COVID-19 Lockdown: The Seafarers, Port State Authorities & Air Travel Crisis
On Monday, my co-founder Hrishi and I began to notice that COVID-19 had completely disrupted our clients operations. As a security & intelligence supplier, we operate hand in glove with their logistics and it was unmistakable that some kind of threshold had been crossed. I spent the remainder of the day on the phone to ship owners and managers and they all highlighted a desperate need for the following:
- Crew Changes
- Provisions
- Testing Kits
By far the most urgent was the crew changes. Managers were beginning to experience issues with minor illness and injuries, all non-COVID19 related and in the normal course of business, but they were unable to disembark those crew members for treatment and their concern was, how are we going to address this problem as it only grows worse?
And grow worse it will. Clubs, Owners and Managers are all following a policy of putting crew contracts into force majeure and extending contracts until the 30th of April, at the end of March 15% of seafarers will be beyond their contracts and by the end of May it will be 40%.
That is 150,000 people that need to go home by the end of the week, stuck on ships at sea. Equally all of them have to be replaced by crew flying out, 300,000 people that need to move in the next week to enable 90% of the planet's logistics to keep moving. Toilet paper, food, sanitiser - if you are hoarding it, they are shipping it and none of it moves without them.
There is nothing that the shipping industry needs more at the moment than the ability to develop an interface with Port State Authorities to enable safe transfers of crew from ship to shore and airport to home.
Some managers have tried to send crew out to do crew changes only for them to arrive in the country of embarkation and be refused permission by port authorities to get onto the ship.
The most paradoxical part of this problem is that most vessels are natural quarantines and most are likely to be entirely safe. The problem for Port State Control is that there is no way to quickly make informed judgements about which ships should be quarantined and which should not.
Currently ship owners do not know which ports they can and cannot conduct crew changes in, and if they can conduct a crew change they have no information on whether or not they can fly their personnel home safely.
We believe there is a solution to this, and we are working on it.