On Saturday 23 March 2019, the cruise ship MV Viking Sky transmitted a Mayday Call after suffering engine failure a few hundred meters off the West coast of Norway. The ship was drifting towards rocks in strong winds and high seas.
The ship had 1,373 passengers and crew on board.
Over the course of the following 48 hours, hundreds of passengers were airlifted off the ship by Norwegian SAR helicopters.
Due to the limited equipment available to rescue agencies, those passengers had to be lifted one by one. No mean feat with nearly 1,400 people on board.
“Still on board #VikingSky 15 hours on. Awaiting evacuation. Crew has been fantastic keeping everyone calm and fed. Seas are still rough with winds of 40 knots”.
“The airlift had gone on through the night”.
We must acknowledge that it appears that the crew and rescue agencies acted impeccably; maintaining professionalism and keeping the passengers calm and as comfortable as was possible.
But let’s look at the facts! This was a very modern cruise ship (built in 2017), was sailing just a few hundred meters from the coastline when it got into trouble, and had ‘only’ 1,400 people on board.
Despite those relatively favourable rescue conditions, the rescue operation was still airlifting passengers (one by one) from the vessel 24 hours after helicopters first reached the ship. Even then, only a relatively small percentage of the total on board were air lifted before it was able to be towed into harbour.
Consider what might have happened – and very nearly did! The ship was drifting uncontrollably towards rocks in strong winds and high seas. Had the vessel actually hit those rocks, the resulting emergency would likely have become catastrophic.
One only has to think back to 2012 when the Costa Concordia ran aground after hitting rocks just a few meters off the Italian Coast. This happened within touching distance of land, in calm seas and light winds, yet still resulted in 32 deaths.
Had the MV Viking Sky hit the nearby rocks it was drifting towards – about 1.5km from the coast, in strong winds and high seas, the resulting casualty list would likely have been unimaginable.
It’s also worth noting that sea temperature off the Norwegian Coast at the time of the MV Viking emergency was around 6º Celsius. At that temperature, casualties become exhausted and unconscious within 30 – 60 minutes and will perish from the cold within 1 – 3 hours. That is of course if they don’t drown first!
Norway has a beautiful and dramatic coast line and its cruise industry is thriving. Ships much bigger (up to 7,000 crew and passengers!) than the MV Viking Sky regularly sail north of the Arctic Circle – hundreds of kilometres from land and at the extreme reaches of rescue helicopter capability. Is it not possible (likely even) that similar incidents can occur in such extreme conditions?
“With four new ships to be launched this year, the cruise industry enters a booming period of at least four years. In 2019, 11 new expedition ships adds to the fleet and by 2022, the total number of new special designed expedition ships will reach 28 additional to those nearly 80 already sailing. In difference, most of the new-built vessels have a higher ice-class and will offer tours deeper into Arctic far-away destinations than the current fleet. Some of the new ships has Polar Class 5 and one even has plans to be the first to offer non-nuclear powered voyages to the top of the world, the North Pole.”
“Although sailing with state-of-the-art safety equipment and emergency survival gear, the fast-growing number of voyages into remote Arctic locations worries search-and rescue (SAR) authorities. Last winter, Norwegian and Russian emergency preparedness agencies met for a table-top exercise on how to evacuate a 200-passenger vessel in ice waters.
“More ships at sea in the high north increase the risk of something going wrong, very wrong,” Tone Vangen, Chief of Police in Nordland and Head of Joint Rescue Coordination Centre of Northern Norway JRCC , told the Barents Observer. “We might have luck or being unlucky. It all depends on the available resources in the area.”
The new Polar Code for Arctic ship operators requires ships to have lifesaving equipment that ensures a minimum of 5 days survival time while waiting for external rescue.
“That is a theoretical statement,” Director of JRCC Bent-Ove Jamtli said. “There are no survival suits, no life-rafts that could keep all elderly people alive for 5 days.”
So is enhanced rescue capability available? Well, yes!
Multi Person Helicopter Rescue is designed around precisely these type of emergency situations – where large numbers of casualties require rescue from difficult to reach locations; often at the extreme ranges of helicopter based SAR.
The MV Viking Sky emergency demonstrates how conventional SAR based helicopter rescue is simply not currently equipped to deal with high numbers of rescuees using single person winch based rescue techniques.
Imagine if those Norwegian SAR helicopters had been equipped to lift 15 people in every lift cycle instead of just one! If we were to assume a 10 minute lift cycle, and further assume that just two helicopters were on station at any one time, then every one of those 1,373 could have been lifted off that ship in around 7 hours if the Heli-Basket HB2000 Multi Person Helicopter Rescue basket was available.
In reality, a skeleton crew would have remained on board to enable the ship to be towed (unless the ship was sinking), so the rescue could have been even faster.
It is accepted that had the ship been at real risk of sinking, then the on board life boats would have been deployed. However, it is also important to remember that people in a life boat – in high seas and strong winds, with sea temperatures at 6ºC – are still very much in a life threatening environment.
Multi Person Helicopter Rescue utilising the Heli-Basket is not designed to replace conventional winch based rescue. Rather, it is designed to compliment it; when the situation dictates that lifting one person at a time is simply not fast enough.
There are numerous scenarios where Multi Person Helicopter Rescue can enhance current rescue capability – the MV Viking Sky emergency is just the latest event to highlight the current gap in rescue capability.
We know the Norwegian Authorities are very aware of the dangers that the growing cruise ship industry presents to them – Integral Risk Global has presented to the SARiNOR project team on this very subject. However, the MV Viking emergency demonstrates that to date, gaps remain in multi person rescue capability.
Integral Risk Global – Specialists in Multi Person Helicopter Rescue.
