A ten-year-old oil tanker carrying crude oil has undergone a safety inspection in Japan. The ship is managed by a third-party ship management company. The oil company that transports the cargo has highlighted several technical problems with the ship during the inspection. It’s a difficult one for the ship’s crew as many of the issues highlighted in the inspection are beyond their remit and responsibilities. The company then decides to appoint a technical manager to sail with the ship whose job is to ensure that the deficiencies highlighted during the inspection are rectified before the end of the voyage. Thereafter, the ship will be presented for another inspection so that the deficiencies can be deleted from the records. But during her sailing passage the captain is reported ‘missing’ from the ship.
What happened to the captain? How did it happen? What has all this to do with a safety inspection? Let’s find out.
You may listen to this story on YouTube or Spotify.
Listen on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Fg3N3JIbo
Listen on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5dHLMDaEktUljYtXGCd7W3?utm_source=generator
I first became interested in this story when I contacted Philip’s brother Michael to know more about him.
“Philip always wanted to go sailing and I wanted to go flying but somehow I too ended up in shipping”, says Michael.
Philip started his sea career in 1995 as a deck cadet. After finishing 32 months of sea time, he sat through his first set of nautical exams and became a merchant ship officer. In 2003, he married Elena, and they had two beautiful daughters. In 2009, Philip became a captain at sea.
Life was never without struggles. Philip switched between conventional cargo ships and offshore supply ships for shorter contracts so that he could spend more time with his family. But in 2016, when his ship was detained in port, the company was declared bankrupt, and Philip had no choice but to return to the conventional tanker market. A compassionate and caring captain even paid through his own pocket to repatriate his crew trapped in the foreign land.
In January 2019 prior to the incident, Philip received a call from the office to join onboard a tanker. As he was flying from his hometown in Goa to Singapore, he received another call from the company during his transit in Mumbai. There was an unforeseen delay with the ship’s berthing and fate would allow to him one last time to meet with his mother who lived in Mumbai.
After a short delay, the captain joined the ship in Singapore outbound to Japan. In the next few weeks, he made a call to his brother and shared his concerns about a vetting inspection in Japan. There were some structural problems with the ship and the company was worried about the ship’s future market prospects. “I told him, what can you do, these things are not in your hands”, said Michael.
For background, vetting inspections play a decisive role for tankers to remain employable in the international oil trade. That’s where safety competes with commercial goals. A suboptimal inspection outcome will seriously impact upon the commercial performance of shipping companies. Good safety is good business. But good by whose standards? One could conveniently attribute this to The Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) or the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners (INTERTANKO) – both representing the interests of ships owner and operators of ships carrying hydrocarbons and both anchored to the myth of Zero Harm. But that would be misleading and not of much help to understand the power of symbols.
Let’s take a look at the ecosystem of shipping to understand how the ideology of Zero Harm translates into practice. The oil companies responsible for transporting the cargoes rarely own the assets. Rather, ships are hired from the market and oil is transported on leased ships (both in the spot market and long-term hire) owned by investors and conglomerates who in turn appoint ship management companies to operate those ships. The ship management companies provide both technical expertise and crewing services to operate those ships. Tanker shipping is a highly competitive market where ship management companies compete against each other on a range of parameters including safety performance, technical capabilities and the retention of skilled crew to operate in a challenging environment. Vetting inspection performance measurement is by far the most powerful measure of success for shipping companies. Everyone strives for goal zero.
But this seemingly straightforward trajectory means different things to different players in the industry. The International Safety Management Code (ISM) first introduced almost two decades ago in an effort to move away from prescriptive regulation towards a self-regulated framework in international shipping beautifully captures the multiple meanings of goal zero within different subcultures in the industry. To the meagre ship owner reluctant to allocate a safety budget, ISM connotes ‘I spend money’. To a ship management company, ISM is about the formalization and rationalization of ship management. Strictly speaking that would mean ‘I save money.’ To the insurers, underwriters and private regulatory bodies in their quest to sell certification products, ISM means ‘I see money.’ To a seafarer at the receiving end of this bureaucratic machinery, the ISM Code is a malicious attempt to manage liability by transferring the risk to the last person in the chain. It means ‘I see misery’ often in the form of more paperwork, fatigue, stress and the anxiety of going through an endless cycle of audits and inspections under the pretext of continuous improvement.
