IN her statement to the media on accidents at sea on June 2, 2003, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo mentioned that "as the painful stories of this tragedy (the sinking of MV San Nicolas on May 25, 2003) move out of our front pages and headlines, we must dedicate ourselves to doing more to prevent similar accidents in the future."

I can not but agree that we need to do a lot more to prevent accidents in the future. Much more than finger-pointing and conducting investigations that do not lead to any punishment - for those guilty for loss of lives - heavier than suspensions of licenses and transfers of personnel to some other posts. Much more than congressional hearings pursued "in aid of legislation" which do not produce legislation to make sea transport safer. Much more than threatening to slash the budget for a maritime agency, as if abolishing that agency can nudge a ship away from colliding with another vessel.

But as we try to do more as the President exhorts us to do, let us be smart that we do first things first. We confront the most obvious causes of maritime accidents. We institute measures that have the most immediate impact on minimizing the risk of maritime accidents recurring. Later, after the leaks are plugged, so to speak, we can start talking about other initiatives that should be part of a holistic approach to preventing sea accidents but which, by their nature, would not produce an immediate impact or would take time to put in place.

The Human Factor in Sea Accidents
The President expressed concern that "smaller vessels like the MV San Nicolas are commanded by Major Patrons who don't have the formal training necessary to secure a license." Her concern is not unjustified. Research has shown that up to eighty percent of maritime accidents could be attributed to human error, meaning failure on the part of those in command of the vessels involved.

We do not have to look elsewhere to find support for the conclusion that human error is the principal factor contributing to accidents at sea. In the case of the MV Do-a Paz incident in 1987, the investigation concluded that the smaller vessel, MT Vector, a petroleum tanker under the command of a Major Patron, was at fault. The weather and the sea were not heavy and neither vessel reported any engine or mechanical trouble. It could only be a case of human error. In the case of the more recent accident off Corregidor, the Board of Marine Inquiry faulted the captain and chief mate of the MV San Nicolas, both Major Patrons, for their "erratic maneuvers" in violation of basic rules of the road.

The officer who goes on watch at the bridge of a ship at sea should be the primary and immediate object of an accident prevention strategy. We can have sophisticated aids-to-navigation infrastructure all over the place. We can streamline our fragmented maritime administration with the creation of a Department of Maritime Affairs. We can establish a Transportation Safety Board as well as an Admiralty Court. We can even enact a Maritime Code. We will not prevent sea accidents with these initiatives for as long as we allow an officer to take command of a ship, who lacks the skill to use his radar or plot his position on his nautical chart, or who is not sure if he should pass the other ship on his starboard or port side.

It is disconcerting that after major sea accidents in the past, including those obviously caused by human error, everybody would talk about everything else but the aspect of our seafarers' competency. It is time we focus on this problem, and a few other critical issues, before we spend time, effort and resources on much less urgent matters.

Competency Testing and Requalification
The immediate task to my mind is to require every seafarer performing watchkeeping duties on board domestic vessels, except those already certificated under the 1995 International Convention on the Standards of Certification, Training and Watchkeeping (STCW 1995), to go through a rigid requalification process. Those who fail the test should be sent to a comprehensive recurrency training and be required to take the requalification test another time. A second failure should lead to non-renewal of license. The whole idea is to have only those proven qualified, stay in command of domestic vessels.

A competency testing and requalification program should be so designed as to cover Major Patrons and all other merchant marine officers not holding the STCW 1995 Certificate within as short a period of time as possible, hopefully without adversely affecting the operations of shipping lines. Shipping lines may be asked to bear the cost of requalifying their own officers. The government, for its part, should provide shipowners incentives to mitigate the cost of the requalification process.

Major Patrons Commanding Vessels
Many vessels in our merchant fleet which are less then 500 GRT, including wooden-hulled ships, are commanded by Major Patrons - seafarers who start as ordinary sailors and who, through the years, learn to navigate vessels on the job and eventually are entrusted command of their vessels. Most Major Patrons have not gone beyond high school and have no formal education in navigation. I still have to understand how they obtained their licenses. On the other hand, we have more than 70 maritime schools which each year turn out more than 5,000 graduates on marine transportation or marine engineering with bachelor's degrees.

It is injudicious to continue with the present situation where officers without formal education and training and professional licenses command many of our domestic vessels, including passenger ships, while thousands of graduates from our maritime schools are idle, or employed nowhere near a vessel. We must upgrade the level of education and training among those entrusted to command our domestic vessels as part of an accident-prevention strategy.

