Safety aspects in redesigning mediumsized beam trawlers

Unlike merchant marine vessels, safety regulations for fishing vessels have been mainly left to the discretion of each national administration.
Learnt from bitter experiences the global safety aspects (stablility, equipment) have been improved in the last decades for the Dutch beam trawlers, however the personal safety aspects (working conditions) are still a matter of free and/or competitive interest for the ship yard/designer and skipper-owner. Although a national working condition law, the so called Arbo-Iaw, is approaching the Dutch fisheries.Without going in details, but with emphasis on safety integrated vessel designing, in this paper three pressing groups of personal safety aspects will be discussed and the state of the an of the research activities given, viz. bridge-, deck layout and noise control. Because safety problems are always occurring on neighbouring fishing vessels, attention is paid to a new research methodology in this field, developed by the Safety Science Group of the Delft University of Technology and applied to beam trawler design in close co-operation with RIVO as fishery expert consultants. Only then dear insights will be get in redesigning beam trawlers on these aspects.