Chris Adams

Chris Adams

Chris Adams served at sea as a navigating officer with Ellerman City Liners of London. He holds a degree in Nautical Studies from the University of Southampton and joined The Steamship Mutual Underwriting Association Limited as a claims executive in 1979, initially specialising in handling collision and other admiralty incidents. He has been a partner of Steamship Mutual’s management company since 1998 and is Head of the Club’s European Syndicate and Head of Loss Prevention. In the latter role he has conceived and developed the Club’s series of loss prevention DVDs which include programmes on Collision Avoidance, Groundings, Crew Health, Cyber Security, and Piracy; the latter winning the Seatrade Award in the Safety at Sea Category. In addition, in over 20 years of cooperation with Videotel, more than 90 onboard safety training programmes have been jointly produced, the content of which greatly benefit from the Club’s claims experience. He is a Fellow of the Nautical Institute, Younger Brother of Trinity House, Member of the Royal Institute of Navigation, Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, Freeman of the City of London, a Trustee of the Maritime London Officer Cadet Scholarship Scheme, and Chairman of the International Group’s Pilotage Sub-Committee.

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Navigational safety in the cyber era

Chris Adams, Head of Loss Prevention, Steamship Mutual, discussed how cyber risks affect navigational safety at the 2017 SAFETY4SEA Conference. Considering that the computerization of operating and control systems on vessels requires effective cyber security arrangements, it is vitally important to raise awareness of cyber security risks with personnel and to implement safe practices to avoid putting systems at risk.

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Best Practices in Crew Health

Chris Adams, LP Director, Steamship Mutual focused on ''Best Practices in Crew Health'' at the 2015 SAFETY4SEA Athens Forum. He highlighted the persistent cost of P&I crew claims, and examined the causes of these, many of which are regrettably recurrent. In the context of injury, failure to adhere to well established best practice regularly results in death or injury when entering enclosed spaces. In view of this, the current PSC concentrated inspection campaign on this issue is a welcome intervention. He also introduced and explained the objectives of the Club's latest loss prevention DVD which addresses crew health and fitness and highlights why physical fitness for seagoing employment is vitally important.My presentation focuses on loss prevention in the context of crew claims with the aim to make clear why loss prevention is important and necessary. Unfortunately, when we look into maritime incidents, we find that, with disappointing regularity, they arise from causes that are eminently avoidable. In order to understand why loss prevention activity in this area is important, it is quite informative to look at the numbers. The following table shows Steamship Mutuals crew claims experience over the last three years (2012-2014). The majority of claims are what we...

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Loss Prevention to address Navigational Risk

- P&I Clubs are concerned about Navigational Casualties and Navigational Error their impact and frequency. When we are looking into their circumstances, we are often struck by the huge gap that exists between the simplicity of the course of the accident and the severity of the consequences. A case study on the lookout and passage planning involves a collision of two containerships Hyundai Discovery and ACX Hibiscus, heading to Singapore. Hyundai Discovery was inbound to Singapore and the Panamanian registered ACX Hibiscus was outbound from Singapore. The collision happened during the morning watch where there was a change in the watch. The Hyundai Discovery just turned to starboard to come into a parallel track and four minutes later the ACX Hibiscus starts to make a course alteration to port. Visibility at the time was reduced by heavy rain. The ACX Hibiscus was making this course alteration as part of a navigational course alternation. There was no reason to make that alteration but she make it in complete ignorance that there was another vessel heading towards because she could see that vessel in the radar clutter. At Hyundai Discovery they noted that course alteration very quickly after occurred and their action...

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Grounding Loss Prevention Best Practices

Despite the advantages in training, advantages in technology onboard ship, we are still getting ships running aground, so something is amiss. What's going wrong? Why are we concerned about it? The concern firstly arises from cost considerations. The table below is rather difficult to interpret of first glance. What it shows is the development of claims on the International Group pool in the first 6 months of the underwriting year, as at the 20th August of each underwriting year as shown in the top line, and then the development of those claims in 12-month intervals thereafter. You can see from that, what we know already is that 2006-2007 had been the worst two years on record. If you track along to 2012 you can see that in the first six months of 2012 claims notified were around about double the previously highest level, and in 2013 things are not looking good either. Claims of US$96.7 million notified in the first six months of 2013, so that's the background to the concern.     If we drill down to look at some of these claims and try to understand what is causing them, from the following chart for the last six...

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