Maritime Disaster Research Articles

Awareness and Practices on Disaster Risk Preparedness of Maritime Students

Disaster preparedness is a measure in which individuals or groups developed plans, allocated resources, and established procedures for implementing the program in case of emergency. Alarming cases of maritime disasters have occurred in the Philippines in the past years. These incidents have created damage to property and loss of lives. They have placed the credibility of maritime officers and the maritime industry in question. These cause a catastrophic impact on the environment as well as on marine life. Hence, the paper describes the level of awareness and extent of the practice of disaster risk preparedness of maritime students of St. Therese MTC Colleges, School Year 2019-2020 at Iloilo City. Likewise, it explores the awareness and extent practices of maritime students. Moreover, it determines the correlation among awareness and extent practices on disaster risk preparedness of maritime students.

Cooperative and competitive behaviour among passengers during the costa concordia disaster

Despite the increase in regulation and codes, there is a relatively small body of scientific literature on maritime disasters management, especially in terms of human factors that affect the success of the evacuation and safety procedures. This paper provides an analysis of passengers’ behaviour during the Costa Concordia disaster of 2012, in which 32 people died. We use 49 passengers’ witness statement made available by the court of Grosseto to understand how the evacuation occurred. We examine whether the main factor in reducing the effectiveness of the evacuation procedure was the lack of effective management or the behaviours among evacuees, or a combination of the two.Results of the analysis suggest that passengers reacted with solidarity, helped each other and that such spontaneous and pro-social behaviour possibly contributed to reduce the number of casualties. By contrast, competitive behaviours happened only in relation to specific environmental constraints and were limited to the proximity of safety boats.The deficiencies in command in the Costa Concordia evacuation highlights the need to increase the skills of personnel called to manage an emergency at sea and the need to create ad hoc training programs that consider also unexpected scenarios.Understanding how people (both staff and public) deal with an emergency and the factors that affect their decision is pivotal to help planners to review their strategy, anticipate similar events, and consider all the factors in future plans and regulations. While human error is always a big factor in maritime disaster, its impact can be considered and mitigated with specific procedures and adaptable plans.

Emergence of Emergency Logistics Centre (ELC): Humanitarian Logistics Operations at the Straits of Malacca

Despite the apprehension of certain parties, the demand for maritime emergency logistics has emerged following the occurrence of maritime accidents around the world while trading activities are performed. The requirement of Emergency Logistics Centre (ELC) is crucial as part of the maritime disaster preparedness at the Straits of Malacca (SOM). The ELC prevents massive losses, should any disaster occur in the rough ocean. Based on unforeseen situations at sea, this paper explores the contributing factors of the ELC in proposing and improving strategies for Kuala Linggi seaport as an ELC. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) has been employed to achieve the objectives of this paper. The outcome of this paper indicates that resource availability, risk management, and geographical factors are the three key attributes that are substantially required to transform Kuala Linggi seaport into an ELC. Furthermore, disaster preparedness, ELC supply-chain management system, and safety procedures are the crucial components to enhance the operational efficacy at this seaport as an ELC. The findings of this research may contribute to the safety of the maritime route and disaster preparedness at the SOM.

When a maritime disaster disrupts the community: The longitudinal course of Post-traumatic stress disorder and predicted factors after Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea

BackgroundThe present study assessed acute, delayed, and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in community residents affected by the disaster, as well as the factors related to the manifestation of symptoms. MethodsA total of 2,597 community residents who lived in Jindo, where the Sewol ferry disaster occurred, participated in a survey at baseline (1.5 months); 1,228 (47%) of these respondents were followed-up 15 months later. The variables included demographic characteristics, witnessing the rescue scene, being a community volunteer, and lifetime traumatic experiences. PTSD, depression, and anxiety symptoms were measured using the Impact of Events Scale-Revised (IES-R), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CESD), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), respectively. An assessment of property loss due to the Sewol ferry disaster was also included in the follow-up evaluation. ResultsThe proportion of PTSD cases among community residents at baseline and follow-up were 16.1% and 15.6% (delayed PTSD, 10.1; chronic PTSD, 5.5%), respectively. Depression and anxiety symptoms at each time point were consistently associated with acute, delayed, and chronic PTSD. Logistic regression analyses showed that anxiety symptoms at baseline predicted the delayed and chronic PTSD. Chronic PTSD was independently predicted by the witness rescue and loss of property immediately after the disaster. ConclusionsThe present findings provide important evidence supporting the need for comprehensive assessment and management of mental health problems in community residents exposed to a disaster. Financial losses experienced by community residents after a trauma must also be addressed, and psychiatric comorbidities such as depression and anxiety should be identified and treated.

