Using this system, we were able to determine the response behaviour and paths for a large proportion of the passengers as they responded to the alarms and moved to the assembly stations onboard,” described Mr. “Our team used up to 106 battery-powered video cameras and the ship’s own CCTV cameras in strategic locations throughout the vessels to determine passenger response behaviour, as well as a novel infrared-based tracking system to capture passenger movement during the trials. The individual’s behaviour during the early stages of an evacuation can have a major impact on how the entire evacuation progresses. Onboard a passenger ship, the general emergency alarm sounds to alert passengers to assemble and is often the first cue an individual receives that an incident has occurred which may require evacuation. The response time is defined as the time between the sounding of the alarm and when passengers start moving to an assembly station. One of the objectives of SAFEGUARD was to develop a series of passenger response time distributions that could be used in passenger ship evacuation analysis. The funding for the research was provided by the European Union Framework Program 7, the province’s Research and Development Corporation (RDC) and Transport Canada. The team’s research became the basis of the SAFEGUARD project, in which a series of five full-scale assembly exercises were conducted at sea on three different types of passenger vessels operating in Europe – a Roll-On-Roll-Off-Passenger (RO-PAX) ferry without cabins, a cruise ship and a RO-PAX ferry with cabins. “Understanding how people behave in emergency situations within maritime settings is vital if we are to design evacuation-efficient vessels and evacuation procedures for crew and passengers to follow,” said Mr. Brown explains having the data are crucial to regulators who test existing models for ship evacuation. Their focus has been on studying passenger response to evacuation alarms and validating current evacuation models specific for large passenger ships. Brown has also been working with colleagues at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom to improve passenger ship safety worldwide as part of his PhD program. Brown conducts research in the areas of emergency response, evacuation, survival and rescue in hopes his findings are adopted by ship designers, regulators, operators and survival trainers.įor the last few years, Mr. The next time you step onboard a cruise ship, Rob Brown wants you to think about how quickly and safely you can get off in case of an emergency.Īs a researcher at the Marine Institute’s Offshore Safety and Survival Centre, Mr.
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