The offshore safety officer role sits on a stack of separate qualifications: a statutory appointment, a professional safety certification, survival training, and medical fitness. Each comes from a different body, and a gap in any one keeps the person on the beach. By MarineCraft Journal · 21 August 2026 · 9 mins … Read more
Buying survival equipment is the easy part. Keeping it certified for the rest of its working life depends on picking a servicing provider whose authorisation actually covers your equipment, and that is where fleets quietly acquire a compliance problem they only discover at inspection. By MarineCraft Journal · 20 August 2026 · 9 … Read more
The worst disaster in the history of offshore oil began with a piece of paper that was not passed on. A safety valve was removed, the permit for the job never reached the next shift, and the pump was restarted. 167 people died. The permit-to-work failures behind it recur, at smaller scale, … Read more
Two pieces of breathing equipment on a ship look similar and are constantly confused. One lets a firefighter enter a burning space. The other only buys a few minutes to escape one. Mixing them up, or letting either run down, is a deficiency that recurs on inspection after inspection.
A liferaft can sit in its canister for years and look perfect from the outside while quietly going out of certification. The rules that keep it valid are strict, specific, and easy to trip over, and an inspector checks two separate dates that operators routinely assume are one.
Every ship over 500 tons carries a Safety Management System. On the best-run vessels it shapes how the crew actually works. On too many others it is a binder that comes off the shelf when an auditor arrives. The gap between those two states is where accidents and detentions live.
