Brussels, 24/02/2000 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission is expected to adopt on 23 March a Communication on maritime safety, as requested by the Council and the European Parliament, following the running aground of the Erika oil tanker. Next week, the Commission will be consulting industrialists, shipbuilders and Member States over the Preliminary Drafts of three Directives it had informally submitted to them on measures to strengthen current legislation in terms of the inspection of ships at port, setting up a register of classification companies and phasing out single-bow tankers. The Director General of Transport at the Commission, François Lamoureux, recently announced (see EUROPE, 23 February, pp. 9-10) that at some time in the future the Commission will be publishing a more general Communication on guidelines on the responsibility of shipowners in the event of accidents. We have outlined the main points of the Draft Communication to be submitted to the Transport Committee on 28 March (along with a Portuguese Memorandum and a French Draft Communication) below.
* Inspecting ships at port. The new Directive would alter existing Directive 95/21 and make ship inspections compulsory (rather than voluntary, as at present), adding a ship's structure to the list of points to be inspected and laying down rules for increased transparency. The following would be compulsory: i) an annual inspection of high-risk ships (petrol tankers and ships carrying chemicals and gas and other tankers over a certain age along with passenger ships) when they stop over in an EU port, ii) compulsory inspection of all ships over 15 years old (as opposed to the current rule for ships over 20 or 25 years old), iii) prior notification, no less than 48 hours before a ship's arrival in port, of the length of time to be spent in port, tank conditions, operations planned during the stop-over etc, iv) a minimum number of checks stipulated in the guidelines, particularly of the ship's structure.
The Draft Directive also reinforces regulations covering information and transparency by making the following compulsory: i) naming the shipping company, ii) listing the areas of the ship which have been inspected on the Inspection Report, iii) forwarding a copy of the Inspection Report to the flag state and the classification company.
The new legislation will lead to a wider publication of the results of the inspections and information on measures taken to remedy any defects discovered. The Commission would expect Member States to submit a report every year on the extent to which the Directive has been implemented, rather than every three years as at present.
* Classification companies. At present, Directive 94/57 lays down accreditation regulations for companies to which Member States delegate port safety inspections, as required by international conventions and the EU Directive on Shipping. The new Directive would give Member States the power to register and strike off classification companies. It also gives Member States the power to temporarily suspend a company in the event of a decline in its inspection standards and tightens up the procedures to be followed by classification companies.
Learning from the Erika disaster, where the ship had hopped from one classification to another over recent years, the Commission will specify the procedure to be followed to change the inspector of a ship. The new Directive would incorporate into European legislation and make compulsory the current voluntary "transfer of classification" agreement signed by IACS classification companies. This would oblige non-IACS companies and IACS member companies alike to take late inspections into consideration, along with the original classification company's recommendations, before they issue a new certificate. The new legislation would require classification companies to change their rules and only work with shipping inspectors who are aware of a ship's history and set up procedures and assessment methods for their regional offices. At the same time, the new legislation would simplify procedures by making it unnecessary to carry out the same inspection more than once or produce duplicate Inspection Reports.
* Phasing out single-bow ships. The draft legislation proposes banning the use of single-bow ships by the year 2010 or 2015 (the date has yet to be fixed) rather than 2026 as specified in the Marpol Convention. The construction of "single-bow" ships has been outlawed by the International Marpol Convention since July 1996 in order to reduce pollution in the event of an accident and such ships will be gradually phased out by the year 2026. The EU Directive means ships must be scrapped when they are 23 years old, rather than 25 or 30 years old. The United States have already implemented the earlier date in their "Oil Pollution Act 1990", whereby single-bow ships have to be scrapped by 2010. All petrol tankers of over 600 tonnes (DWT) would be phased out under US legislation, whilst Marpol only covers ships of over 20 000 DWT.
This acceleration in the elimination programme should be accompanied by financial measures to encourage the industry to use dual-hull vessels as soon as possible
Risk of shortage of ships corresponding to new standards?
"The problem is that it is not at all certain that there is a sufficient number of ships corresponding to the new standards on the European market. In that case, how will we carry oil: by road? By pipeline?, observers wonder. The European Shipowners Association, ECSA, has begun a survey to assess the impact of the plans of the Commission's services on the European fleet and oil supplies. While reserving the right to decide at the hearing on 1 March, ECSA's Secretary General notes that "the Commission's proposals on classification companies and port controls are along the lines recommended by shipowners following the sinking of the Erika".
In a press release published end-January, the shipwoners association pleaded, among other things, in favouer of greater cooperation between classifiation companies and increased transparency, as well as for coordination by port authorities and an increase in resources allocated to inspections. The shipowners, however, did say that the question of the "single-hulls" did not lie at the origin of the disaster and, more generally, that the elimination of that category of oil tanker should be settled at international level, for reasons of competition.