“In the early morning of October 15, 2015, the Sabina departed from Aalborg (Denmark) on its voyage to Kotka (Finland),” reports the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board (SUST) in its investigation of the accident involving a ship sailing under the Swiss flag. "During the night of October 16, 2015, the Sabina passed a waypoint where a course change was planned according to the voyage plan, but this course change was not made. At that time, the officer on watch was alone on the bridge. A short time later, the officer on watch left the bridge to take medication for his headache in his cabin. From that point on, the bridge was unmanned. The Bridge Navigational Watch Alarm System (BNWAS) was switched off. Upon arriving in his cabin, the watch officer suffered a loss of consciousness or a disturbance of his well-being, fell to the floor and remained there. Just under an hour later, the Sabina touched the ground off the west coast of the island of Bornholm (Denmark). Although no one was injured, “the ship was severely damaged.”

The sequence of events leading up to the accident makes for dramatic reading: the overseas pilot on a Norwegian tanker noticed that the Sabina had deviated from its usual course to Finland. When his attempts to contact the Sabina by radio failed, he alerted the Danish Coast Guard. They contacted the port authority in Rønne on Bornholm and the police. They also warned the leaderless ship in vain that it would crash into the island's coast at over 12 knots (22 km/h) in half an hour if it did not change course. The shipping company also tried to reach the ship by satellite phone. Without success. So a sea rescue boat was sent to meet the Sabina.

Its crew managed to wake the sleeping Sabina crew by banging on the ship's side with bolt cutters and a hammer. Just in time. The awakened captain managed to turn the wheel hard to starboard at the last moment. “The shortest distance between the ship's hull and the rocky coast was between 20 and 50 meters,” writes the SUST. For a 128-meter-long ship, that is extremely close.

This raises many questions: “What if...?” For example, what if higher waves had prevented the sea rescue boat from approaching the Sabina so that the crew could bang hard on the ship's side? How would the leaking fuel have polluted the island if the Sabina had not turned away at the very last moment? And what would have happened if the Sabine had been powered by nuclear fuel instead of fossil fuel?

Fatigued sailors and wrong-way drivers

“Some members of the crew lacked adequate awareness of the limits of human performance in relation to fatigue,” the SUST states. The investigation authority shows that this is a fundamental problem in the shipping industry in the appendix to the “Sabina” report, in which it lists further cases:

• Total loss of the 101-meter multi-purpose freighter “Gabriel” in 2009: “The officer on watch was overtired. (...) He may have fallen asleep in the wheelhouse."
• Incident involving the 142-meter container ship ”Karin Schepers" in 2011: The captain took over the bridge watch. “Due to fatigue and alcohol consumption, the captain fell asleep in the wheelhouse shortly thereafter, whereupon the Karin Schepers sailed virtually unmanned for over two hours, entered the lane of oncoming traffic in a traffic separation zone, and then ran aground.”
• Or the accident involving the 90-meter multi-purpose freighter “Beaumont” in 2012: “Contributed to by fatigue, the officer on watch fell asleep in the wheelhouse during his bridge watch. He slept for around an hour until the ship ran aground.”
• The same was true of the accidents involving the 80-meter multi-purpose freighter “Douvent” in 2013 in the North Sea and the ‘Danio’ in the same year on the northeast coast of Great Britain.
• On the “Fri Ocean” in December 2013, the officer on watch also woke up just seconds before the ship ran aground on the west coast of Scotland.
• Three months later, the 116-meter container ship "Yusuf Cepnioglu" was completely destroyed off the Greek island of Mykonos because the officer on watch had fallen asleep due to exhaustion.
• This was followed in September 2014 by the 183-meter bulk carrier Ince Inebolu.
• And less than six months later, the officer on watch on the west coast of Scotland wrecked the "Lysblink Seaways". He “had been on the bridge, but lost his situational awareness due to alcohol consumption.”
• In August 2015, the "Musketier" became what is known on the highway as a “wrong-way driver”: she entered the traffic separation zone in the opposite direction and sailed there for more than an hour and a half against oncoming ship traffic. (...) Influenced by alcohol and medication, the captain had left the wheelhouse during his bridge watch and fallen asleep in his cabin."

The Swiss investigation authority's list shows that fatigue is a persistent problem in the shipping industry. When alcohol is added to the mix, the dangers become even greater.

The "Exxon Valdez" disaster

Fatigue was also one of the causes of the oil spill in Alaska in March 1989: The 300-meter crude oil tanker ran aground on a reef, spilling around 1.3 million barrels (40,000 tons) of crude oil into the sensitive ecosystem. According to Greenpeace, only 7 percent of this could be removed through cleanup efforts.

The disaster was the result of an unfortunate chain of events in which fatigue played a significant role. On the night of the disaster, Captain Joseph Hazelwood ordered the ship to deviate from its usual route in order to avoid any icebergs and then retired after handing over command to the third officer. The latter had previously supervised the pumping out of ballast and the loading of oil in the harbor and was overtired when he took up his watch. The US safety authority subsequently stated: “With regard to personnel policy (...) the safety authority is of the opinion that Exxon Shipping Company did not take sufficient account of the known impairments caused by crew fatigue.” It also criticized "the lack of company programs to ensure that crew members comply with duty time regulations; the lack of procedures to ensure that, in addition to the captain, at least one rested deck officer is available for watch duty at departure; the practice of evaluating a crew member's performance in part on their willingness to work overtime, which created an incentive for excessively long working hours; and the indiscriminate increase in workload and on-call time across the entire fleet before and after the Exxon Valdez ran aground." (National Transportation Safety Board, 1990)

The oil company had reduced the crew to a minimum. “The safety authority considers the Exxon Shipping Company's practice of reducing crew strength to be generally imprudent (...). The financial advantage gained by eliminating officers and crew members on each ship does not appear to justify the foreseeable risks of serious accidents.”