Making rational arguments and talking abstract theories is perhaps not the best way to understand the problem with goal zero. Instead, let us return to Captain Philip Mathew’s story to uncover the hidden trajectory, trade-offs and unintended consequences of this endless search for perfection of an entire industry.
On 9th June, just three days prior to the incident, Elena received a call from Philip. It was a usual long distance spouse conversation. “Nothing unusual”, said Philp with a reassurance that they were “just preparing for another inspection. It’s a bit stressful but nothing that I cannot handle.”
On 11th June, the ship was informed that the discharge port was Port Rashid, UAE and apparently, a vetting inspection was scheduled alongside cargo work to clear the deficiencies raised in Japan. According to the local rules, Port Rashid requires all ships calling port to submit port formalities at least 24 hours prior to arrival. Everyone got busy from there.
On 12th June at around noon time, the family received a call from the company that the captain was missing from the ship. ‘It’s been 4 hours since he is missing. What have you done? Where are you searching? I asked. I was told that they were still searching’, said Michael.
“When I pressed further, they said, where to search? The position he went missing? The position we found we suspect he was missing? or the position we came to know he was missing?”
If you don’t belong to the world of shipping, it is so hard to imagine even the most obvious physical risks on a floating ship. When someone goes missing at sea, every moment adds to more complications. Not making decisions only makes the situation worse. The ship was about 60 miles south of the Iranian coast and there were four ships searching for the captain. “The ship managers assured me that they are doing their best”, Michael said.
“I was totally lost. I didn’t want to leave the office because I knew once I go home it would be harder to think. I sat around and tried to do a few things. Then I called the Indian embassy in Hamburg. I told this person, I’m an ex-seafarer from India and I’m now working in Hamburg, and this thing has just happened. Is there any way you could help? I told him the ship is near the coast of Iran. And I remember him scolding me back and saying, where are we? where am I? And I said, you’re in Hamburg, sir. Where did this incident happen? I said, the coast of Iran. And he said why are you troubling me? This is not a question meant for me. And I was a little bit taken aback.”
What could be more demeaning than a bureaucratic response to a human being in distress? Having lived in the West and seeing how often immigrants are disowned by their own country of origin I found a new meaning emerging from this narrative. It almost felt like an institutional attempt to manage the expectations of a third world citizen who was suddenly starting to feel his rights after living in a so-called civilized society. Michael should have known better that his brother was not Captain Philip onboard a Danish carrier highjacked by Somalian pirates where the sovereign state would do all it takes to get their citizens back. It was Philip, a third world seafarer, working for a Singapore based ship owned by a Japanese owner and flagged under the Panamanian jurisdiction. Life is cheap, even cheaper when you come from a land of 1.5 billion. Who cares that a captain goes missing at sea?
After a few hours of frantically searching the international waters, the ship managers concluded that it was time to call the rescue off and move on. “The chartering manager called me and said, Michael, we have searched everywhere. We have spoken to the director general shipping in India. It’s too dark, and now we are abandoning the search.”
“I was, I was very numb, you know, I was very, very numb. With all these things that happened before that. I was just sort of, I mean, couldn’t believe this was so real and so happening.”
“But aren’t you all going to search?”, Michael asked.
“And I remember he said, it’s dark. I mean, we have all spoken to the director general, and now we just have to move on. The ship will sail out, but the Iranian search and rescue team will continue with the search.”
First the missing seafarer is abandoned by his own state and then by the employers all within the course of a few hours. And if this was not enough, the Iranian coastguard informed Michael that the only reason they were continuing their search for his brother was because there was another accident reported in the area.
“Consider yourself lucky. There has been a piracy attack on two merchant ships today. So, we will also be looking out for your missing relative, they told me”, Michael shared with me.
“It is as if my brother meant nothing. I should just consider myself lucky. I don’t have the adjective to describe how it felt.”
The propaganda of zero harm
What an unfortunate story of apathy in pursuit of zero harm? The ship manager could not afford any more time for a missing employee, the state washed its hands off from the citizen, the regional coastguard obviously had other priorities and in the absence of any *humanitarian support, it was a lone brother coordinating search and rescue from his own office in Hamburg through the night.
