Safety does not mean operational inefficiency, said Ledesma, who handles business development, marketing and sales at ESL Power Systems, arguing that passive and active protection systems have to be engineered to work with an operation rather than against it. The alternative, he said, is a system an operator can bypass with a single button press, which stops being a safety system at all.
Moderator Harry Palmer, Risk Assessment Manager at TT Club, set out the problem the panel was trying to solve. He described visiting a container terminal the week before, where operators remotely ran semi-automated RTGs that were automated inside the stack and handed control to a human once a container crossed the fence line to meet a truck. Watching from the control room, Palmer said he saw an override warning repeatedly flash on an operator's screen while the operator carried on regardless.
How do you stop an operator bypassing the system?
Joerg Spiegelhalter, Global Industry Manager at SICK AG, said the same logic applies to sensor-based protection. “When it is possible to bypass or to override the application, it is not anymore a safe solution,” he said. He gave the example of anti-collision scanners on a ship-to-shore crane that had been turned to point at the sky rather than along the boom, after the sensors were misaligned during installation; rather than fix the mounting, the operators had simply disabled the detection.
On electrical power, Ledesma said ports often run equipment at 480 volts, well above the 110, 120 or 250 volts used in a home, enough current to kill or badly shock someone who plugs or unplugs it without thinking. His company's systems require a mechanical step to de-energise an outlet before it can be disconnected, and will trip the breaker if an operator pulls a live plug anyway, backed by high-visibility LEDs that show whether a socket is energised, he said.
The same thinking extends to reefer power, Ledesma said. A cable can tear or snap if a gantry pulls a container away while it is still plugged in, so ports need ground-fault detection at the level of a rack or bay rather than just at each socket. “Ground faults, they need to be considered in these cases because ground fault could be an instant or it could be accumulation of ground fault current that needs to be tripped,” he said, adding that the approach is already standard in mining and should spread further into ports and terminals.
Why does it matter for the bottom line?
Palmer said the cost of losing a reefer load, such as blood plasma or high-grade tuna, to a broken cold chain can run to “hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single container.” Ledesma said pressure-monitoring systems, increasingly common on reefer stacks, let operators know if a container is losing a degree of temperature or running without power at all.
Beyond cost, Palmer said the usual trigger for a terminal to take safety seriously is a fatality, and it should not take one. “Sadly, often the beginning of that story is a fatality,” he said. Fredrik Rönnquist, Fogmaker's Regional Manager for Southeast Asia, put the panel's common view more simply: “the best accident you can have is the one that never occurs,” he said, arguing that fire suppression, sensors and electrical protection should be treated as an investment rather than a cost.
What happens next?
Ledesma said customers should weigh the total cost of a safety system, including the cost of a failure, rather than choosing on price alone. Entries are open now for the TT Club and TOC Innovation in Safety Awards, Palmer told delegates, inviting ports with an idea to submit one or to look at past winners for inspiration. Spiegelhalter said SICK AG had been one of this year's winners, announced in March.