STCW Hours of Rest and Fatigue in Marine Accidents

I have stood watches after a cargo operation that ran most of a day, and I know what it does to a person. Your eyes are open, you are technically awake, and you are not really there. Fatigue does not feel like a hazard from the inside. That is what makes it one.

The international minimum

Under the STCW Convention, seafarers on watch must generally have at least 10 hours of rest in any 24-hour period and at least 77 hours in any seven-day period. Rest may be split into no more than two periods, one of them at least six hours long, and the interval between consecutive rest periods should not exceed 14 hours. There are exceptions for emergencies and drills.

U.S. law and Coast Guard rules add their own work-hour limits for various vessels and services. Which set of rules applied depends on the vessel, its flag, and its trade. That is worth pinning down at the start of a case.

How rest records go wrong

Ships are required to keep records of hours of rest. In practice, those records are sometimes the least reliable documents aboard. The patterns are familiar:

• Every day recorded with exactly the minimum rest, never more and never less
• Rest hours that conflict with the deck log, the cargo log, or the officer's own signature on other documents during a recorded rest period
• Records filled in days or weeks after the fact
• Identical entries across several crew members

When the rest records do not match the vessel's other logs, the other logs are usually closer to the truth.

Proving fatigue

Fatigue leaves evidence if you look for it:

• Deck, cargo, and engine logs showing when people were actually working
• Port call and cargo operation times
• Overtime and payroll records
• Phone and email activity during supposed rest
• Testimony about the watch schedule and how it worked in practice
• Manning compared with the workload

Why it matters in a case

Fatigue does not by itself prove anything caused an accident. But it is often the condition that explains why a capable officer missed something obvious, or why a deckhand made a mistake he had never made before. And the company decides how many people to put aboard and how to schedule them. That makes fatigue a management question as well as a crew question.

The defense side

A company with accurate rest records, adequate manning, and evidence that it monitored and corrected fatigue problems is in a strong position. The point is not that every tired crew member makes a company liable. It is that the records should show the company took the issue seriously.

About the author

Captain Mitchell S. Stoller is a Master Mariner Unlimited, former Exxon tanker master, and former Los Angeles Harbor pilot. About Captain Stoller