The most painful aspect of this saga is that it is not at all painful within the culture of shipping. It is expected and quite ‘normal.’ A senior manager tells me, “Oil companies are still better than the rest when it comes to taking care of their people.” One wonders how bad does it get at the bottom end of the strata?
What struck me as I listened to Michael was his ingenuity even under enormous stress. Michael tried everything humanly possible from tagging the Indian foreign minister on a Twitter post to begging every possible search and coordination center in the regional waters seeking assistance. What should otherwise be a concerted effort of an industry came down to one person’s endeavors to save his family.
Nearly every oil tanker carries a conspicuous slogan at the forefront of the accommodation – Safety First. And all that it takes is a crisis situation to uncover the futility of such slogans. It reminds me of the plight of an Argentine ship captain whose ship was once detained in Aberdeen. ‘Nippin, safety is just a talk, who cares for the seafarers? Today, if I need to install a toilet on our ship, there are hundreds of approvals I will need from regulators and ship managers. But if I tell them I have been working non-stop for three days without rest, everyone points in another direction. The propaganda of zero harm.
Do Unto Others …
As painful as it was listening to how the captain was abandoned by nearly every custodian of safety in the maritime industry, it gets even more disturbing when we shed light on the social context of this accident.
From the time Philip went missing, Elena always felt something was not right in the way the company was handling the communication with the family. So, without informing the company, the family decided that Michael should visit onboard before the ship sailed out from Dubai. As he was boarding the flight in Hamburg, Michael received a phone call from Dubai.
“It was my batchmate in Dubai. He told me the company canceled the inspection. He said, I saw the captain’s name, it was your brother, and I was to inspect the ship. And then it got me thinking maybe Philip was under pressure because of this vetting. And I said, damn! I mean, this was my batchmate who knew who my brother was. And obviously it would have been a good inspection, you know. So that was the moment I just lay down on the airport floor. It was like, the world is so small, you know, it was such a simple thing.”
There was complete silence in our call before Michael broke down into tears. An entire industry takes pride in the myth of ‘objective safety assessments’ and in a moment, we realize how a drop of compassion changes the entire experience of inspections. What became clear from our discussion was how a ‘batchmate’ holds the power to turn a bureaucratic, depersonalized process into a humane experience. It is no surprise that seafarers develop preferences for inspectors and local pilots when visiting foreign ports not because the inspectors don’t raise ‘findings’ but because some of them treat seafarers like human beings. Respect, empathy and compassion – a scarce attribute within the dehumanizing culture of risk and safety – in pursuit of certainty and zero harm.
Hope is all we have
When Philip went missing, Michael had the presence of mind to appoint an independent investigation agency in Dubai. When he arrived onboard, still hopeful that Philip maybe hiding somewhere on the ship, he made an announcement on the public address system. “It was a difficult call for me, but I had to do it. This was a request from the little girls back home. We know he is hiding somewhere; he can’t just go missing like this, they told me on the phone. Please look everywhere properly uncle. I searched everywhere, even the garbage bins.” After all, hope is all we have.
As he engaged in conversations with other crew members, more things came to the surface. On the day of the accident, the captain was last seen coming off the smoking room at around 0630 in the morning. Between 0700- 0945, the technical manager who was sailing with the ship to address the vetting deficiencies, kept looking for the captain. At around 0945, unable to locate the captain on the ship, the duty officer on the bridge advised the ship manager to make an announcement on the ship’s public address system. The technical manager felt this would distract the maintenance team who were preparing the ship for inspection in port. Nothing distracts people who are committed to zero.
“Let them carry on the work”, the technical manager said and then he took three crew members with him to search for the captain. An hour later, the duty officer requested the technical manager to radio alert the ships in vicinity. The technical manager responded that a captain gone missing would reflect badly on the company’s reputation. There are no evil intentions here; shame does not allow space for imperfection and vulnerability. As the pressure mounted on the manager, a permission was granted to the duty officer to make a radio announcement that a ‘crew member had gone missing onboard’. Somehow, it would have felt like an ideal compromise between the fear of being accused of doing nothing and appearing to do at least something.
