Safety paramount in wake of Wahine disaster

Monday, 9 April 2018

Children are taken off lifeboats during the Wahine rescue.

OPINION: The Cook Strait can be a fearsome stretch of water. Fifty years ago New Zealanders found out just how fearsome when tropical cyclone Giselle swept south and hit a southerly front. The result was a violent storm, a storm which sank the Union Steam Ship ferry, the Wahine, with the ultimate loss of 53 lives.

The disaster remains etched on our national consciousness – as does the determination to avoid it ever occurring again.

Lifeboat number 2 from the Wahine is brought ashore at Seatoun Beach. Engineer Phil Bennett, who skippered the lifeboat, is top left.

No one is more conscious of that than those responsible for the Interislander fleet, which travels the strait up to 14 times every day. They remember not only those who perished that day, the family and friends they left behind, but also those who risked their lives to save the 683 who survived that day.

Among them were their predecessors — the crew of the Aramoana — the New Zealand Railways owned roll-on roll-off rail and vehicle ferry which launched its lifeboats in horrendous conditions. New Zealanders rise to the occasion, as they did that day, and the lessons learned from the Wahine's foundering are still valuable today.

* Flashback: Wahine disaster 45 years on

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The Cook Strait will always be daunting, but much else has changed. Those changes have made crossing the strait much safer.

That is a result of better ships, better weather forecasts and better management systems. Those changes echo the KiwiRail approach that makes safety paramount in all that we do.

Standards for the design, stability and survivability of ships have improved markedly, led by the International Maritime Organisation.

Ferries were among the first ships in the world to adopt the International Safety Management Code more than 20 years ago, and the Code's requirements — which are continuously audited and updated with improvements — and its safety focus, which is implemented in KiwiRail's Interislander operations through the Company's Safety Management System.

Equally important is the culture the new rules promote. KiwiRail and Interislander put safety first always, and that is the approach taken when bad weather is on the way and decisions must be made about whether or not to cancel sailings.

Our teams use sophisticated forecasting tools and real-time wave information, to make informed decisions about sailings in bad weather. Where there is a risk that significant wave height will reach six metres or more, the ships will not sail. That is written into our Safety Management System.

The Master of the ship retains the ultimate authority to cancel sailings at his or her discretion, a rule enshrined within the International Safety Management Code and our own Safety Management System.

Those Masters sailing our ships also have access to technology that simply did not exist in 1968. There are constant monitoring systems for signs of any water being taken on board, and navigation systems which reveal exactly how close ships are to hazards and also improve situational awareness.

Training has also evolved. KiwiRail has invested in developing ship and port models for the state-of-the-art Smartship Simulator in Brisbane used to train and retrain the bridge crews who sail our ships across the Strait.

The simulator is used to replicate the Cook Strait crossing. It's used as part of an expanded, on-going programme of training for bridge teams.

The intervening years have also seen a step change in weather forecasting. Nowadays weather is under the unblinking eye of the satellite. Masters have a much better idea of what they will face in the Strait and as they enter Wellington Harbour.

The Wahine disaster helped shape maritime safety systems in New Zealand. It changed the way ferries operate on the Cook Strait and gave rise to organisations such as the Life Flight rescue helicopter service, which Interislander sponsors.

KiwiRail and the Interislander are fully aware of the risks of sailing Cook Strait — it can be one of the most daunting stretches of water in the world — and we guard against complacency every day.

There is, however, no doubt that 50 years on from that tragic day in 1968 things are very different, and very much safer.

Peter Reidy is the chief executive of KiwiRail.