Seb (00:01)

Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Safetytech Accelerator’s Insight Series. I’m going to be talking to Steve Marchant about Safety Innovation in Ports. ⁓ Hi Steve, good to have you on the line. Could I start by asking you to introduce yourself and give us a little bit of background about your role?

Steve Marchant (00:02)

Yeah, so my name’s Steve Marchant. I work for Forth Ports in the role of

Health and Safety Employee Engagement Manager group-wide and I also line manage the safety team in Tilbury which is a large port south east of England, biggest port in the Forth Ports Group. Yeah, that’s me.

 

Seb (00:49)

Now, I feel like we should kind of get straight into it. We’ve talked before about different risks and different safety priorities within ports. Do you want to kind of start by outlining maybe one or two of your key priorities at the moment?

 

Steve Marchant (00:50)

Yeah, so I think it’s no secret in the port industry that most of our injuries occur in containerised operations.

Most of the deaths that occur in ports are in RoRo operations and that’s a significant ⁓ impact. No hedging your comments, it’s the absolute worst that you can ever experience as a worker, as a safety professional. Being involved in the death of a colleague is awful. although they are fairly infrequent, they are where it happens.

So the container operation itself, you get your slips and trips, of manual handling type injuries, minor contusions with deck work. But the roll on roll off stuff, you know, it really is, it really is my biggest concern. And I think, I think if you question anybody in the industry that’s got a roll on roll off operation, it’s always in the back of their mind that this is, this is the point where you have that interface with people and really heavy plant. moving heavy loads ⁓ and yeah when it goes wrong it goes really badly wrong.

 

Seb (02:21)

For those of those

 

who might be watching who maybe aren’t as familiar with a poor environment, could you kind of give a really practical example of kind of a situation where this would occur?

 

Steve Marchant (02:28)

Yeah, so roll on roll off really comes in two ways accompanied freight or unaccompanied freight. So the accompanied freight anybody who’s been to a cross channel ferry going to France on their holiday will know exactly what that looks like. That’s vehicles driving onto a deck in the hold of a ship. Quite often multiple decks, not just a single deck, know, moved into a parking position and then everybody leaves and they go to wherever on the ship for the crossing.

And there’s also a huge amount of unaccompanied freight that crosses our seas and oceans. And that’s where the container part of an articulated lorry will arrive at a port, but the cab unit will disengage and leave the trailer behind. A port trailer, quite often called a tug, will then load the ship with that. It’ll be lashed to the deck using either chains or screw fittings.

That’s done obviously by a gang of what we call riggers. They have different names in other places. So you have that piece of, particularly with the unaccompanied freight, you’ve got a unit which invariably during the load back, so not the unloading of the vessel, but the loading of the vessel, for a part of that operation is moving backwards. It’s reversing into position on the deck.

it has a massive blind spot which is the size of a trailer. There are things in place to give as much view as possible so you have some very big mirrors on these tugs and the driver can actually reverse his seat. ⁓ So although he’s driving the unit in reverse he’s facing the way of travel but pretty much all he can see if he’s sat in his seat as you and I would be in a car is the

is the front end of the container or the load. Now he can lean out one side to see down the side. He’s got a big mirror to see down the other side, but whatever he does, that blind spot behind the trailer unit is absolutely blind. He won’t be able to see that at any point during his reversing manoeuvre. And during the adjustment where he is having to turn left or right, that blind spots are created by the container itself. So bits that are in view if you’re going straight suddenly disappear from view. So you are very much reliant on people staying out of the way and being aware of those vehicle movements. everybody who works with people knows that nobody’s perfect, people make mistakes and yeah they are catastrophic mistakes when they happen.

 

Seb (05:24)

And why do you think, in your opinion, does this remain unsolved? I guess kind of adding on to that, how mature do you think you are in terms of, or maybe the industry is in terms of solving these challenges?

 

Steve Marchant (05:25)

I think we’ve there’s certainly been a lot of talk and looking at the issue. So there was a a roll on roll off conference held at Hull a few years ago, 21 or 22 and lots of

 

technology was spoken about, you whether you use a role that we call policemen, it’s kind of a traffic handler. There will always be banksmen involved, but it’s still kind of, it’s not really technologically advanced. We’ve looked at cameras, because your units are not staying with the trailer, the cameras kind of might be in the right place, might not be in the right place. So people have trialled cameras in various guises.