Michael then visited his brother’s cabin, but he could not find anything unusual. “It was a normal cabin, a boiler suit hanging, safety boots lying on one side. A couple of juice cans in the fridge. It was like a normal person who had left his cabin and as if was coming back. Nothing unusual. There was a small Bible with a bookmark which Philip used to carry with him.”
By this time, a parallel narrative was starting to emerge from the company. The captain may have ‘self-harmed’. Michael remained unconvinced of this narrative as he continued talking to more crew members in searching for more evidence. His search took a new turn when Michael spoke with the ship’s agent. The ship agent told Michael that on the night before he went missing, the captain spoke with him on phone several calls.
“He told me that the captain was busy preparing for the inspection until 0145 in the morning and sending me the required paperwork”, Michael said. The agent reminded him to get some rest, but a diligent captain wanted to make sure that everything was in order before he hit the bed. There was one last paper that he could not submit before he went to bed because it needed the chief engineer’s signature. At 5am, the captain was back at work again with roughly about 3 hours of rest at least on the paper.
This raised more alarm bells for Michael. He was keen to find out what happened between 0630 – 0945 – the time that the captain was last seen by the ship’s crew and when he went missing. He requested the company for a copy of the voyage data recorder (black box) and after initial resistance, Michael finally obtained a copy for his records. As he went through the transcripts, he noticed intense conversations between the captain and the vessel manager on the bridge about the ship’s readiness for vetting inspection in port.
“There was non-stop discussion about work, work, work, work, all related to the vetting. I mean, I’m a masters, obviously you know. We can understand fully, all totally related to the vetting. Is this signed, is that signed, that sort of thing.”
“My eyes were not at its best, they were blurred with tears, and they were really aching. But whatever little I could see, there were some crappy messages. I caught this superintendent [technical manager] on two or three things. I said, you made such a big fuss over this, and this was not even required. He just put his head down, you know, like, you know, realizing he had been cornered. He didn’t say much after that. After listening to the VDR [voyage data recorded], and after seeing the attitude of the superintendent, especially after listening to VDR, I was very sure that Philip had not harmed himself, at least deliberately. So, it only came down to the conclusion. It was very clear for me.”
“Only two possibilities arise from there to explain how Philip went missing. It could either be that someone had pushed him overboard. A police investigation was carried out and several crew members were interviewed by Dubai police, but nothing was really found”, he said.
From Michael’s point of view, the most plausible explanation was that on the night before Philip was so overwhelmed by the paperwork that when he nipped out for a smoke after the morning meeting, he lost balance and toppled overboard. When I looked at the design of the liferaft deck (outside the smoke room) it started to make sense. We do not know, and we will never know under what circumstances the captain went missing. Unfortunately, the sea does not provide many answers; it only raises more questions, and like all accidents it is now up to us what questions we care to ask.
To me chasing a cause of this accident is secondary; finding someone to vent out our frustration is futile, determining whether the captain went missing, someone pushed him, or he really jumped overboard is immaterial. What is worthy of reflecting is the extent of brutalization in our quest for zero within the culture of this industry. Let’s just meditate on this issue.
Can zero be an aspiration?
Captain Philip Matthew became a victim to the unrealistic expectations of an industry in ways that seafarers will not find difficult to relate with. It is often the marginalized and the vulnerable at the receiving end of the myth of perfection.
One often hears in the risk and safety industry but also in the academic discourse an incessant support for the zero ideology. It’s an aspiration, no one is really expecting you to achieve this goal. At the most, it is a stretch goal. I too have heard this a few times.
The term aspiration comes from the Latin word aspirato which means breathing in. Are we saying that people should just breathe in zero? How can someone breath nothing and still stay alive? That is of course a play of words. But beyond semantic juggling, there is an ideology behind zero that sets us against our own existence as fallible humans. How can perfection be a goal when all of existence is fallible?
When we first decided that it was time for us to become parents, knowing Irma I knew she would feel under tremendous stress to provide the best to our children. So, I bought this little placard as a reminder for both of us. Every now and then when we see this placard, it reminds us of our fallible existence.
