Shell’s Grahaeme Henderson has once again made an outspoken attack on shipping’s bad safety record and urged greater collaboration among industry players to improve standards and reduce deaths.
Shipping’s fatality record was “appalling” but industry leaders had the power to cut the death toll, Henderson told the Global Maritime Forum in Singapore.
Addressing a crowd of approaching 250 senior executives from around the world, he highlighted that was about the number of people killed by the industry every eight weeks.
“Multiply that by six and you get the number of people killed every year,” said Shell’s vice president, shipping and maritime.
“These are appalling statistics, and we need to change that now.”
His words silenced the room in similar manner to last year at the first Global Maritime Forum in Hong Kong when he took the organisers to task for bad safety standards, having no safety briefing and leaving the conference hall’s fire doors locked. A safety briefing was held this year.
A UK study showed that people working in shipping are 20 times more likely to die at work than the average British worker, and five times more likely to die than those in construction.
“If we turn to suicide, of all of those deaths 6% are confirmed suicide, and if we take cases that are not quite clear it could be as high as 15%.
“That is six to 15 times the suicide rate in the UK.”
Henderson said he had been personally touched by the subject when he worked in Nigeria and a colleague had been killed offshore of Port Harcourt in “horrific circumstances”.
The memory of seeing the man’s three young daughters at his funeral had stayed with him. “An accident doesn’t last a day, a week, or a year. It lasts a lifetime.”
Leading industry executives must co-operate to find ways to improve safety standards and reduce the death toll.
“We have in this room the leaders of the shipping industry, we have the power to make a difference, let’s be one global team, let’s be together in safety,” Henderson said.
Shell introduced a ‘partners in safety’ programme in 2012 which has reduced the number of serious actual and potential incidents by more than three.
It also runs the HiLo programme to eradicate catastrophic events in conjunction with Maersk Tankers and Lloyd’s Register.
