BC Ferries gets “black boxes”
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 - 9:05 am
Rutter Inc. has announced that its British Columbia dealer and service agent, Radio Holland, will retrofit BC Ferries existing fleet with a total of 40 Rutter VDR-100G2 voyage data recorders (VDRs) over the next two years.
“VDRs are black boxes for ships that record and store audio, instrument, and navigation data in a pressure resistant water-tight capsule. Our VDR provides a particularly rich playback context, providing a clear and accurate record of the circumstances leading up to a marine incident or event,” said Byron R. Dawe, President of Rutter Technologies, Products Division. “While the majority of the demand for this product is driven by regulations requiring certain classes of international traveling vessels to carry them (15,000 - 20,000 vessels over the next 5 years), increasingly the VDR is being seen as providing invaluable safety and management information to domestic ferry operations. We are certainly pleased with this latest success and expect that other leading domestic ferry services worldwide will take note and follow the BC Ferries example for voluntary fitting,” he said.
Rutter says it has installed about 1,100 vessel VDRs for customers including Washington State Ferries, Brittany Ferries, SeaFrance SA, Carnival Cruise Lines, Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, Holland America Line, Celebrity Cruises, and Moby Lines. BC Ferries’ (BCF) decision to install VDRs on all their vessels makes it the single largest voluntary installation of voyage data recorders to date globally, according to Rutter.
BCF and the Canadian Transportation Safety Board (TSB) have had difficulty in pinpointing the exact causes of some recent accidents. Employees often have imperfect recall of events leading-up-to and during an emergency situation and, fearing retribution from the company, have been unco-operative with some investigations, leading BCF to suspect them of dishonesty (e.g. Queen of the North, M.V. Quinsam).
George Morfitt’s recently released Safety Review of BCF did not explicitly recommend the installation of VDRs. (Source: Rutter press release)
