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With
the second and final tranche of
ships due to come under the aegis of
the International Safety Management
(ISM) Code on 1 July 2002, the
International Maritime Organisation
has adopted a set of revised
guidelines on the implementation of
the ISM Code by national shipping
administrations.
The
ISM Code provides an international
standard for the safe management and
operation of ships.
The
guidelines establish basic
principles for verifying that a
shipping company’s Safety
Management System complies with the
ISM Code, for the issue and annual
verification of the Document of
Compliance for individual ships and
for the issue and intermediate
verification of the Safety
Management Certificate.
Meanwhile,
in an unexpected development the
American Bureau of Shipping has
instituted a policy under which it
would decline to issue or renew ISM
Safety Management Certificates (SMC)
on ships that it did not also
class.
One
exception to this policy was made
for certain managed fleets in
response to industry
representations.
This
policy was jointly decided upon and
implemented by ABS, Det Norkse
Veritas and Lloyds Register.
The
announcement sparked a great deal of
discussion within the industry and
elicited some opposition from
certain shipowner groups.
It
quickly became clear that the
reasoning behind the decision, and
its practical implications had been
widely misunderstood.
The
classification societies were, in
effect, declining business to
protect their reputations.
Within
the ambit of the ISM Code, the first
warning flag to the classification
society that it may be a dealing
with a rule beater is when an
operator has selected one
classification society to class the
ship, another class society for the
Document of Compliance, and a third
class society for the Safety
Management Certificate.
The
code permits such split
responsibilities and there are some
responsible operators who may have
adopted such a pattern for a
legitimate reason. But for the rest
it is often a transparent attempt to
thumb their nose at the
internationally agreed safety
standards designed to protect ships,
their crews and the world’s
coastlines by compartmentalising the
classification and certification
authorities—by “dividing to
conquer”.
The
three societies have decided to
limit their offering of SMC
certification services to ships that
they class, and to require a simple
evaluation of the effectiveness of
the safety management system at the
time of the annual class survey,
regardless of whether they also
issued the SMC or not.
The
one exception occurs when a
shipmanager has contracted with a
single body for the DOC and for the
SMCs for the entire fleet, although
the ships themselves may be classed
with several different
societies.
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