 

And there was a lot of work being done by P &O, I will say their name, with an outfit in Ireland called Timing Island, investigating different technological approaches. There’s still a massive human interface in those. So you rely on a guy with a wand that connected to the tug driver. So you still rely on the banksman, except it’s an electronic wand versus hand signals. ⁓

 

And I just think that, you know, we’re port professionals and however much we try and keep abreast of what’s happening with technology, I don’t think that really any of us have got the knowledge, skills, experience to come up with the right answer. And when we do come up with a concept, maybe even, we can’t find one that, ⁓ we can’t find that idea being made, manufactured, out in the world.

 

Although I do think that’s changed. I’m seeing things that are getting closer to it now, but it’s still not quite the product, if you like. It’s certainly something that you would think is kind of theoretically got a solution on the market. And obviously people plant interface at a more general level is something that is being looked at, whether it’s cameras, sensors, wearables.

 

Seb (07:30)

It’s certainly something that you would think is kind of theoretically got a solution on the market. And obviously people plant interface at a more general level is something that is being looked at, whether it’s cameras, sensors, wearables.

 

It is quite an active area of the market from a technology perspective. But I think there’s a lot of kind of more specific practical difficulties out of thought that would prevent something that might be quite simple in another site, maybe a building site, that actually suddenly means it doesn’t work in a port.

 

Steve Marchant (07:58)

Yeah and I think that’s exactly the issue. So a typical ferry comes into port they’ll be

 

I don’t know, maybe 200 trailer units to load or unload and instead of 200 on, 200 off. And you’re under an amount of time pressure because you’ve got tides to deal with. You know, this is a tidal effort. We won’t push it for time. We’ll sell with stuff unloaded if it has to. So it’s not that piece that’s the problem.

 

I think the real issue is that each of those 200 units is a unique unit. It belongs to somebody. They’re paying for a cross-channel crossing. So we’ve got routes that go into Zeebrugge and Europoort. So they’re paying for that to go across. And maybe at some point it might come back empty or the other way around. It might come in full and at some point might go back empty. of the, I don’t know, 14,000 moves over any given month,

 

it’s quite possible that they won’t be the same box and some of the boxes you’ll only ever see once. So fit into plant, I think we still have that problem. If we have proximity sensors, it’s a bit like the camera thing. They’re only really applicable to the tug unit. So as soon as you put that trailer on the back, you’ve now got a massive signal shadow. It’s a massive steel box. Nothing wants to talk through it. And yeah, you know,

 

People have tied with the idea or investigated the ideas of magnetic cameras and then you end up with all your cameras disappearing. You lose your 200 cameras disappear on the first sailing because they get left on a box or at least over time you end up with none left. So that’s kind of difficult. I just think our plant is here and we can control that. And we use things like proximity sensors and halo lighting and

 

directional signal arrows on projectors on things like forklift trucks because they’re there and they don’t leave. But the trailers leave. ⁓ I guess the challenge is, ⁓ you could have proximity sensors on every trailer that were wired up when you put on your airlines to ensure the brakes work. But that’s convincing every trailer owner in the world or in Europe

 

to fit them to their trailers, retrofit them and the manufacturers to do that moving forward. So it’s a massive challenge.

 

 

Seb (10:49)

Alright, good stuff Steve.

 

So I think one of the things that we see with quite complicated problems like this, it’s almost not surprising that they haven’t been solved because there’s nothing on the market that you can just buy off the shelf. But there’s probably a lot of technology, there’s probably 70 % to 80 % there, and able to solve the problem. But what we’ve got to do is go a level below that and start to finish off that

20% where we need to investigate the context in a lot more detail, the technology probably needs to be adapted, there needs to be quite a deep collaboration between a vendor and the person who has the problem to get to the final solution. And it’s often difficult to form that collaboration. Is this something that you think would be best to solve on your own? Or actually, is this something that you’d like to see come together and address collaboratively?

 

Steve Marchant (12:00)

Yeah, I very strongly think that this should be an industry initiative. I think it’s not just the ports. think it’s the operators, know, our customers, if you like, that bring their vessels in. So, you when you look at the big ports that run these things, places like Liverpool and Dublin.

