by Lloyd's List
10 April 2025 (Lloyd's List) - WORKING in a port today is considerably safer than it was decades ago but it will be even safer in decades to come.
Debbie Cavaldoro, chief executive of Port Skills and Safety — an organisation that counts the UK and Ireland’s biggest ports and shipping companies among its members — explained that even just eight to 10 years ago, there we still “quite a few fatalities” in ports.
While fatalities do persist in small numbers, the annual figure is not nearly as big now as it has been in years gone by, Cavaldoro said.
She compared the safety culture of today’s ports to that of a few decades ago, when PPE was not commonplace, and jobs were often passed down from father to son or workers were recruited by friends.
“That bought its own culture with it, and often that wasn’t the safest,” she said.
The industry has come a long way, and behaviours that would have been visible in ports across the world in the 1980s would horrify those working today.
Cavaldoro said people she had spoken to that have worked in ports for a long time have told stories of people hanging from the back of cranes and showing a healthy disregard for PPE.
She said those tales inspired her organisation to begin thinking of behaviour that is commonplace now that in 10 years’ time the industry will find “completely crazy” and ask “how did we ever allow this to happen?”.
Working from height, for example, could be a risk that is almost entirely eliminated through improved technology. Falling from height ranks as one of the biggest causes of lost time through injury reported by 23 of PSS’ members in its 2023 annual report, the latest available.
But VR training and remote handling could remove the need to have humans working at height.
Cavaldoro said that was one of the best benefits the move to automation has, but stressed that humans would not be removed from the process entirely.
“You still need those people skills to know how to do it, but you're using it in a safer environment so they can still adapt to changing work, changing weather, changing scenarios to have that human impact,” she said.
“But they’re doing it from a desk with a remote, rather than sitting on top of it.”
The quality of video available now matched a pair of human eyes looking down from a crane, Cavaldoro said, which could see working from height as “something that we see less and less of as we move towards the future”.
But it’s not just tech that is making ports safer. Investment in the softer side of port operations, for example recruitment and culture, has made reporting accidents or even near-misses much easier for staff.
“I think the younger generation are much more focused on safety and much more willing to have those conversations,” Cavaldoro said.
The widening of recruitment so that the same groups of people do not occupy every position “has an impact because different people and different backgrounds bring a different conversation in, so you don't get people training friends and family in the way that they've done it”, she said.
“And you don’t get kind of that bravado that you might get if you have people that have been to school together and brought up together.”
While technological advancements are of course exciting to read and write about, Cavaldoro acknowledged that “we don’t know really know what technology is going to do”.
Safety culture, on the other hand, takes a long time to change and is more sustainable than the latest tech breakthrough.
“If we want to see an improved safety culture in 10 years’ time, that has to start today. So, I’d like to see much more,” she said.
“In 10 years’ time, I’d like to be talking about the fact that there is a complete acceptance of a no-blame culture, that all incidents are reported and that people are happy to report them.
“We talk a lot about data and AI and all of those things, and how they can use information to make ports safer.
“But to be able to use AI, we need to get the data in, and we can only get the data if people are happy to report.”
