In Depth

Piracy Expert: Maersk Alabama One Slice of a Huge Pirate Problem

Roger Hawkes of Global Industries discusses why some of the debate around piracy this month is misplaced, and how piracy has been a problem for years

By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor

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Finally, in the wake of 9/11 the International Maritime Organization implemented the International Ship and Port Security Code that now regulates security for vessels and port facilities throughout the world. It was done so in order to address the fear that terrorists would target the Maritime Transportation System. The ISPS Code established a number of required security measures for vessels and port facilities that the maritime industry has spent untold millions of dollars to implement. Almost every vessel that has been attacked in the Gulf of Aden and elsewhere across the world is operating under these security requirements. It would seem that at some point we must question the validity of these requirements and ask why the industry is spending huge amounts of money on complying with security regulations that were designed to improve security on vessels to prevent them from being attacked by trained terrorists when these measures are not even adequate to prevent common thieves from penetrating a regulated port facility, boarding vessels and robbing the crews, much less preventing a vessel from being hi-jacked off the coast of Somali by teenagers armed with AK-47s.

What can companies who have ships in dangerous waters do in the short term, while this problem is going on? What can they use to protect themselves?
My opinion is the tools are all out there. I see daily piracy reports everyday. What we see more and more are piracy attempts where they try and board a vessel and it fails. I believe that is because more and more antipiracy practices are being implemented that are making it harder for pirates to be successful.

When you develop an antipiracy plan, if you have a vessel that is sailing through known hotspots, you have to do an assessment of that voyage itself just like you are doing a risk assessment for a facility or an operation anywhere else. You have to apply the classic security tool we all use: The risk assessment. Your security measures for piracy in Southeast Asia will be different from off the coast of Nigeria or Somalia. You have to match your security measures with the threat.

Once you have done that, there are things you can do that don't even have a security connotation to them. Things such as altering the route you go through, or going through at a higher speed. For instance, up until very recently, all the attacks in the Gulf of Aden were occurring during daylight hours. So that should tell you right there you want to time your transit to go through those waters as much as you can at night. But in Southeast Asia, most of the incidents take place at night. You can mitigate a lot of piracy risks just by planning the voyage properly if you have those two parts of the equation.