Vixen has repeatedly denied that fact and several closely related facts that are documented within the JAIC report.
And countless other facts, large and small. Her performance in this thread simply repeats the same lies over and over, peppered with inflammatory rhetoric. Her call to repentance for others' alleged dishonesty is only one ironic example of the latter.
Another well-documented fact that
Vixen has repeatedly denied is the unacceptably routine exemption of older vessels from new safety regulations, which allowed the Estonia to sail with EPIRBs that were not automatically activated upon contact with water. The JAIC report expressed its disapproval of such grandfathering at the end of
section 15.13
They are right to do so. Many regulatory bodies walk a fine line. The FAA, for example, has a dual mission to both promote and regulate air travel, but its regulatory mission is not always first for takeoff. In contrast, the IMO is focused on safety but relies upon treaties and is therefore hobbled by diplomacy. The fine line there lies between needful regulation and the sustainability of member nations. The IMO is most effective when most if not all seafaring nations are able to participate. If regulations are too onerous or fleeting, members will withdraw and the mission fails.
Grandfathering across the fine line has more diplomatic and political value than safety value. The mandate for all ships to have hydrostatically released buoys, but a selective requirement for the buoys to be immersion-activated is exactly the kind of regulatory stupidity that those of us governed by this labyrinth detest. You get the stupid situation of having manual-only buoys in automatic-release brackets.
Just because it's stupid doesn't mean it doesn't happen. This is where conspiracy theorists argue from a fantasy world in which everything makes common sense. Yes, common sense tells you that if you have float-free buoys in hydrostatically-operated brackets, they
should also be immersion-activated. A couple of $1,500 EPIRBs should be a miniscule expense to someone operating a multimillion-
markka ship, right? Well, no, that's not at all how owners and operators think. Instead, it's a $3,000 (two EPIRBs) expense for a half dozen ships in the fleet, so $18,000, in a budget bursting with mandatory repairs, upgrades, and improvements.
"Are we required to upgrade these devices?"
"Not yet, not if we stay with the 1974 certificate."
"The ones we have still work, right? In case of emergency, they'll still bring help?"
"Yes, they're manual-only, but they still work and the crews are trained on them."
"And we already paid $X,000 to upgrade the holders, which are now up to regulation and will still hold these models, right?"
"Yes, we're fully compliant."
"Great!"
And with that conversation, the $18,000 fleet-wide EPIRB upgrade gets stricken as part of some hypothetical need to trim, say, $250,000 out of that year's upgrade budget. At this level of decision-making, it's an exorbitant expense for what is perceived as only a marginal increase in safety that's not required, but falls under "would be good to have someday, but not today."
The CEO of a shipping line will definitely be having dinner occasionally with the country's IMO representative. And a periodic topic of conversation will be the ongoing expense for keeping up with new regulations.
"See, Miko, it seems like we just get our ships up to standard, and the next year we have to refit everything we refit last year because of new regulation changes. We borrowed $3 million last year to accomplish the refit, and now we'll have to borrow another $3 million to do next year's refit before we even have time to earn enough fares to pay off the prior loan. We need to be able to operate at a
reasonable level of safety for a time, not the bleeding edge all the time."
Grandfathering is an all-too-common balance between safety and economy. And you can't just write off economy. Engineering isn't about
total reliability and
total safety. It's about
acceptable reliability and safety for the affordable price. If it costs $10,000 per person to cross the Baltic Sea, travel simply won't happen. It happens today at an affordable price because we accept that risk.
Now on the other hand, when we write accident reports we get to be sanctimonious. The JAIC is right to call the grandfather exemption foolish, because in hindsight it
was foolish. A ship sank and many people died in part because of delays in distress response, including EPIRB operation. Investigative bodies have the privilege of identifying flaws and making recommendations regardless of cost. The very fact that we're writing an accident report means the risk-cost-benefit analysis was off-kilter in a way that matters to the traveling public.
Carriers ride the fine line because we
want them to—right up to the point where the ship sinks or the plane crashes or the train derails. Then we wag our fingers at them and tell them to get back across the line. It's not that carriers are evil. We just don't know where that line is at any given moment, either as carriers or as designers and builders. When an accident happens, some of us are tasked with redrawing the line using 20/20 hindsight. And yes, we get to call out such things as complacency and laxity in regulation. But we get to invoke what the law calls
res ipsa loquitur—"the thing speaks for itself." The fact that a plane is now a smoking crater, or a ship is now a reef, means that
something went wrong that shouldn't have, and it needs to be found and fixed.
After the fact, we get to be sanctimonious.
Before it, economics is still a factor.
) and I can tell you that the cost of putting up a couple of EPIRB brackets on a passenger ship to comply with the 1988 IMO edict is not material and if it was - say, it brought down the profit margin - then that margin would simply be passed on to the passenger in what they pay for their tickets. Given at today's cost of circa €600 per EPIRB, I can't see it would cause any great disruption at all, certainly not at the level of having to redesign an entire bow visor and recall all such vessels for refitting.
