Activities and Working Papers

Ad Hoc Panel #15

Current Activities of the Panel

The panel suspended its operations after the last analyses sponsored by the U.S. Coast Guard were completed in October 2007 while it awaited the publication of a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to update the passenger weight standard. On August 20, 2008, the NPRM was published and the panel is now revived to focus its final efforts on a technical review of the NPRM and its supporting documents. This effort is anticipated to include a technical review of:

• the proposed rules,
• the strategy for implementation of the proposed rules,
• assessment and suggestions for improvements to the proposed rules, and
• analysis of the impact of the proposed rules.

To help coordinate this effort, a teleconference/meeting of the Panel is planned for September 2008. The Panel’s progress will be summarized in a report to the T&R Steering Committee and a final meeting of the Panel is will to be held during the SNAME 2008 Annual Meeting & Expo in Houston. This meeting will be held to discuss members views on the NPRM and related documents, to agree on the panel’s technical comments, findings and recommendations, and to agree on the Panel deliverable (report). If the Panel so desires and the T&R Steering Committee agrees, technical comments on the proposed rules will be submitted to the docket for the rulemaking. After these current activities are completed, the Panel will retire again until needed for review of the final rule.

Past Activities of the Panel

Background - The formation of this panel was chartered by the SNAME T&R Steering Committee at its meeting in October 2005 at the SMTC held in Houston. The panel’s main work has been to support a USCG sponsored study on increased passenger weight and size standards. In this area, the focus was to review and comment on the grouping of passenger vessels for evaluation, the technical assumptions used for evaluation, confirm technical validity and thoroughness of stability results, and provide peer review of the study’s outcomes. The Panel’s charter provides greater detail of its tasks.

The panel’s kick-off meeting was held on March 6, 2006 using MeetingPlace (by Cisco systems) to manage voice and web conferencing, which allowed members to view meeting documents via their internet browser. The meeting closely followed the agenda. The key action item from the meeting was the distribution of a questionnaire that most panel members answered. The next meeting, held on April 7, 2006, (again using MeetingPlace) addressed the responses to the questionnaire. Based on the meeting dicussion and the questionnaire responses, the salient points that the Panel agreed upon were:

1. Passenger weight should be the basis for stability information.
2. People weigh more than they did, and a useful average is 187 lbs per adult passenger.
3. Non-passenger payload (luggage, carry-on, etc) should be dealt with as weight in addition to passenger weight, and handled separately.
4. Not all passenger vessels, due to their size, will be as sensitive to the increased average passenger weight as others. This difference needs to be dealt with, but no decision has yet been made on the exact mechanisms of evaluating this sensitivity. No determination has yet been made on which, if any or all, vessels need to undergo a stability review.
5. A convenient, practical means for operators to gauge their compliance with stability requirements is desirable. We believe both passenger weight and passenger count will be part of the practice, but no algorithm has been determined.

3rd meeting - On June 30, 2006, the first ideas on the grouping of passenger vessels to facilitate improved study was received from the USCG and distributed to the panel for review and comment. This information included 7 sheets that presented principal vessel dimension data for monohulls less than or equal to 65 feet in length operating on exposed waters. The comments by the Panel on the the grouping ideas were recorded in the panel’s August 15, 2006 memo. On September 9, 2006, the 3rd Panel meeting was held during which the contents of the memo were discussed. Since the study was anticipated to be completed shortly thereafter, the Panel elected to wait for receipt of the draft impact analysis study report.

4th meeting - The Panel became involved in the review of the preliminary draft phase 1 report at the beginning of 2007. On March 9, 2007, the 4th Panel meeting was held to discuss the phase 1 report, its limitations, and consider what additional work might be needed to provide a satisfactory assessment of the impact of increased passenger weight on inspected passenger vessels. The Panel chair then requested feedback on the basic direction of the impact study in order to make a recommendation to the Coast Guard, either:

1. continue the strategy to identify vessels at risk from passenger weight increase as outlined in the Phase 1 report and attached document; or
2. adopt a new criterion-based strategy outlined in comments provided by the Panel chair; or
3. neither strategy: there must be a better way.

5th meeting - On March 27, 2007, the 5th Panel meeting was held to discuss the feedback of 10 members and agreed on recommendations to be provided to the Coast Guard. These recommendations that incorporates much of the criterion-based strategy that was proposed were included in the August 23, 2007 Panel memo (this document is available as one of the Reference Documents listed below).

Activities prior to NPRM - During the summer of 2007, Coast Guard field units updated vessel information in its MISLE database on 745 randomly sampled inspected passenger vessels. This information was used so that supplemental work could be done to the phase 1 impact analysis study. The Coast Guard sponsored additional stability evaluations on the impact of increased passenger weight on vessels that had undergone a simplified stability proof test (SST). A simple methodology for increased passenger weight evaluation was developed for vessel’s that underwent a SST. In October 2007, the Panel was requested to provide comments on the report of this work (this document, titled ”Stability analysis of small passenger vessel with increased passenger weight,” is available as one of the Reference Documents listed below).

Panel Membership

Panel chair is Dr. George Borlase of the Applied Physics Laboratory - of the Johns Hopkins University. The panel vice-chair is Mr. Andy Lebet of DeJong and Lebet, Inc. and the Panel’s website maintenance is coordinated by Mr. Chuck Neville of Charles Neville Associates. The panel members consist of experienced persons from ship design firms, shipyards, small passenger operators, research organizations, associations, and governmental agencies.

Reference Documents

Most of the documents to which the Panel might refer are now available online by way of the Regulations.gov website, which contains the docket or collection of documents related to the passenger weight rulemaking activity. This docket may be accessed by going to http://www.regulations.gov/search/index.jsp and, under the banner ”search documents,” entering the document identification number corresponding to the deisred item, and clicking on “Go.”