“Sad and Dismal is the Story”: Memory, Preservation, and the Folk Music Tradition of Great Lakes Shipwrecks

Music has often taken maritime disasters for its theme, and Great Lakes shipwrecks claim no shortage of songs. Some were written at the time of the disaster, and others appeared years later, reviving the memory of the event. In an effort to understand the relationship between shipwrecks, folk traditions presented in music, and memory, this paper reviews as examples four famous Great Lakes shipwrecks: Lady Elgin, Eastland, Rouse Simmons (a.k.a. the Christmas Ship), and Edmund Fitzgerald. To explore the relationship between music, memory, and the potential for preservation, preliminary assessment based on exploratory survey data suggests that the exposure afforded by music and folk traditions may aid understanding and preservation through social marketing and other public outreach including education and music performances. This paper focuses on folk music but acknowledges other data and media such as archival documents, photographs, books, exhibits, and documentaries, as materials useful for creating or sharing memory and for understanding the folk songs and shipwrecks selected for consideration.

Effects of seawater immersion on open traumatic brain injury in rabbit model

We emulated instances of open traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in a maritime disaster. New Zealand rabbit animal models were used to evaluate the pathophysiological changes in open TBI with and without the influence of artificial seawater. New Zealand rabbits were randomly divided into 3 groups. Control group consisted of only normal animals. Animals in TBI and TBI + Seawater groups underwent craniotomy with dura mater incised and brain tissue exposed to free-fall impact. Afterward, only TBI + Seawater group received on-site artificial seawater infusion. Brain water content (BWC) and permeability of blood–brain barrier (BBB) were assessed. Reactive oxygen species levels were measured. Western blotting and immunofluorescence were employed to detect: apoptosis-related factors Caspase-3, Bax and Bcl-2; angiogenesis-related factors CD31 and CD34; astrogliosis-related factor glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP); potential neuron injury indicator neuron-specific enolase (NSE). Hematoxylin & eosin, Masson-trichrome and Nissl stainings were performed for pathological observations. Comparing to Control group, TBI group manifested abnormal neuronal morphology; increased BWC; compromised BBB integrity; increased ROS, Bax, CD31, CD34, Caspase-3 and GFAP expressions; decreased Bcl-2 and NSE expression. Seawater immersion caused all changes, except BWC, to become more significant. Seawater immersion worsens the damage inflicted to brain tissue by open TBI. It aggravates hypoxia in brain tissue, upregulates ROS expression, increases neuron sensitivity to apoptosis-inducing factors, and promotes angiogenesis as well as astrogliosis.

Laboratory Investigation into the Evaporation of Natural-Gas Condensate Oils: Hints for the Sanchi Oil Spill

The Sanchi oil tanker collision in the East China Sea on January 6th, 2018 has caused worldwide attention due to its uniqueness. A considerable amount of highly volatile natural-gas condensate oil was spilled, burned and sank with the Sanchi tanker, this entirely new kind of maritime disaster has posed massive unknowns to the public. In this study, for better understanding of the evaporative behavior of condensate oils, two condensate oils were investigated under various laboratory conditions. The overall result demonstrates that the evaporation of condensate oils is highly dependent on the air-exposed time and the total loss of condensate oils could be more than 90% within a short time. However, a certain amount of the high-molecular weight and toxic oil contents such as phenanthrenes still highly remain in the aquatic system even after a long evaporation process, indicating their detrimental potentials to the aquatic organisms. Based on these data, for the Sanchi oil spill accident, it is assumed that although the evaporation weathering of the total condensate oil mass is probably tremendous, the long-term ecological risks of the remaining oil components in the marine environment are strongly recommended to be carefully evaluated.

Implication of e-navigation on maritime transportation efficiency

A maritime disaster is an event which usually involves vessel collisions, grounding, fires, explosions, oil spills, marine pollution and piracy which affecting the reputation of shipowners and their competitiveness level. All these issues have been distinguished as major consequence of human error hence, the e-navigation has been developed to integrate human involvement with navigational advancement to increase the reliability of maritime operation and consequently improving the competitiveness of seaports from the perspective of foreland and overland. However, the implication of e-navigation on maritime transportation has remained ignored. As a result, extensive explorations are required to understand the integration of e-navigation in maritime transportation to ensure a comprehensive coverage of e-navigation from foreland, seaports and inland towards sustainable development as well as to overcome maritime vulnerability. In this study, Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been employed to validate the implication of e-navigation on maritime transportation by evaluating the efficiency score in this sector. The outcome indicates that safety procedure, transportation system, human resources, environment protection and security procedure are key components affecting e-navigation from the perspective of maritime transportation.

