Spot the Hazard

In 2015, Standard Club, part of NorthStandard created a ‘Spot the Hazard’ competition with the International Chamber of Shipping. Open to all serving seafarers, it was designed to promote hazard awareness as a means of reducing the toll of easily preventable accidents. 

To take part, seafarers visited the competition website and used the downloadable forms to identify hazards. There were five posters to cover the key hazardous areas, including the galley, bridge, engine room, main deck and shore terminal. In addition, entrants were required to invent an idea designed to enhance safety on board ships. 

A total of 590 seafarers entered from 78 companies, and they submitted 1,300 posters. This allowed us to analyse the results and make some discoveries regarding the perception of risk among those who entered. The full analysis is available in our Personal Injury Bulletin.

The results were encouraging, with many seafarers scoring top marks on each of the posters. But every year there are thousands of accidents that could have been prevented, so there is still work to be done to translate this understanding of what constitutes a hazard into safe working practices on board. 

Get the posters

In the interest of helping seafarers to identify hazards and understand how they could escalate into serious incidents, we continue to make the competition posters available. The hazards are highlighted and there is an explanation of why awareness of each hazard is important for the safety of ship operations.