Formal Safety Assessment

Application to the Regulatory Process

The MSC continued to progress the development of formal safety assessment, FSA, as a comparative tool for the application to the IMO rule making process by agreeing a strategy that calls for a collection of research studies and results, applying FSA on a trial basis to draft guidelines for selected ship types and developing a plan to gather feedback information, possibly on an international level through IMO, to assess the tool’s application. A structured, systematic, step-by-step approach was accepted whereby new or improved regulation could be compared to existing conditions such that a balance between the ship and its operation could be made relative to costs and safety and environmental protection issues.

Several options to implement FSA by flag Administrations, IMO and shipowners were identified. It was considered that IMO could use FSA to review the overall framework of safety and environmental issues to identify priorities based on ship type or hazard category or use FSA as a comparative tool to evaluate new proposals. Individual Administrations could use FSA as a tool to determine if an exemption should be granted or if an alternative arrangement to the regulations is considered equivalent. FSA might further be used by shipowners to demonstrate the safety of a ship and/or as risk management tool under the provision of the ISM Code. Work is scheduled for completion by 2000.

Retroactive Application of Regulation

The MSC approved in principle draft interim guidelines for the systematic application of the “grandfather clauses” in IMO regulation addressing construction matters, subject to the application on a case-by-case trial period and resolution of the following issues: (1) whether or not a compelling demonstrable need, relative to cost, reliability and effectiveness, should be incorporated into the guidelines; (2) defining how wide the safety gap be between new and existing ships should be and whether or not operational standards can be used in assessing the safety gap; and (3) the need to apply weighing factors based on a cost benefit analysis.