Serious marine incident in the port of Grisslehamn, Norrtälje Municipality

Summary in English

On Friday, 13 October 2023, the car and passenger ferry ECKERÖ was in Grisslehamn and loaded cars and passengers for a trip to Åland. Both crew and passengers were on the vehicle deck. In order to accommodate all the cars, a so-called hoistable car deck had to be lowered to be able to load cars on two floors. In connection with the lowering of the hoistable car deck, one of its platforms fell uncontrollably onto the deck below.
A car with a trailer was crushed and two people suffered minor injuries.

At the time, the automation for operating the hoistable car decks did not work and they instead had to be lowered manually. The Able seaman who was to perform the task had not done this for a long time and accidentally pulled in the locking wedges to the platform before the cables were stretched. This resulted in the platform falling freely for a bit. As the cables slowed the platform up, one of the sheaves to the lifting cables was torn loose. The spacer plates that were supposed to hold together the two steel plates between which the line sheave was mounted had defective welds. The welds broke from the load that occurred. There was then no longer anything to hold the cables in place and the platform then fell freely.

Causes of the accident

The cause of the accident was that there were insufficient safety functions when manually operating the hoistable car decks.

Contributing causes of the accident were that the risks of manual maneuvering of the hoistable car decks had not been identified. This has led to insufficient training of the crew, the instructions for maneuvering not being updated and that people were allowed to stay under the hoistable car decks during manouvering.

At system level, a casual factor was that hoistable car deck platforms are not covered by sufficient requirements regarding construction, installation and use.

Inadequately performed repairs meant that the platform's hoisting arrangement did not hold up to the loads that occurred during the incident.

Safety Recommendations

Rederiaktiebolaget Eckerö is recommended to:

• Ensure that all hazardous operations are handled in the safety management system, and that training and instructions for such hazardous operations are developed and kept up to date.
  
  
• Complete the work of introducing a technical solution that ensures that the lockings on the hoistable car decks cannot be retracted before the lifting cables have been stretched.