Accidents hurt, they cause upset, diminish the profits of the shareholders and they are mostly unnecessary. In fact statistics abound that most accidents at sea are caused by human error rather than mechanical failure. Alongside this statistic is the fact that most humans who have erred say "but it just happened" or "honest it wasn't me guv". The fact that the 'human' might be saying such a thing whilst sitting on the beach watching the ship go down like a lead weight is a costly failure and comes with the possible loss of life.

Simply put humans are not perfect and through tiredness, lapse of judgement or illness mistakes will occur.

These statistics nearly always tend to pin the tail on the donkey of the man at the lower end of the totem pole. If a ship sinks it is (from a desk job point of view) invariably the fault of the Captain who should have turned to port instead of starboard. The previously mentioned Captain will invariably mutter to himself that it was the mate who called the shot or the helmsman who didn't know his bum-cheeks from his elbow. If an engine decides to blow a crank out of its side the failure will be blamed on the Chief who should have spotted the rising temps before it occurred. The Chief will invariably blame the duty engineer who in turn will probably smack the greaser for having a cup of tea instead of sitting by engine for 28hours of everyday!

Unsafe incidents will always happen and it is not suitable to meet the causes of such by blaming somebody and saying that it was their fault. It is necessary to look beyond the blame factor to ascertain if a particular accident could be prevented from re-occurring and to implement change however costly to make certain that this is so. Taking this to extremes; if human error is to blame for the majority of accidents, by simply replacing a workforce with robots and ugly-looking mechanised androids with one eye safety standards should increase dramatically. Oh, and if an accident does occur there will only be a few metal limbs to sort out and no tears shed! Cost though generally overrides this from becoming common practice thankfully but it does go to show that safety standards are linked directly to a company's profit margin.

Without increasing unemployment rates to 90% of the population robots are not really viable but other practices that could be implemented at cost never are. Take for example the engineer who constantly finds himself blamed for overfilling bunker tanks, causing mass spills on ecologically preserved beaches and killing off millions of birds and animals some of which are now extinct due to his incompetence. This Engineer obviously has a personal problem and although he should be prevented from being involved in filling up fuel tanks maybe from a safety point of view the fuel could be taken away from the engineer! If there is no fuel the chance of an oil spill occurring is about, erm, zero! So perhaps companies should return to the sail, oars and coal!

Governments and companies seriously attempt to portray a picture of the ultimate safe working place. Policy notices abound that state categorically that the main goal of the chairman and his hangers-on is to protect the environment and the safety of their employees. Whilst quite clearly the main goal is in fact an ongoing quest to fill their pockets and those of the shareholders with as much dosh as they can possibly imagine.

The 'cliff study' is a prime example of misplaced solutions that effectively appeases the population but maintains a balance as far as the cheque book goes! There is a cliff and over the years ramblers and short-sighted people keep on falling over the edge to become pancakes at the bottom. The local council realise that with regard to winning the next election they need to appease the population so they build a little hut at the bottom of the cliff and put a red cross on it. A local layabout is given a crash course in first aid and paid to man this booth! Total cost of project: $500 for the hut from B & Q, $8000 in yearly wages at the minimum rate and $20 for a packet of plasters and a box of aspirins. What they should have done is to build a fence around the cliff which would come to about $50,000! Work that one out!

Cost will always play a starring role in current levels of safety and without tying oneself to railway tracks with three inch chain or going on a hunger strike outside Buckingham Palace this will always be so, even with this feeble attempt to gain justice nothing will change! Safety standards as far as any employee is concerned are a direct result of how much input is given to the bureaucracy that is in place. At sea various statutes, governmental bodies and others have input as to how safe a vessel actual is. This input is regulated and governed by a massive library of rules and regulations that control and maintain every single aspect of safety on-board and to which all parties must adhere. The fact that it would take decades of reading to get through every single clause and sub clause and that some of the clauses are so twisted in obscurity that even a master decoder would give up on is by the by!

These systems have been put in place so that should an accident occur a trail of paperwork will lead to the door of the person whose fault it was. This does sound like life is slipping back to the easy blame factor but the difference is that by using these systems correctly the blame, from the point of view of the shipping Industry, can be directed to were it is deserved, the office or seafarers alike. Should the office be in any way negligent by simply filling out the correct form this is forever documented. And should the office not act upon the contents of the form, and should an accident then occur then documents exists to prove such and it becomes harder for the office moles to worm out from underneath the evidence.

Used correctly these systems are the only means by which the average seafarer is going to get anywhere close to justice. So use them, but not too often as the paperwork is horrendous!