 

and many others around the country. Dover has a huge amount of roll-on, roll-off. I’m not sure about their unaccompanied volumes, but certainly it’s a huge ferry terminal. And I think anywhere that’s running that kind of service, and particularly those big players in the customer base, the likes of P&O, DFDS, those guys, it needs to be a joined up effort.

 

Seb (12:54)

There’s a lot of, especially in the safety world. mean, so we do this with other challenges in maritime, but I think in the safety world where everyone has the problem. So it makes sense to collaborate. But on top of that, the way of addressing the problem is potentially risky because we don’t know the solution just yet. So if one person is going to go away and kind of take a bet on a piece of novel technology, it might not work and that person’s kind of used up their resources on something that doesn’t work. Whereas if everyone is working together, you can kind of make up the gaps because you’re going to be exploring lots of different solutions and everybody’s kind of sharing that risk appetite together. So it makes a lot of sense, I think.

 

Steve Marchant (13:24)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

 

I think so. And, know, there are in the UK major ports group, there’s port skills and safety. There are, you know, there are industry bodies out there that could.

 

that could drive this. Much like PSS is doing around EV safety at the moment. I think ⁓ it’s not a concern that’s just mine. know, if you talk to people with this operation, that thing I spoke about in ⁓ Hull a few years back, there were probably 150 people at that event who have all got skin in the game.

 

Seb (14:18)

Yeah, but it strikes me that there’s a lot of groups,

 

really good industry groups talking about the problems, bringing people together. Obviously, we’ve attended some of those together, but actually what’s needed is a practical, applied technology program that’s really going to explore the potential solutions together, because I think everyone understands the problem, but actually we need to get on and try stuff and work out how we implement technology.

 

Steve Marchant (14:23)

Yeah. Couldn’t agree with you more.

 

Seb (14:24)

Okay, so based on this discussion, what’s your message to industry then and what sort of collaboration would you like to see?

 

Steve Marchant (14:32)

I think for me, this is something that we… There’s a choice, but I don’t think there’s choice here. I think we have to do something. We’ve got to do something to never let it happen again. So six days into my career at Forth Ports, we had the awful experience of a young man dying on a ferry. And there’ll be many of ⁓ the safety professionals in the ports industry with these operations that have been through the same thing, if not at their own ports, certainly in their own organizations. And I just think the longer we wait, the more chance there is of it happening again. And we just should not be letting it happen again. It’s kind of a moral obligation, if you like, to fix the biggest problem that we’ve had and still have. So I think the final thing that I want to say is you know if you when you look at our leadership when you look at CEOs down everyone’s really committed to safety if you ask the question there’s nobody that’s going to say something else comes before safety and they speak to it and they speak to it well and and that really reinforces the fact that the industry wants to do better.

 

Seb (15:41)

Yeah, sure.

 

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Steve Marchant (15:41)

At the end of the day, everybody has the absolute right to go home after a day’s work in the same state that they arrived. So, whole in body and mind, not hurt, not injured, not ill. And we just, we have to do everything that’s in our power to make sure that that happens. Not just today, but every day.

 

Seb (16:06)

And I think it’s really powerful, Steve. And I think what’s interesting now is that the words kind of everything in our power is starting to change because while you can’t buy something off the shelf necessarily, we’ve got the power to actually potentially solve this problem using technology. And it’s something that we should really be doing.

 

Steve Marchant (16:12)

I what’s interesting is the words and everything in our power is not going to change. That’s why you can’t find something on the shelf necessarily. We’ve got the power to actually potentially solve this problem using technology.

 

Yeah, and I think it is time for us to embrace technology in every way, shape or form. You know, we’re using BI and AI to analyse our data. We’re using technology to speak to each other. We’re using technology to manage our data in a way that we’ve never done before. It’s given us insights. You know, for people who’ve got grey beards and boy have I got a grey beard.

 

Technology can be a scary thing, but I think the time is now to recognise we’re in the century of the fruit bat, to quote Terry Pratchett, and we need to just embrace it and find out what we can get it to do, not just what it can do now, but what can we get it to do moving forward.

 

Seb (17:14)

And our role at Safetytech Accelerator is to really try and help people like you do that with a focus on making the world a better place and removing risk.

 

Okay, Thanks a lot, everybody, for listening in, watching. Thank you very much, Steve. And this concludes another episode of Safetytech Accelerator’s Insight Series.