A fire in a ship’s engine room has to be fought by a system that was chosen years earlier, on a drawing board. Pick the wrong extinguishing system for the space, and the mistake is built into the vessel. Here is how CO2, water mist, and foam are matched to the hazard.
Immersion suits are built to keep a person alive in freezing water. In the warm seas of Southeast Asia, the rules allow some ships to leave them off. That single exemption creates more inspection confusion, and more risk, than almost any other item in the life-saving locker.
Two of the most dangerous jobs in the industry are climbing a flare stack and entering a storage tank. A drone can now do the first look on both without a single person leaving the ground, and increasingly the classification societies accept the result.
PFOS foam is banned from ships from 2026, and the EU rule bites harder still. Why swapping AFFF for fluorine-free foam is not a simple refill.
The 2019 SOLAS deadline forced a fleet-wide swap of lifeboat on-load release hooks. Years on, they still trigger detentions. What inspectors check, and why.
Port State Control detentions in the Asia-Pacific are not random. The same Tokyo MOU deficiency categories detain ships year after year, and knowing them is the difference between a three-hour inspection and a three-day detention.