Maritime Disasters and Collective Identities: Surviving Shipwreck in Early Modern Portugal

This article focuses on one of the twelve Portuguese shipwreck narratives collected by historian Bernardo Gomes de Brito in Historia tragico-maritima (1735–36), Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, capitao, e governador de Pernambuco (1601). Several features make this account unique. Unlike the majority of the shipwrecks which occur off the southeastern African coast, this maritime disaster takes place in the Atlantic. Furthermore, the narrative's title refers to its captain and not to the name of the carrack, which ironically never completely shipwrecks, but just barely survives its arduous journey. Building on Josiah Blackmore's reading of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts as symptomatic of counter-historiographic impulse to the official textual culture of imperialism, I explore how this story of survival and rupture, while striving to represent subjectivity, in fact, disrupts the country's expansionist rhetoric by pointing instead to the emergence of collective identities. The essay explores the ways in which the narrative interrogates the individualization or subjectivization processes reflected rhetorically in the text. The formal and stylistic practices at play in the account show how shipwreck narratives of maritime disasters unsettle early modern conceptualizations of subjective and ontological experiences and reflect a plural and collective framework of thought.

Innovative solutions based on CAD of the protective barrier systems architecture for maritime disasters

Pollution of the waters of the planetary ocean is due both to the evacuation of waste water from industrial units along the sea, as well as to the operational or accidental losses that have occurred in the process of oil marine exploitation and the uncontrolled evacuation of the sentries of ships in traffic or stationary. Nowadays, in order to limit the effects of pollution, inflatable and non-inflatable systems based on composite structures are used in all riverside countries of the seas and oceans. The textile material covered with elastomeric mixture made up of special ingredients has proved to be a very successful material for marine environment applications. For establishing the design principles of a composite material, as part of a barrier protection system made of floating surface elements, used in dynamic conditions (for accidental pollution), in open water (offshore), a specialized software that enables the definition of the calculation parameters, accomplishment of the effective calculations, processing, visualization and the export of the numerical data was used.

Empathie of sensatiezucht?

Abstract Empathy or sensationalism? The shipping disaster of the ‘Berlin’ in 1907 and its aftermath In the early morning of February 21, 1907, during a fierce storm, the ferry ‘Berlin’ crashed on the pier of Hook van Holland. With 128 victims, it still is the largest maritime disaster off the Dutch coast in peacetime. Due to the enormous interest of the population, the media and the Dutch royal house, it became a major media disaster in Dutch history. How did that happen? The disaster occurred at a time when a new era was dawning by the dissemination of many new forms of media, such as film, photography and illustrated magazines. In addition, there was the special attention paid by Prince Hendrik, Queen Wilhelmina’s husband. His arrival in Hook van Holland was unprecedented, because he not only came to watch the rescue attempts, but also actively contributed to it. That made the disaster one with two faces; on the one hand, that of the lower class with the population of Hook of Holland and the brave saviors and, on the other hand, one of the upper class because of the attention paid to Prince Hendrik. All this ensured that the disaster was experienced intensely, more intensely than before.

A Comparative Analysis on Maritime Disaster Management between Korea and Sweden

The purpose of this study is to illustrate the importance of crisis management planning and effective governance by comparing and analysing cases related to crisis management in disasters. Firstly, this study analyses the sinking of the MV Sewol of Korea, one of the worst ship accidents in the world, and criticise the crisis management plan. It also applies relevant methodologies to identify how to manage incidents and how to perform them for better management. Secondly, this analyses the sinking accident and crisis management plan of MS Estonia in Sweden which is one of the worst ship accident in the world. As a result, MS Estonia disaster triggered improvements in safety policies in Sweden.
 This study argues that Korean government can learn important lessons from Sweden to avoid the "vicious cycle" that exists in South Korea's policy decisions related to safety issues. Compared with the case in Sweden, this study suggests that further measures are needed to end the vicious circle of low safety standards and low confidence in Korea. Compared to the case in Sweden, a few policy recommendations are suggested in this study.