Technical defects

Of course, fatigue and drunkenness are not the only causes of shipping accidents. In around two out of five accidents, the engine failed. The ship is unable to maneuver. A particularly spectacular accident occurred in March 2025 when the container ship “Dali” (9971 TEU) collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the port exit of Baltimore (USA) after first the power supply and then the engine failed. Although traffic was stopped in time, six workers employed to maintain the bridge died when it collapsed. The damage to the ship was estimated at $18 million. The replacement of the important bridge will probably take several years. However, six workers employed to maintain the bridge died when it collapsed. The damage to the ship was estimated at $18 million. Replacement of the important bridge is expected to take until 2030 and cost up to $5.2 billion.

The preliminary report by the US investigating authorities shows that The cause was a single loose cable sleeve in the Dali's electrical system. “We determined that the power failure in the low-voltage bus led to a failure of the lighting and machinery, including the main engine's cooling water pump and the steering gear pumps, resulting in a loss of propulsion and steering capability.” (National Transportation Safety Board, 2025)

Has anything improved since the Exxon Valdez oil spill?

The most important advance: the Exxon Valdez was a single-hull tanker. Today, only double-hull tankers are permitted. However, there are question marks regarding operational safety. The accidents caused by fatigue and alcohol listed by the Swiss investigative authorities all occurred after the Exxon Valdez disaster. And they are unlikely to be the only ones.

The rules are actually clear: the safety regulations of the UN's International Maritime Organization (IMO) are available on every ship in the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) manual. The international SOLAS Convention was first established after the sinking of the Titanic and is amended after every major accident.

The ISM Code (International Safety Management Code) is also important for practical application on board. It requires shipowners to develop a Safety Management System (SMS) that prescribes the concrete implementation of safety measures. Sounds bureaucratic. And it's not particularly popular with crews as “paperwork.”

The extent to which compliance with SOLAS can be monitored can perhaps be gauged from the second weighty tome, MARPOL (International Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Ships). On YouTube, you can find videos showing a worker on an MSC cruise ship illegally throwing garbage bags overboard. And the illegal pumping of oil sludge from heavy oil processing or oil-containing bilge water through so-called “magic pipes” is so widespread that a reward has been offered for whistleblowers who expose such offenses, and a Wikipedia article describes the problem. In short, at sea, the authorities are far away and monitoring of regulations is only possible indirectly.

Two captains sound the alarm

An article by two captains, Naveen Singhal and M. M. Saggi, on the Splash 24/7 portal provides some insight. They refer to the Exxon Valdez disaster and write: “Nothing appears to have changed after 35 years.” The business of flag states is to register the respective ships. “nearly all flag states are under pressure to mandate reduced manning, often against their own safety standards, solely to maintain the ship’s registration (business) within their jurisdiction, before the shipowner considers transferring to other more lenient flag states.”

In addition, investigations have shown that four out of five seafarers “altered their rest hours records to evade inspection findings". Seafarers are "seafarers face lengthy contracts, low wages, insufficient crew, overwork, fatigue, and unhappiness. A few thousand pages of SMS junk, meant to demonstrate compliance, sit gathering dust—neither read by the author, who remains anonymous, as most of the text is borrowed. If that isn’t enough, excessive, cumbersome paperwork, irrelevant checklists, and procedures—neither pertinent nor specific to the ship’s hardware—choke the conscience of the seafarer."

Another factor is apparently the ever-shorter port times achieved through automation: "Meanwhile, a sincere chief engineer — which is rare — struggles with non layup time for maintenance but is expected to act as an Usain Bolt and juggle around to complete the maintenance, even if that requires nviolating port regulations by immobilising engines at anchorages orn during port stays, and jeopardising the safety of the vessel. While the less adventurous chief engineer may prefer to simply tick the boxes.“ Accordingly, after the Dali collided with the bridge in Baltimore, the investigating authority found the loose electrical cable sleeve within 12 months, ”whereas the ship never detected it during 10 years of operation.."

Conclusion: “Safety standards on ships are victims of a decayed ISM code and significant gaps in the so-called minimum safe manning, creating a waiting to happen scenario. Giving the devil its due, certificates are on the rise, but safety standards are decreasing, as compliance is often documented in PDFs while vessels remain unseaworthy in practice.”
 

References

Schweizerische Sicherheitsuntersuchungsstelle SUST (2025): Schlussbericht der Schweizerischen Sicherheitsuntersuchungsstelle SUST über den Seeunfall des unter Schweizer Flagge laufenden Mehrzweckfrachters SABINA vom 15. Oktober 2015 vor der Insel Bornholm, Dänemark, Bern, https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/BS/Sabina_Konstanza_SB_D.pdf 

National Transportation Safety Board NTSB (1990): Safety Recommendation, Washington D.C. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/M90_26_31.pdf, abgerufen 12.12.2025

National Transportation Safety Board NTSB, Meeting of November 18, 2025 (Information subject to editing): Contact of Containership Dali with Francis Scott Key Bridge and Subsequent Bridge Collapse, Patapsco River, Baltimore, Maryland, March 26, 2024, https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/Board%20Summary%20Contact%20of%20Containership%20Dali%20with%20Francis%20Scott%20Key%20Bridge.pdf, abgerufen 13.12.2025

Captain Naveen Singhal and Captain M M Saggi (2025): An outdated ISM code awaits a doctor, auf Splash247 v. 12.12.2025, https://splash247.com/an-outdated-ism-code-awaits-a-doctor/, abgerufen 13.12.2025