Fast rescue craft damaged by inappropriate use
What happened?
A vessel was engaged in a joint offshore oil spill response exercise involving third parties. During the exercise, the client instructed the Master to use the Fast Rescue Craft (FRC) of the vessel as a towing boat for repositioning the oil booms deployed.
What went wrong? What were the causes?
The mooring bollard on the FRC broke under tension when the FRC started to tow the oil boom.
The FRC was not fit for this purpose and this was not considered while planning or risk assessing the task in preparation for the exercise. A suitable work boat should have been used for positioning of the oil boom.
Incidents involving small boats, whether work boats, Fast Rescue Craft (FRC), lifeboats or Crew Transfer Vehicles (CTV), should always to be treated as having high potential for serious injury or fatality. Please visit the IMCA safety flash webpagewhere you can enter any phrase or word and search through the wording of over 1000 safety incidents. Try searching for boat (90 hits), lifeboat (34 hits) or fast rescue craft (10 hits).
Members may wish to refer to the following incident:
Safety Event
Published: 31 January 2018
Download: 
IMCA SF 03/18
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