| dc.description.abstract | Our topic for this task is:
“Causal factors that contribute to grounding of cargo vessels” The maritime industry has long had a strong focus on safety and through our learning’s in Nautical Studies; we’ve found that there are countless laws, regulations and protocols (IMO, SOLAS) in place to hinder accidents. But navigational accidents still happen at sea. So we’ve tasked ourselves to analyze and identify contributing causal factors that lead to grounding of cargo vessels in British waters.
First, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the various accidents, we’ve used a qualitative method to analyze seven different investigation reports that refers to groundings. All the vessels in these reports have been investigated by the United Kingdom’s authorities. Second, each investigation report has been analyzed with the help of “The human factors analysis & classification system” framework, in order to reveal which casual factors lay behind each navigational accident. “The human factors analysis & classification system” framework specifically focuses on revealing factors in four different categories, unsafe acts committed by the vessel’s crew, precondition for these unsafe acts, unsafe supervision and organizational influences.
Our study revealed that all the analyzed accidents had at least one common factor (decision-based error) that contributed to each accident taking place, furthermore all analyzed reports contained multiple organizational failures that had affected the crew’s mentality and work ethics prior to the accidents. We could therefore conclude with that all accidents have had a mixture of both human actions and organizational influences that made it possible for the various accidents to take place, and that those human actions were a result of the organizational influences. | nb_NO |