Depthwise Separable Convolution Neural Network for High-Speed SAR Ship Detection

As an active microwave imaging sensor for the high-resolution earth observation, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been extensively applied in military, agriculture, geology, ecology, oceanography, etc., due to its prominent advantages of all-weather and all-time working capacity. Especially, in the marine field, SAR can provide numerous high-quality services for fishery management, traffic control, sea-ice monitoring, marine environmental protection, etc. Among them, ship detection in SAR images has attracted more and more attention on account of the urgent requirements of maritime rescue and military strategy formulation. Nowadays, most researches are focusing on improving the ship detection accuracy, while the detection speed is frequently neglected, regardless of traditional feature extraction methods or modern deep learning (DL) methods. However, the high-speed SAR ship detection is of great practical value, because it can provide real-time maritime disaster rescue and emergency military planning. Therefore, in order to address this problem, we proposed a novel high-speed SAR ship detection approach by mainly using depthwise separable convolution neural network (DS-CNN). In this approach, we integrated multi-scale detection mechanism, concatenation mechanism and anchor box mechanism to establish a brand-new light-weight network architecture for the high-speed SAR ship detection. We used DS-CNN, which consists of a depthwise convolution (D-Conv2D) and a pointwise convolution (P-Conv2D), to substitute for the conventional convolution neural network (C-CNN). In this way, the number of network parameters gets obviously decreased, and the ship detection speed gets dramatically improved. We experimented on an open SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) to validate the correctness and feasibility of the proposed method. To verify the strong migration capacity of our method, we also carried out actual ship detection on a wide-region large-size Sentinel-1 SAR image. Ultimately, under the same hardware platform with NVIDIA RTX2080Ti GPU, the experimental results indicated that the ship detection speed of our proposed method is faster than other methods, meanwhile the detection accuracy is only lightly sacrificed compared with the state-of-art object detectors. Our method has great application value in real-time maritime disaster rescue and emergency military planning.

Imperial Geographies: Poetics of the Atlantic in Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s El semejante a sí mismo

Mexican playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s early modern urban comedy El semejante a sí mismo interrupts the cloak-and-dagger plot and its Seville centered-geography three times to narrate in vivid detail feats of glory on New World waterways by the Viceroy of New Spain, the Marquis of Salinas, and the Indies fleet admiral, Lope Diez Aux y Armendariz. By adorning the three monologues with epic-like registers about the deeds of New World heroes, Alarcón’s play establishes a geography of translatio imperii in which the Spanish audience is forced to look away from Seville and gaze westward at examples of imperial glory. The imperial geography comes to an abrupt end, however, when Leonardo delivers a final monologue recounting a maritime disaster on the Atlantic and what begin as a triumphant voyage to the New World devolves into the aimless language of a shipwrecked mariner lost at sea.

Prediction of Survivors in the Titanic Cruise

On the 15th of April, 1912 the titanic witnessed a disaster resulting in the sinking of her passengers on the maiden voyage near North Atlantic. Even though it is a very long time since this maritime disaster took place, the idea behind what impacts each individual survival is still a great research attracting researcher’s attention. The approach taken in this paper is to utilize the publically available data set from website called Kaggle. Kaggle is a popular data science webpage that put together information of people in the titanic into a data set for the data mining competition: “Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster”. The research and comparisons in this paper uses a few machine learning techniques and algorithms to analyse the data for classification and prediction of survivors. The prediction and efficiency of these algorithms depend greatly on data analysis and model. The techniques used to do so are Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosting Machine.

High-Speed Ship Detection in SAR Images Based on a Grid Convolutional Neural Network

As an active microwave sensor, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has the characteristic of all-day and all-weather earth observation, which has become one of the most important means for high-resolution earth observation and global resource management. Ship detection in SAR images is also playing an increasingly important role in ocean observation and disaster relief. Nowadays, both traditional feature extraction methods and deep learning (DL) methods almost focus on improving ship detection accuracy, and the detection speed is neglected. However, the speed of SAR ship detection is extraordinarily significant, especially in real-time maritime rescue and emergency military decision-making. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach for high-speed ship detection in SAR images based on a grid convolutional neural network (G-CNN). This method improves the detection speed by meshing the input image, inspired by the basic thought of you only look once (YOLO), and using depthwise separable convolution. G-CNN is a brand new network structure proposed by us and it is mainly composed of a backbone convolutional neural network (B-CNN) and a detection convolutional neural network (D-CNN). First, SAR images to be detected are divided into grid cells and each grid cell is responsible for detection of specific ships. Then, the whole image is input into B-CNN to extract features. Finally, ship detection is completed in D-CNN under three scales. We experimented on an open SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) used by many other scholars and then validated the migration ability of G-CNN on two SAR images from RadarSat-1 and Gaofen-3. The experimental results show that the detection speed of our proposed method is faster than the existing other methods, such as faster-regions convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN), single shot multi-box detector (SSD), and YOLO, under the same hardware environment with NVIDIA GTX1080 graphics processing unit (GPU) and the detection accuracy is kept within an acceptable range. Our proposed G-CNN ship detection system has great application values in real-time maritime disaster rescue and emergency military strategy formulation.