Notice the end goal – ‘happy kids.’ It’s not as if we are aiming for disease-free, no harm, or error proof children. In an imperfect world, children will become sick, they will suffer, get injured and become depressed. As I write this paper, our nine years old has suffered from a broken arm while playing football and he has been off from the school for 4 weeks. At one stage, he was also bullied in the school. Would that mean we have failed as parents? How can perfection become a source of aspiration for fallible humans?
As parents we set absolute goals to protect our children from harm. No iPad, no phones, no sugar or walk 10k step from tomorrow. Guess what happens next. Hiding, stealing and a culture of cynicism against parents and before we realize, we have created subcultures within our own families. When we set absolute goals we stifle creativity, learning, imagination, and risk – all the essential ingredients of living and being. But absolute goals also make us blind to the trade-offs and biproducts. We think we are being specific when setting absolute goals even when specific means going nowhere and achieving nothing (zero).
The salvation myth
There is popular saying in the shipping industry – No one dies on my watch. Our perception becomes so narrowly focused on saving lives that we can no longer see the harm we commit under the pretext of zero. The notion that I’m here to save you is perhaps one of the most dangerously misleading myths of safety even from a legal perspective.
It took months of struggle for Michael to watch his brother being acknowledged as a ‘statistic’ within the International Maritime Organization (IMO) accident database. The IMO refuses to register an accident if it were not reported by the ship’s flag state. But the flag state of the ship (Panama) has no incentive to acknowledge a death onboard one of their flagged vessels. That would come in the way of goal zero.
It doesn’t end there. Captain Philip Mathews is survived by a widow and two little girls. In the absence of state support, the family needs immediate access to his funds in the bank. But federal laws don’t allow Indian banks to release the funds until a death certificate is produced which could take up to 7 years from the time a person goes missing. How often do we think about the unintended consequences of goal zero?
There is another problem with the salvation myth. It makes us dogmatic and anti-learning. Sometime ago, I was sipping a glass of wine while the plane was landing in Aberdeen. The flight attendant swapped my glass for a plastic one. All that she had to say was, ‘this is not safe for you.’ Period.
Nothing scares people more than the fear of death, and it is where all sensible conversations come to an end. Once an inspector says it’s not safe for you, the captain must obey his command. Zero thrives on fear because deep inside nothing makes us more anxious than the fear of mortality.
The danger with Zero is that the uncritical masses take it literally. We learn from the ancient Greek and the Egyptian symbol of Ouroboros that there is no innovation and learning without unlearning just like there is no rebirth without destruction. Zero, when imbibed uncritically, is both anti-learning and an impediment for innovation.
The perfection myth
If you still believe that goal zero is merely an aspiration and that it should not be taken so seriously, perhaps it would be an idea to reflect on the situation of Philip’s widow and the two girls. I hear you. It’s Philip’s fault that he took his goals too seriously, huh?
Zero is not just a number to manage; zero is a symbol of the denial of existence. Zero strips us of our existence as fallible beings. Zero is an ideology and like all ideologies, it is powerful and unconscious within the culture of an entire industry.
You may tell the captain to sleep on time. The world will not come to an end with a signature missing on a certificate. But what do you tell the ship’s agent who has to respond to port formalities? How do you convince a ship inspector that a missing signature will not make much of a difference? It does not end there.
To date, there has been no formal investigation into this case by the shipping company. Isn’t it strange that in an industry where a finger injury generates piles of paperwork, an incident involving a captain missing at sea has been silenced for years? That is the power of Zero Harm.
No reindeers were harmed
A Filipino junior officer once told me, ‘I cannot sleep sir thinking what if I missed a signature on a fire extinguisher? What if the inspector will find out? I will go home, no job for me then?’
Zero harm strips people of their dignity and humanity.
Look around and you will find zero everywhere.
No reindeers were harmed in making this good stuff.
No animals were harmed in making this film.
No seafarers were harmed in transporting these goods.
Why blame the marketing and entertainment industry when safety science is deluded by this myth.
Captain Philp’s story serves to illustrate the delusion of Zero Harm.
Can we come up with realistic goals?
Note: This article is one of the many stories from the book, 51 Stories in Culture: To live and to be, co-authored by Dr Nippin Anand and Dr Robert Long.
