Risk Assessment and Management for Maritime SAR and Oil Spill Response

This report summarizes selected publications that deal with maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) operations, winter navigation as well as oil spill response. In the first part of this report, the SAR capabilities, response times and effects of weather on Finnish Search and Rescue Units (SRUs) are evaluated. Besides this, the risk of oil spill and effects of winter conditions were evaluated. Two of the most relevant accident types – collisions consequences on oil tanker and RoPAx vessels – were evaluated. Both tankers as well as RoPax vessels are very common vessels in the Gulf of Finland, carrying thousands passengers or tonnes of oil. However, during the project it was found that there are currently no particularly reliable methods for assessing which sea areas are most prone to accidents. This highlights the need for future research in the methodology. Furthermore, a model is presented that describes the interaction between ships and the ice when navigating in an ice channel. This model helps to understand better the increased side forces and yaw that occurs in ice channel when compared to sailing in open waters. This can be used to train bridge personnel to better understand their ship's behavior under challenging ice channel conditions, thus decreasing risk.  A final model describes how fast an oil slick will spread in an ice channel as a function of factors such as the ice concentration and ice floe size, allowing for better estimation of how far oil will spread until effective clean-up measures can be taken

Maritime Search and Rescue in the Russian Part of the Gulf of Finland

Presently, search and rescue (SAR) operations in the Russian part of the Gulf of Finland are handled by the Border Guards, the Ministry of Emergency and the Small Boat Inspection of St. Petersburg and Leningrad. Voluntary search and rescue organizations are a recent phenomenon in Russia; they are under active development. There is a desire to organize SAR services based on risks, making the best use of the limited available resources. In particular, decision makers are interested to know how many search and rescue units of which types are needed in which locations. This thesis presents an exploratory study of resource allocation possibilities in the Russian SAR region of the Gulf of Finland. Different possibilities of setting up voluntary rescue organizations are studied by using simulation. The results indicate that Kronshtadskly and Suursaari are likely to be good locations to establish voluntary SAR base stations. Due to lack of reliable data in the Russian SAR region, little can be said about the required vessel types or their number. The study however indicates that an approach using system simulation can provide good decision support, if such data becomes available