaign will run for three months and will involve compliance checks relating to the SOLAS Convention, the overall status of the vessel’s navigation safety and the competency of crew involved in navigation operations.

The Tokyo MoU and the Paris MoU conducted a joint CIC for SOLAS Chapter V concerning safety of navigation in 2008. Since that time, the regulations for navigation equipment have undergone frequent changes and ECDIS has been introduced. Port state control officers will use a list of 12 questions with ECDIS being a focus area.

Deficiencies relating to navigation equipment contribute a major proportion of the total deficiencies, said the Paris MoU in a statement. From 2009 to 2016, a total of 174,559 deficiencies concerning safety of navigation were recorded, accounting for 15.27 percent of all deficiencies.

It is expected that the Tokyo and Paris MoUs will carry out approximately 10,000 inspections during the CIC.

The Paris MoU released its full annual report for 2016 last month highlighting an increase in bans within the region: 20 bans compared to 11 in 2015. The detention rate has also increased from 3.4 to 3.8 percent.  

The five most frequently recorded deficiencies in 2016 were ISM (4.4 percent, 1,838), fire doors/openings in fire-resisting divisions (2.6 percent, 1,078), nautical publications (2.5 percent, 1,049), charts (2.2 percent, 922) and oil record book (1.7 percent, 706). 

Port state control officers in the Paris MoU region performed a CIC on the Maritime Labour Convention from September to November 2016. Over 3,600 questionnaires were completed during regular inspections. The campaign resulted in 42 detentions (1.1 percent). 

The MoU's 2015 CIC relating to enclosed spaces resulted in 54 detentions.