Legal Briefing & Risk Focus

Another UK P&I Club publication belonging to the Legal Briefing series. This particular one is dealing with the cargo claims under United States law. The intention of the authors of this booklet was to provide the Club members with the guidance on those claims.

The law which governs the ocean transportation of the cargoes shipped both to and from United States ports is the COGSA 1936, standing for the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act - it is in fact the American enactment of the Hague Rules of 1924, however there are some differences.

Among other relevant laws there are Harter Act and Carmack Amendment as well as the Federal Bills of Lading Act and, of course, individual state laws. The content of this publication will be of some interest to the people dealing with the above mentioned cargo claims and willing to have a clear picture...

This P&I publication is devoted to the fires occurring in the engine room of the vessel. Taking into account a very broad range of fuel and ignition sources existing in the engine room of any ship, it appears quite understandable that this is a place where huge proportion of fires happening on board ships originates. These are maybe the most common types of fires.

In fact, a substantially extended time onboard vessel with no fire incidents could actually lead to complacency which would in turn result in a failure to duly prioritize appropriate fire prevention measures and practices. This paper is intended to provide some information on the shipboard engine room fires.

The material contained in it is arranged in several sections covering the measures to be taken in order to reduce the risk of fire in the machinery room, ignition processes and fire essentials, solid and gaseous fuels, electrical, oil and scavenge fires, incinerators and boilers, fire detection and suppression, visual inspections of the equipment, limiting the spread of fire, QCV, i.e. quick closing valves, shipboard fire safety systems etc. In spite of its compact size, this booklet covers virtually all important aspects and is recommended for familiarization.

This is a special consolidated release of the "Risk Focus". This issue specifically highlights the enclosed spaces, the master pilot exchange, power loss and moorings, slips, trips and falls, and mental health. The information contained in this booklet will definitely be practical for the ship crew members, operators and owners in their efforts to reduce the number of accidents happening on board vessels. Apart from focusing on the statistics and listing the major reasons of the shipboard accidents, the authors of this book try to analyze what has happened and what measures shall to be implemented to avoid same things in the future.

This compact booklet published by the UK P&I Club last year provides information about the cargo claims under the Turkish Code of Commerce. When developing the content of this document, the UK P&I Club specialist collaborated with the leading Turkish experts in the field. The ultimate goal of the booklet is to give the Members all required guidance on the specific matters related to the cargo claims.

The TCC mentioned above contains complete and unified rules dealing with all important aspects of the vessel arrests and tackling the unique demands of the maritime shipping industry. Subject Code was originally enacted in 2011 and subsequently entered into force next year. In this booklet we will have a glance at the administrative and legal effect of this Code. The provisions of the Code regulate all maritime shipping matters together with all other commercial transaction fields.

The document covers such aspects as precautionary aspects and application for ship arrest, agreement made between parties involved for the extension of time, challenging an arrest and limitation of liability, judicial sale of ships under arrest, arbitration and jurisdiction clauses, etc. Recommended for the people who wish to be up-to-date will the latest happening in the industry.

A couple of years ago, AP Moller Maersk – one of the world’s leading companies did become a victim of the serious malware attack. It was a really global threat, the name of the virus was NotPetya; however they also referred to it as ExPetr. The attack directly impacted the online cargo booking system. As a result, the staff of the company was forced to use their private email addresses when responding to the critically important messages.

Due to the fact that the essential work processes mainly relied on the IT, people had to resort to the old-school manual system. The whole process of resuming all services and getting the whole system back into operation took more than a week and resulted in significant losses. The present information booklet was officially released by the UK P&I Club in order to give some insight on the use of the cyber crimes and cyber safety.

You will get to know the most basic threats commonly existing in the modern shipping industry associated with cyber technologies. The impact of these threats to the whole maritime supply chain has been discussed in detail. The document will be of practical interest to all people dealing with the safety and security aspects of day-to-day operations of their companies and ships.

The present official release of the Briefing continues the brilliant series intended to provide required assistance in sharing the remarkable professional legal expertise between the members of the P&I Club. A major portion of the aforementioned expertise in the offices located everywhere in the world is mainly consisting of the lawyers capable of providing their valuable advice to the Club Members regarding the legal as well as documentary and contractual matters directly relating to the P&I in general. These specialists form a sort of a virtual team of professional lawyers writing on the critically important legal issues, and this the works presented to your attention is dedicated to the recent updates to the BWM.

This release of the "Risk Focus" publication is specifically dedicated to the power losses. The maritime industry notes the increasing number of the ship engine failures/blackouts. The number of the failures resulted from the power loss eventually led to collection of the relevant data by the risk assessors of the Club; the assessors have subsequently performed a detailed and thorough analysis of about seven hundred claims giving a cause for concern. Quite significant portion of the claims for the third-party damage to the property could actually be attributed to the blackouts or to the ship's main engine failures.

Well, the human errors are accounting for nearly sixty percent of total number of the UK P&I Club's claims exceeding 100000 USD. Half-thousand of these claims involved vessels under pilotage. In many cases, the miscommunication on the navigation bridge of the vessel has been considered a major contributing factor.

The vast majority of subject incidents include the groundings and collision, personal injuries, collisions and other. Though some overall decrease was noticed in the average cost of these claims, the average annual cost to the UK P&I Club since 1987 is approximately sixteen billion dollars...