Cruise Ship Surveillance Reviewed
By: Carlton Purvis, Published on Jan 21, 2014
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Comments (18)
Alain Bolduc
Would one option for the man overboard technology be to install cameras to monitor the sides of a ship and to detect events involving a large object, the size of a human being, falling across that area? How many false alarms could that generate?
Obviously, if cameras are targetting the gangways and movement close to the railings, the number of false alarms will be tremendous.
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Carl Lindgren
I concur. Although I've never installed on a cruise ship, I've been on four cruises (no, I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn) and checked out their cameras, as I'm wont to do.
I can barely imagine the technical and logistical problems installing any system on a cruise ship, let alone a "man overboard" system sensitive enough to cover everywhere someone is likely to fall off without generating a gargantuan number of false positives. Cruise ships are huge, with multiple outside-accessible locations, including at least 3-4 sets of rails on multiple decks plus all of the balconey staterooms and suites.
They also have "features" that jut out from the sides and stern of the ship and, as you see in the video, lifeboats on both sides. Camera placement would be challenging, as would cabling - I believe cruise ships must have all cabling enclosed in conduit.
This is the ship I'll be sailing on this spring:
How would you cover that? The ship is 965 feet long and 106 feet wide. There are at least 10 decks where someone could jump or fall off. And she is far from the largest cruise ship. RCCL's Oasis class ships are 1,187 feet long by 198 feet wide, with more than a dozen exposed decks:
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Vasiles Kiosses
How about installing a net around the ship to catch falling people. Put a sensor on it based on weight displacment, and then monitor the net with cameras and correlate the events. Probably more reliable no? and they can deploy the nets as they make sail.
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Carl Lindgren
Vasiles,
Where would you put them? They can't be placed where they would interfere with the launch of lifeboats. Any higher and the nets would either allow falls from a couple of decks or block balconey staterooms' view.
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Vasiles Kiosses
I guess thats the engineers job. I was just thinking out loud. Even in evactuation scenario, how is someone at the lowest deck or the top deck gong to get to the lifeboats in time anyway given the population on the ship. I think it safer just not to go on a cruise.
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Barry Shaw
Personally I think it's a little unfair to place the onus on the cruise ship companies to make their decks completely idiot-proof. Decks and balconies are designed to be as safe as possible so as to avoid genuine accidents, but short of caging all around the ship and ruining the experience of the open ocean for everybody, that should be enough.
I'm not aware of any overboard incidents which were truly accidents - in which normal behavior was involved - and I don't consider someone getting rat-faced in the bar and leaning too far over the rails to throw up or simply pass-out, as 'normal behavior' or even an accident in the true sense. Many overboard situations are the result of suicide or homicide - there is dark humor in the industry about a cruise being the preferred way to get rid of your spouse! In those situations the best use of surveillance is on the decks themselves, so that there is evidence of the circumstances in which a person goes over (jump, fall or pushed) and those are the areas which are reasonably well covered by CCTV.
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Undisclosed End User #1
well, N.Jewel was one of the ships I was working on in Surveillance. Believe me, it is protected and quite well :)
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Horace Lasell
While I found these personal accounts very moving, in the abstract cruise ship passengers appear considerably safer than their ashore counterparts (although the following does not consider the possibility that incidents might be under-reported).
Annual cruise ship overboard rates are about 1 in a million, compared to about 20 in a million annual drownings across America, suggesting you're 20 times more likely to drown in America than to fall off of a cruise ship.
I can't find an indication of the annual deaths aboard cruise ships, but worst case, if all deaths reported since 1979 had occurred only in the most recent year, that would suggest that Americans in America are about 1,000 times more likely to die than are Americans on cruise liners. But actually those deaths occurred over a period of more than 30 years. Assuming that passenger count and deaths both gradually increased from 1979 to the present, that weakly suggests that maybe Americans in America are something like 20,000 times more likely to die than are Americans on cruise liners.
Using that same approach, worst case, if all deaths reported since 1979 were actually murders and occurred in the most recent year, that would suggest that Americans in America are about 6 times more likely to be murdered than Americans on cruise liners. But cruise liner passengers are much safer than that, because not all reported deaths were murders and those reported deaths occurred across 35 years vice one year.
Data and sources:
The cruise industry has about 20 million passengers a year.
Cruise ships recently reported about 23 annual overboard incidents.
Cruise ships have reported 172 deaths of any cause reported on cruise ships since 1979.
(source:statisticbrain.com)
America's annual death rate is 8.39/1,000 (all causes), 4.7/100,000 (murder), and 1/50,000 (drowning) (source:wikipedia)
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