From the outside, drills on board can easily appear as a box-ticking exercise: another alarm, another muster, another checklist. For inspectors, they confirm compliance against established standards, often influenced by individual judgement. For the crew, however, drills serve a very different purpose. They are rehearsals. They provide opportunities to practise under controlled conditions, identify weaknesses, challenge assumptions, and learn before mistakes carry real consequences.
At BSM, we have recognised this and established an internal project group to further strengthen how drills are planned, conducted, and evaluated. The objective is to better align onboard learning with realistic emergency scenarios, while ensuring that drills remain meaningful exercises that genuinely improve safety performance.
Regulations and compliance sit alongside this and are sometimes viewed as burdens rather than safeguards. There is no shortage of paperwork in our industry, and it can feel excessive. Yet most rules exist for a reason: because something went wrong before, often with serious consequences.
When approached properly, compliance is not about paperwork or penalty avoidance. It is about learning from incidents that others have already paid for. At BSM, we emphasize this through a zero-tolerance approach to procedural non-compliance.
What concerns us is not only that the world has become more volatile and complex. That has always been the case to some extent. What concerns us just as much is the temptation to treat safety as something static while everything else changes. Safety is not static. It must evolve alongside the environment in which our ships operate.
Yours sincerely,
Jeroen Deelen
Chief Operating Officer
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement
