Do you always have a life raft for occasional cross channel trip ?

[bedouin]

3 remediate the risk, which means, having taken all steps to make the probability of a Severe risk occurring infinitesimally small, we still MUST have a plan to deal with it if it actually happens, or else we don't do whatever operation we're assessing. In this case, there is absolutely no remediation other than carrying a life raft.

That is where your analysis breaks down. There are plenty of ways of remediating the risk such as
a) Part inflated tender
b) Drysuit
c) Towing rigid dinghy
d) always cruising in company.

Plus it is totally acceptable to say that I am sufficiently confident that the risk won't happen that I don't need to do anything about it

The problem is that a liferaft can be seen rather as a universal panacea - if I have one I need nothing else - but that is far from the case. Plenty of cases where having a liferaft has not saved lives and indeed when having the liferaft has cost lives.

 

[bitbaltic]

That is where your analysis breaks down. There are plenty of ways of remediating the risk such as
a) Part inflated tender
b) Drysuit
c) Towing rigid dinghy
d) always cruising in company.

Yes, this point is about what the remediation should be. I had left that out for the sake of brevity but of course it has to be considered. For any risk there will be a number of possible remediation strategies, and some may work better than others (e.g. The thread had already concluded that a raft is better than s dinghy) whereas others may strengthen each other in combination (eg raft plus dry suits). The method does not 'break down' because different remediation strategies are possible, no more than your implication (by giving an unsorted list) that all such strategies are equal is true. Once you recognise the need for a remediation you have to decide what is appropriate. I would maintain it is a life raft as a minimum (grab bag, dry suit, etc etc could be seen as part of the remediation) but my point was to get people to see why they ought to be thinking about remediation as distinct from mitigations.

Plus it is totally acceptable to say that I am sufficiently confident that the risk won't happen that I don't need to do anything about it[\quote]

Depending on the severity of the assessed risk, as I have said. Risk assessment is about balancing likelihood against consequence. All professional risk assessments would consider loss of life a consequence requiring a planned remediation. My view is that amateur ones should do as well, in this specific case because life rafts are reasonably affordable. Do you wear a seat belt when driving, or put a child in a car seat? Then you are remediating for the consequences of a car crash, no matter how much you are mitigating against the event by driving carefully. If you look at the way you live life you will find yourself remediating risk much more than you think. Perhaps you don't smoke, but you have probably held life insurance nonetheless.

The problem is that a liferaft can be seen rather as a universal panacea - if I have one I need nothing else - but that is far from the case. Plenty of cases where having a liferaft has not saved lives and indeed when having the liferaft has cost lives.

This seems to hark back to the fastnet life rafts debate, which is an interesting subject in itself but for the purposes of this thread a) lessons about when to abandon ship (the important point, noteithstanding what you are abandoning it for) have been learned and b) technology has moved on, such that those experiences and examples are arguably not relevant here.

 

[westhinder]

Engine-driven pumps are nice because they do not require electricity, but are expensive and complex to install, and are not all that high capacity.

An extra pump which is available in every boat is the engine itself. Simply put a T-valve in the raw water inlet hose, with a hose and a strainer into the bilge. If needed, switch the T-valve and the engine helps to pump out the boat. It is not a high-capacity pump, but I was favourably surprised to find that it keeps ahead of what a fully opened garden hose can deliver.
I use the system at lay-up to flush the engine with fresh water and afterwards to put anti-freeze through the system.
Not a definitieve remedy, but a mitigating factor.

 

[Dockhead]

. . . [BU]The problem is that a liferaft can be seen rather as a universal panacea - if I have one I need nothing else[/BU] - but that is far from the case. Plenty of cases where having a liferaft has not saved lives and indeed when having the liferaft has cost lives.

Very true, but was anyone saying that?

 

[duncan99210]

I used to be a Joint Forces Sub Aqua Diving Supervisor. When I first got the qualification, doing a formal risk assessment was not part of the requirement. Instead, as experienced divers, we were meant to think things through and plan for the 'what ifs' if an incident occurred.

Not long after that, a formal risk assessment systems as imposed as a result of pressure from HSE. Much muttering amongst the old and bold about conducting paper chases. However, it turned out to be a very useful tool in planning diving expeditions. It forced us at the early planning stages to look closely at the type of diving we planned to do, the risks involved in each step of the expedition and how to mitigate and manage those risks to an acceptable level, bearing in mind the inherently risky activity that diving is. It forced us to consider remediation in terms of how to conduct a rescue and recompression if all of the mitigation measures failed.

And that is the point I think bitbaltic is trying make. You can do your risk assessment in the most professional manner. You can put in place significant measures to manage and mitigate the risks identified. But you must still plan for if it all goes pear shaped. That, to my mind, is where things like dry suits, PLBs and liferafts come in: when its all gone horribly wrong because of a series of seemingly insignificant problems, there's still a way to preserve your life.

 

[pmagowan]

I am not sure of this 'there must be a remediation method' no matter what the risk if the consequences could be death. That would literally make it impossible to set out to sea as we would have to have a method to mitigate everything possible no matter how small! As others have pointed out liferafts may be very far down this extensive list which would include boom brakes, helmets, defibrillators, epinephrine injections, a harpoon for those pesky whales etc etc. Some risks are too small to have a remediation especially if mitigating factors are taken into account. For example, would it not be better simply to seal your berths and settee compartments such that your boat wouldn't sink even if holed? This could probably be achieved for the same cost as a liferaft and is a one off expense. How many boats are secured for a knockdown? How many people clip on all the time, wear helmets, carry underwater breathing apparatus etc etc.

I think the one thing the statistics show is that the need for a liferaft is vanishingly small in general and can be made even smaller. An inflated tender would suffice in most cases even if this risk happened and the lifeboat didn't arrive in time and no other boats were close and you couldn't keep your boat afloat or it became untenable to stay aboard!

I don't think Fastnet lessons have necessarily been learned. I think in many instances people still abandon ship too early and I don't think people simply knowing what they should do means they will do it. Look at people stopping to pick up their hand luggage when leaving a crashed plane. I recall the skipper on one of the boats saying that he told the crew they should stay with the boat but that they were so scared and battered that they were not thinking straight and thus abandoned ship.

I have a liferaft because when I first got the boat I didn't analyse the risks but simply ticked the box that everyone blindly advised. The risk of my boat sinking is probably higher than most. I have since then become less and less convinced about the potential benefits of a liferaft and stories of them not working don't help especially when you know your own dinghy does work! A good grab bag, Plb and dinghy could, in many cases be sufficient and in some cases be better than a liferaft.

 

[ex-Gladys]

I am not sure of this 'there must be a remediation method' no matter what the risk if the consequences could be death.

If you look at some of the closely controlled industries, there will be a value placed on killing someone. As I recall, in Railway safety this is or was about £100,000. If the treatment of the risk of death which is, say, likely to happen once every 20 years, and going to cost £500,000, the risk will be tolerated.

 

[pmagowan]

If you look at some of the closely controlled industries, there will be a value placed on killing someone. As I recall, in Railway safety this is or was about £100,000. If the treatment of the risk of death which is, say, likely to happen once every 20 years, and going to cost £500,000, the risk will be tolerated.

The fact remains, no matter how you value it either financially or otherwise, we must accept some level of risk or die of boredom!

 

[bitbaltic]

And that is the point I think bitbaltic is trying make. You can do your risk assessment in the most professional manner. You can put in place significant measures to manage and mitigate the risks identified. But you must still plan for if it all goes pear shaped.

Exactly.

 

[bitbaltic]

If you look at some of the closely controlled industries, there will be a value placed on killing someone. As I recall, in Railway safety this is or was about £100,000. If the treatment of the risk of death which is, say, likely to happen once every 20 years, and going to cost £500,000, the risk will be tolerated.

This is going a bit far into it but most industrial risk matrices will use a common severity scheme (1-5 typically with 5 being most severe) and apply it to various discrete 'types' of risk, so before you start using the matrix you must decide if you are primarily looking at say a financial risk, environmental risk, injury risk etc etc (acknowledging that there is often overlap). This leads to several things on the severity scale for severity value 5, eg it might be defined as a loss of 100k for a financial risk and multiple deaths for an injury risk. Naturally this leads the end user to think that 100k lost = multiple deaths, or that the company values lives in the tens of thousands of pounds. However, the different risk types shouldn't be viewed in this way, and it is not the purpose of the matrix.

I have never seen a scheme which puts a deliberate monetary value on life. For obvious reasons that is a bad planning tool if the value is low, and a PR disaster if it is revealed in the wake of an incident. I would think such a scheme rather out of date now.

 

[RupertW]

And that is the point I think bitbaltic is trying make. You can do your risk assessment in the most professional manner. You can put in place significant measures to manage and mitigate the risks identified. But you must still plan for if it all goes pear shaped

I know bitbaltic replied "Exactly" to this but I still disagree as it is perfectly acceptable in professional risk assessment to tolerate a risk instead of putting in place a solution for if that risk actally happens, including a risk of death, or multiple deaths, if the likelihood is low.
The balance must be whether the remediation is worth the mitigated risk which has reduced likelihood of a given scenario. Provided you understand the risk's impact and likelihood, and the options for remedation it is an entirely professional judgement to decide that no remediation is effective enough, or cheap enough, or safe enough, or flexible enough to enact.

It is the kind of planning that happens every day in hospitals when strategically planning for pandemics, or number of ED consultants on a shift, or protocols for checking and rechecking medication - all of which involve risks of death but all must be balanced against providing services and fixed resources.

Liferafts are a great example of where a rational person would say, "It doesn't effectively remediate even the very very low likelihood of the event happening, so lets think about what else might reduce the likelihood further" But somehow we believe from the odd anecdote that liferafts must be there to keep us "safe".

 

[bitbaltic]

it is perfectly acceptable in professional risk assessment to tolerate a risk instead of putting in place a solution for if that risk actally happens, including a risk of death, or multiple deaths, if the likelihood is low.

We'll have to disagree because in my profession it explicitly is not. We would stop a project rather than accept a register with an unremediated 'red' risk.

It is the kind of planning that happens every day in hospitals when strategically planning for pandemics, or number of ED consultants on a shift, or protocols for checking and rechecking medication - all of which involve risks of death but all must be balanced against providing services and fixed resources.

Can you give a specific example please? Of a worked-through severe risk, and it's mitigations, that was accepted without any remediation, and that you have worked on in that field? The above is very nonspecific. Remember that hospitals are in the business of dealing with ill, injured and dying people, which means patient death is a likelihood and not necessarily a severe outcome of an action; risks of that type should not and would not be treated in the way that the risk of a fatality would be in an industry which was in the business of employing fit and healthy people to undertake industrial tasks.

Liferafts are a great example of where a rational person would say, "It doesn't effectively remediate even the very very low likelihood of the event happening.

In the above you are mixing up mitigation and remediation- you mitigate the likelihood of an event happening, not remediate that, and you remediate after it has happened, (for which a raft is an effective remediation as shown by the number of successful survivals using them; perhaps amongst other strategies which others prefer). This suggests a lack of familiarity with the risk assessment process which goes against your earlier suggestion that you are familiar with formal medical risk assessment.

 

[RupertW]

We'll have to disagree because in my profession it explicitly is not. We would stop a project rather than accept a register with an unremediated 'red' risk.



Can you give a specific example please? Of a worked-through severe risk, and it's mitigations, that was accepted without any remediation, and that you have worked on in that field? The above is very nonspecific. Remember that hospitals are in the business of dealing with ill, injured and dying people, which means patient death is a likelihood and not necessarily a severe outcome of an action; risks of that type should not and would not be treated in the way that the risk of a fatality would be in an industry which was in the business of employing fit and healthy people to undertake industrial tasks.



In the above you are mixing up mitigation and remediation- you mitigate the likelihood of an event happening, not remediate that, and you remediate after it has happened, (for which a raft is an effective remediation as shown by the number of successful survivals using them; perhaps amongst other strategies which others prefer). This suggests a lack of familiarity with the risk assessment process which goes against your earlier suggestion that you are familiar with formal medical risk assessment.

I can't believe the oil or any other industry really stops a project because it can't remediate a low likelihood possibility of a death. That certainly wasn't the case on an $12 billion airport building project I worked on which would have been stopped many times if the risk (and actual reality) of death happening had been a showstopper (unless you mean the remediation plan of agreed compensation each time a death occurred).


One example (part of the formal Board Assurance Framework which is a legal document for a Hospital Trust) was dealing with a flu pandemic (H1N1). Scenarios were sent to Risk Team for the Board by the then national body showing probable numbers of cases, and cases requiring ventilation, by week in the event of the current new flu strain becoming a pandemic.
There was no scenario for the hospital being able to reduce the likelihood of the pandemic, but to mitigate it's effects. For the low to moderate scenarios the actions were clear - we identified new clinical spaces, how we would shut down surgery, ordered new ventilators, set up training, lock down the hospital site, protocols for triage of those who might recover, not those likely to die and so on. But for the final scenario with the largest number of predicted cases and deaths we agreed that we would tolerate that risk without any further action as the expense and preparation needed for for that remediation would disproportionately affect the day to day running of the hospital and it's provision of services. So a formal national risk scenario notified to us was tolerated without action despite the much higher number of deaths that would result if it happened, compared to the much lower number of deaths we were likely to prevent by instead using resources on normal activities.

 

[bitbaltic]

I think we are looking at different things. This is the key difference:

There was no scenario for the hospital being able to reduce the likelihood of the pandemic, but to mitigate it's effects.

No, because hospitals do not go out and cause pandemics, nor do pandemics not break out if hospitals decide not to deal with them. In this case, mitigation is the entire strategy, and what you are talking about is accepting a circumstance where you run out of resources. This is, to go back to the start, because you are reacting to something external and out of your governance- at the 'act of God' scale rather than being a foreseeable consequence of your own actions.

Things we do in oil drilling are usually the consequences of our own actions, and thus more comparable to d skipper making a sea passage, which is why I think my take on risk management is more relevant. But either way the main point is to get people thinking about the difference between mitigation and remediation, which is never very clearly underlined in risk debates on this forum. The concept allows for people making their own judgements about severity and remediability- as I say, I do not think your example of an unremediable risk is particularly germane, but if you want to plan your sailing on the basis of some risks being unremediable, fair enough and that's your approach.

Re. The oil industry canning projects due to unremediated severe risks- of course what it means in reality is we go back to the drawing board and work the project s different way, rather than completely canning it, but I was trying to keep it simple. In fact the nearest thing I can think of to your pandemic scenario was the macondo/deep water horizon event, when matters got completely beyond the risk plan. I don't want to open that one up but believe me it focused minds and produced the current risk culture because not one oil company ever wants to be that company again. Did your hospital ever face the pandemic you planned for? I suspect not. If it did and was completely overwhelmed, you might come back and find the goalposts for acceptable risks have moved somewhat.

 

[Deleted member 36384]

I can't believe the oil or any other industry really stops a project because it can't remediate a low likelihood possibility of a death. .....

I can assure you that they do and Macondo very much underlined that where you are actually risking significant shareholder value as well. Fortunately such risks are well known and mitigation understood so if a project can not demonstrate control it does not get approval. Example, Shell stopped all Arctic drilling after it discovered, through Audit, that certain risks did not have effective mitigation in place. My current employer has a number of risks where the mitigation is specified and mandatory. If the project can not demonstrate that they have the controls in place (equipment, contracts, approved funds, competency) then only the CEO can approve the project to go ahead, irrespective of the value. After Macondo I had to undertake specific training and sit multiple exams with a 90% pass mark, to test my understanding of the company assurance process and my role as a technical authority.

Here is a specific example. I am required to have blow out prevention equipment for a well that is capable of natural flow, even though the prognosis of finding ​overpressure and movable hydrocarbons in an exploration well can be less than 10%. In the event that we do and the well flowed, everyone can run away with no threat to life. I can not get approval for that project unless I can demonstrate that I have a working BOP that is fully tested and compliant with the company standards.

Another example, I can not execute rig move or transportation project unless all vehicles are fitted with reversing alarms and seat belts. I would loose my job if I did such is the importance of mandatory controls. In both cases my employer, in the past has killed people by reversing over them or allowing vehicles to be used without seat belts.

In the above examples, if the project was started an later through assurance audits it was found to be not compliant, then in the first case the project would be shut down immediately until the matter was resolved and in the second case the transportation aspect of the contract would be immediately stopped and corrective action taken. I have had to delay million dollar rig moves because trucks turned up in the middle of the desert without seat belts.

Quite simply my employer does not allow low probability risks where the consequence is death to happen. The statistics that drive this rational is that many low level risks that are ignored, eventually build up to a Macondo type event so we focus on compliance to the standards which are actually quit easy to comply with. Think this is not profitable, I drill the lowest cost per meter wells globally for my employer as externally benchmarked and my teams have had the safest rigs globally in 3 x times in my years as a manager and we are always in the top 5 safe rigs. Good safety is good for productivity and good for profits.

 

[Tranona]

.

I think the one thing the statistics show is that the need for a liferaft is vanishingly small in general and can be made even smaller. An inflated tender would suffice in most cases even if this risk happened and the lifeboat didn't arrive in time and no other boats were close and you couldn't keep your boat afloat or it became untenable to stay aboard!

especially when you know your own dinghy does work! A good grab bag, Plb and dinghy could, in many cases be sufficient and in some cases be better than a liferaft.

I am afraid the reported cases of yachts foundering simply do not support that. As i said earlier there have been only 2 cases where a dinghy might have been an alternative - because in both cases the boat sank relatively slowly and conditions were benign. In most other cases the weather was extreme - and even using a raft in some cases was problematic or the boat sank far too quickly for there to be time to prepare and launch a dinghy. One additional case (off ireland) where a boat sank following a rudder failure; liferaft failed to inflate and crew were saved by a nearby yacht launching their big dingy from davits. However, conditions were benign and the boat sank very slowly, so not typical.

So, while your observation on the chances of it happening are supported by the evidence but not your assertion that a dinghy would be a satisfactory substitute.

much the same can be said about boats flooding - this is as rare as fire. The YM crash test showed how very difficult it is to hole a modern GRP boat - never mind a steel, aluminium or composite one. The emphasis on pumping facilities is a hangover from wooden boat days, and particularly working boats which were by their nature leaky and hull planking more easily breached.

 

[Deleted member 36384]

... as it is perfectly acceptable in professional risk assessment to tolerate a risk instead of putting in place a solution for if that risk actally happens, including a risk of death, or multiple deaths, if the likelihood is low. ...

I agree with you and this is why the UK rail network after, I think the Clapham disaster did not install automatic systems for stopping trains, it was far too expensive for the low probability of death. IIRC it came out in the wash that the cost of life was £2million/head as used in the calculations back then.

 

[capnsensible]

Overconfidence - one of the most dangerous traits in a skipper.

As this thread shows there isn't a correct answer to the question. A good skipper will be aware of all the risks associated with sailing and take a balanced response to those risks. A bland assumption that a liferaft is necessary shows a lack of understanding of the true risks of sailing.

Of course I am a good skipper, I sail for a living. In excess of 130,000 miles of yachting has made me quite capable of deciding that I will properly equip a yacht for sea. But thank you for your advice......

Actually, I sailed across the Straits of Gibraltar today, from Ceuta in N Africa to Estepona, Spain. We travelled nearly forty miles on a well found yacht, complete with liferaft, life jackets, flares, VHF radio switched on. You know, all the things people tell me aren't necessary on here.

Go careful out there.......:encouragement:

 

[JumbleDuck]

We travelled nearly forty miles on a well found yacht, complete with liferaft, life jackets, flares, VHF radio switched on. You know, all the things people tell me aren't necessary on here.

Defibrillator? Crash helmets? If not, why not?

 

[Poignard]

I go to sea for a living and have done since a billion tides ago. Every yacht I sail is properly equipped with safety gear including a liferaft and my crew are always properly briefed in its use and deployment.

What am I doing wrong?

Absolutely nothing.