Channel safety summit

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32604, 12 May 1971, Page 17

Channel safety summit

fN.Z.PA.-Reuter —Copyright! LONDON, May 11. Representatives of Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands will meet in London this week for emergency talks about safety in the English Channel ship-ping-lanes.

The meeting, called by Britain, arises from a series of collisions and sinkings in the Channel. Fifty-one people lost their lives over a twomonth period at the beginning of the year when three ships went down. , The ranker Texaco Caribbean blew up and sank after a collision, and 24 hours later the West German freighter Brandenburg collided with her bow wreckage. Two months later the Greek vessel Nikki collided with one of the two wrecks, and sank.

The safety summit, to be opened by the British Parliamentary’ Under-Secretary for Trade (Mr Anthony Grant), will discuss ways of keeping watch on ships and guiding them; the need for hydrographic surveys; wreck removal; and air-sea search and rescue.

In Largs, Scotland, yesteray, Mr william Brankley. the chairman of the National Union of Seamen, said that shipowners who disregarded safety standards should be treated as sternly as drunken drivers.

In a reference to the Channel disasters, he said: “Behind al! the talk about traffic separation schemes and standards of navigational competency lies the indiscriminate pursuit of profits and an almost criminally casual approach to the dangers of a collision at sea.” The Folkestone Coroner (Mr Norman Franks) ruled yesterday that a wrong decision by the officers of

the Brandenburg led to the collision in which she was involved and in which 21 members of her crew died.

The Coroner, who recorded a verdict of accidental death on the seven crewmen whose bodies were found, said that, in particular, the Brandenburg’s first officer had interpreted warning lights displayed by a wreck-guard vessel “in a different way to that in which they have been interpreted in this country and on the Continent for many years.”