ABSTRACT
Chantiers de l’Atlantique is one of the world leaders on the highly complex ship market. With its qualified workforce, state of the art industrial facility and IT tools, it is an expert in designing, building, integrating, and testing the most innovative cruise ships worldwide. From the 70s, the cruise ship size has almost doubled every 10 years and our biggest cruise ships are now approaching the 10 000 people on board.
Although the environmental concern has become the prominent issue at IMO level, the safety topics remain of paramount importance for very large passenger ships, considering that flooding due to collision, grounding and contact continues to be the most significant contribution to the overall risk.
In this presentation, I will highlight the current status of the regulation, i.e., how the flooding risks are covered by the current rules and where are the main known gaps of this regulation.
Then I will show some examples on how we deal, at Chantiers de l’Atlantique, with those safety aspects, which are not fully covered by the regulation or give room for interpretations, considering that we cannot compromise with safety.
Finally, I will explain how the European collaborative R&D project “FLARE” (Flooding Accident Response”) tried to tackle the mains gaps of the regulation, leading the way to a more comprehensive safety approach based on holistic risk models. Tremendous efforts will still be needed to issue the next generation of SOLAS rules, but the way is already mapped out.