A phase-in program for licensed maritime graduates to match a phase-out program for major patrons over a period of say 5 to 10 years should be put in place. To ensure that enough licensed officers are available for domestic vessels, the government may have to require service time on any domestic vessel before an officer is allowed to be deployed on a foreign vessel on the license he holds. When the officer obtains a higher license, he can again be required to serve time on a domestic vessel on that higher license. Of course, waivers can be granted in instances where no positions are available on domestic vessels, which means some government agency should be tasked to keep a supply-and-demand data base.

The government must encourage shipowners to give licensed officers higher pay rates than those given to major patrons to be replaced under the program, with some kind of fiscal incentives.

For the time being, serious consideration should be given to limiting major patrons to carrying out voyages not more than six hours, only at daytime and only in sheltered waters. There will definitely be some initial dislocation in interisland shipping with those restrictions on the employment of Major Patrons. That should be a small price to pay for the sake of safety at sea.

Vessel Inspection System
After the officer performing watchkeeping duties on a vessel, the next most important target of a sea accident prevention strategy is the pre-departure vessel inspection and clearance system. The whole procedure is intended to keep an unseaworthy vessel or an overloaded passenger ship from leaving port, unless rectifications are done to the satisfaction of the inspector. When a vessel sails with a clean bill of health, so to speak, the risk of that vessel becoming a marine casualty en route to her destination is greatly minimized.

The Philippine Coast Guard, to its credit, has designed a comprehensive pre-departure inspection system. Theoretically, it is a fool-proof system that should prevent such situation as that where the MV San Nicolas was given the green light to sail, when the vessel reportedly had taken unmanifested passengers. The problem is that the Coast Guard can not perform the inspection routine on one hundred percent basis, given its puny resources. An ever bigger problem is that many of the smaller ship operators are unable to meet the desired safety standards - for economic reasons. If the Coast Guard throws the book at each of our 5,000 vessels in the domestic fleet, a significant number of non-convention-sized ships, including our wooden-hulled vessels, might not qualify to leave port, disrupting interisland commerce and movement of people. The subject of obsolete or unseaworthy ships in the context of accident prevention will be discussed later.

With only 4,000 coast guards deployed on various missions at different places, pre-departure inspection being only one of their many functions, the Coast Guard is definitely not equal to its enormous task. It is bound to fail somewhere. In fact, it has failed specifically in the area of pre-departure inspection a number of times. Our headline-grabbing politicians, they who materialize ever so quickly for some media mileage after each sea accident, better put their money where their mouths are. Whining and ranting won't prevent accidents. Finding the money to increase the organizational capability of the Coast Guard - at least for its pre-departure inspection function - is what will help reduce the risk of accidents at sea.

To enable the Coast Guard to do a good inspection job on each of the more than 5,000 ships that sail at any time of the day from at least 1,000 loading or embarkation points all over the country, we need to triple the Coast Guard's personnel count. That's a lot of money but, again, it should be a small price to pay to prevent loss of lives at sea.

Need for Passenger Terminals
The pre-departure inspection system should be able to effectively prevent overloading of passenger ships. It's all a matter of setting up a passenger processing and manifesting system similar to what we have in the airports. But without passenger terminals, that system can not be enforced, and the Coast Guard will have no recourse but to do the head count on board the vessels where unticketed and unmanifested passengers can play hide-and-seek with headcounters. Our port authorities should start putting those passenger terminals now in ports where there are none.

Phase-Down of Wooden-Hulled Ship Operation
The wooden-hulled ships in our merchant fleet - the batels, the pumpboats and the motorized bancas - have been the backbone of our marine transportation system between small islands and centers of populations in the bigger islands. Their significant contribution to the growth of remote island economies and interisland commerce can not be disputed. But it is time we graduated from the wooden hull age not because a wooden-hulled ship is inherently unsafe, but because we have the steel-hulled vessel as an evidently safer alternative. (The Galleon ships which traded between Manila and Acapulco in Mexico in the olden days were built of wood. That probably was because they did not have steel vessels then).

Our maritime authorities should now formulate a long-term national merchant fleet development plan which should provide for the retirement over time of wooden-hulled ships and obsolete steel-hulled vessels. Pending formulation of a fleet modernization master plan, we must start a phase-down of the operation of wooden-hulled vessels. We should limit their operation to voyages not longer than six hours, at daytime and in sheltered waters. We may allow them to continue only where and while no steel-hulled vessel service is available. Operators of wooden-hulled vessels who will be affected by these limitations should be given the first crack at offering steel-hulled vessel service on routes from which they will be asked to withdraw their wooden-hulled vessels.

To be continued on August 18