By
Rebecca Gibson |
The single biggest challenge facing cruise and ferry lines is to ensure that the capability to evacuate large numbers of people in a short period of time is available, regardless of the circumstances. Most accidents at sea involve fire or collisions – with a risk that certain areas of the ship cannot be used for evacuation, or that a crucial system sustains damage. From our perspective at Viking, there should be more focus on redundancy as it precisely deals with having sufficient evacuation capacity regardless of the nature of the emergency and whether one section of the vessel has become inaccessible.
Viking evacuation systems have therefore been designed with chutes and slides that can handle a higher capacity than that of their in-built liferafts. The capacity of the evacuation systems can be increased by using a series of associated, yet independent liferafts that can be quickly repositioned where needed. In this way, a sufficient amount of redundancy is in place even if access is no longer possible in certain sections of the vessel.
As a manufacturer of safety equipment, Viking is only interested in getting the best possible equipment onboard passenger and cruise vessels. In fact, our clear impression is that cruise lines and shipowners have continually shown a great interest in increasing a high safety standard onboard their ships as they do consider it an important competitive parameter. Industry response to the safety issues raised by the Concordia accident has until now only reinforced this view and we will of course continue to deliver products that live up to our customers’ high expectations.
We have experienced a significantly increased order intake on our large evacuation systems, primarily from the passenger and cruise industries. Our customers are constantly looking for the latest technological developments in safety equipment and have a great focus on redundancy, to which we believe our products respond very well.
Our development department continues to work on ways to bridge different systems and safety equipment so that they will be able to work even more closely together. Our goal is to increase both the flexibility and the capabilities of various systems so that they can handle unpredictable situations and still keep passengers and crew safe.