“They're lowering the boats! She is lost! She is lost!”: Maritime Disasters and Onomastics in Eugene O'Neill's Early One-Act Plays

Abstract The article examines how O'Neill turned to his memory of the sinking of the Titanic in several of his early one-act plays. Thirst, Warnings, and Fog function as a triptych showing details related to the catastrophe, including the story of expert John J. Knapp, whose name O'Neill gave to the wireless operator in Warnings. Other writings—S.O.S. and In the Zone—take the fear of sinking by German U-boat as context. Ile and Where the Cross Is Made contain multiple references to sea calamities of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Finally, some characters (especially Maud Steele in Bread and Butter, two female figures in The Iceman Cometh, and the Mildreds in Recklessness and The Hairy Ape) symbolically wear names inspired by vessels that shipwrecked in 1912, the year of O'Neill's “second birth.”

Sociological explanation and mixed methods: the example of the Titanic

The question of how and with what methods the social sciences should explain phenomena is fiercely contested. While several scholars have argued that mixed methods may help to improve sociological explanations, there is a lack of highly visible examples that show the added value of this methodology. The goal of this paper is to show that the case of the Titanic, and the question of who survived and for what reasons, can be seen as such an example. The Titanic tragedy is the most well-known maritime disaster of modern history, and the Titanic dataset is a widely used and first-rate example for the teaching of mono-method statistical explanation. We demonstrate that a mixed-method explanation is superior to a mono-method explanation in that it clarifies not only the relationships between variables, but also the mechanisms that led to the co-variations. Among the most important mechanisms, we find that the rule “women and children first” was interpreted differently by different actors, and that this, together with the fact that different classes of passengers had different levels of access to the boat deck, explains much of the gender/class differences in terms of survival that we can observe. We conclude by discussing the lessons that can be drawn from the example for sociological explanatory work more generally.

Achievements and challenges on the implementation of the European Directive on Port State Control

As a response to the strong political and public outcry for more stringent regulations regarding safety of ships in the wake of a series of maritime disasters in the 1980s and 1990s, the European Commission adopted a number of Directives on Ports State Control (PSC) that has made the provisions of the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on PSC binding on all EU Member States (MSs). Directive 2009/16/EC, as amended, which entered into force on January 2011, is the latest version of those Directives. Aside from specifying targeting, inspection, and detention procedures, this piece of legislation establishes that each Member State (MS) shall be inspected every five years by the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) to monitor the level of implementation and enforcement of the Directive. We analysed 25 inspection reports prepared by the Agency in connection with MSs inspections, to determine levels of implementation, compliance, and harmonisation with the provisions of the Directive 2009/16/EC. This article summarizes the main shortcomings and observations as identified in the inspection reports and concludes that while the Directive has been properly implemented by the MSs, there remain areas where harmonisation is yet to be achieved. In detail, this article detects gaps between policy and practice for EU policy makers which aim at ensuring a level playing field in Europe and avoid safety competition among countries.

Natural Course of Posttraumatic Symptoms in Late-Adolescent Maritime Disaster Survivors: Results of A 12-Month Follow-Up Study.

ObjectiveThis study is a prospective observational study on 75 late-adolescent survivors of a large passenger ship accident from immediately after the accident to one year later. MethodsAssessments of student survivors were conducted on day 2 and at months 1, 6, and 12. The PTSD Checklist (PCL), Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), State subscale of the State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-S), Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS), and Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) were administered. ResultsWhen the assessments for day 2 and month 12 were compared, all the scales, except the PCL-avoidance subscale, showed a significant improvement in symptoms among males. However, among females, all the scales, except the PCL-re-experience subscale and the STAI-S, failed to show a significant improvement. All the symptoms for both males and females showed a pattern that decreased to the lowest level at month 1 (camp-based controlled intervention period), then increased at months 6 and 12 (voluntary individual treatment after returning to school). ConclusionThe rapid deterioration of psychological symptoms was found during the chronic phase, when students returned to their daily routines and received voluntary individual therapy. There is a need to screen high-risk adolescents and be more attentive to them during this period.