EU takes action to overhaul cruise ship safety

Posted on Apr , 26, 2012 by Ben Sampson

In official terms they are called major incidents, in colloquial terms - disasters.

Whatever you call them, when people lose their lives while travelling on a train, aircraft or a passenger ship, it is a tragedy. Such incidents normally cause safety to be thrown in the spotlight and action is taken to improve standards.

Three months ago the cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rock off the western coast of Italy. Thirty people died and two are still missing. This week the EU outlined the measures it wants the cruise industry to take to prevent similar accidents happening in the future. As well as increasing enforcement of existing inspection and monitoring, the EU is developing extra safety legislation for cruise ships, smaller domestic ships and roll-on roll-off ferries.

The EU is also conducting a technical research project, GOALDS(Goal Based Damaged Stability), into cruise ship stability, which will take a closer look at the designs of cruise ships and their survival probabilities following damage.

GOALDS was started in 2009 and complete later this year. The EU will use its results to help form new guidance and legislation for the cruise ship industry.

However it is often a challenge with major incidents, which happen so infrequently, that the spotlight on safety quickly melts away and the lessons learnt become difficult to sustain. Hopefully this will not be the case with the Costa Concordia, and in the future as engineers strive to improve the safety of vehicles, operational safety will also improve.

EU set to drive down noisy traffic

Posted on Nov , 30, 2011 by admin

Later this month the European Commission will publish proposals that will place stricter limits on the amount of noise cars and lorries can make in the EU.

According to a European Environment Agency Study, 55%, around 67 million people in European cities and towns “endure daily road noise levels above the lower EU benchmark (55 Lden) for excess exposure”.

The most obvious way to reduce noise pollution from traffic is to reduce the amount of traffic. However EU legislation has failed to make any difference since its introduction in the 1960s. Researchers now believe that the amount of traffic would have to be reduced by more than 40% in most places to have any discernible effect. Furthermore, the noise from lorries and buses masks the noise from smaller cars – so heavier vehicles need to be targeted first.

Herein lies the problem today. Typically for EU legislation that concerns the automotive sector, there is plenty of lobbying and arguing. Germany wants to change the way the noisy vehicles are categorised by the EU to a system based on power to weight ration. But environmental NGO Transport and Environment has pointed out that this heavily favours sports cars and family vehicles manufactured in Germany.

The proposals are now due to be published on 30 November, and there is likely to be much debate, similarly to the other main pollution emitted from motor vehicles, exhaust gases. However when the social costs of traffic noise in EU22 are estimated to be more than €40 billion per year, the political motivation to find viable solutions is strong.