Safer on Board Environments for Indonesian Seafarers and Fishers in the Time of Covid-19 and Beyond

Abstract

The seafaring and fishing industries in Indonesia have been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need to research the best technical solutions to ensure the safety of seafarers and fishers so that they can keep working safely at sea. It is highly unlikely that the Indonesian fleet will be able to rapidly return to the pre-COVID-19 situation within the next few years. Therefore, long-term solutions are required. This research aims to provide guidance for owners, operators and masters to reconfigure their vessels and operations to ensure a safe working environment to counter the potential spread of the virus, as well as maintaining the integral safety of the vessels. The present paper reports several primary activities, including analysis of existing guidelines, questionnaire survey, computational fluid dynamics, remote monitoring and machine learning. These works are expected to provide indications on virus-hazardous areas for ships, inform guidelines on hygienic and reconfiguring means to counter COVID-19 and potentially the spread of similar viruses, and further establish a long-term monitoring and optimising system for ship safety and performance.

COVID-19 transmission inside a small passenger vessel: Risks and mitigation

“…Crew and passengers can be exposed to a serious risk of contagion, since the compact and crowded space of ships implies a high likelihood of COVID-19 outbreak. In this context, there is an urgent need to research the best technical solutions to ensure COVID-19 safety for ships ( Thomas et al, 2021 ).…”