Passenger vessel evacuation: between regulation and reality

Passenger ship evacuation procedures are designed around assumptions that often collapse in real emergencies. Selina Wai-Ming Robinson, of the University of Portsmouth, argues that regulatory compliance alone is insufficient to deal with this problem

Evacuation systems on passenger ships are based on several assumptions about the crew's ability command a vessel, its condition, and human behaviour, all of which are consistently violated in major accidents. As a ship starts to list, flood and lose power, the conditions under which evacuation procedures are intended to function begin to deteriorate, either gradually or, as in the cases of Herald of Free Enterprise (1987) or Estonia (1994), with catastrophic speed.