6 AUGUST 2018 • FOGHORN FOGHORNFOCUS: SAFETY F ortunately, this actual radio transmission was preceded and followed with “THIS IS A DRILL.” It was made during a full- scale exercise conducted with the U.S. Coast Guard, regional Gulf Coast re- sponders and HMS Ferries this past March. Looking back to nearly a year earlier, HMS Ferries had set as a goal to partner with our clients and regional responders and conduct emergency response exercises at each jobsite. HMS Ferries operates and manages ferries in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Washington. These exercises were different and unique for each ferry location and ranged from an active shooter scenario, to a confined space major injury recovery, to the Mobile Bay Ferry Fort Morgan’s mass casualty. However, they all shared the same major goal of improving our entire company’s safety posture. As it turned out, the Mobile Bay Ferry was the jobsite selected by HMS Ferries’ President Matt Miller to work with the Coast Guard and conduct HMS Global Maritime Ferries Division’s first “full scale” exercise. If you are like me and aren’t well versed in exercise planning jargon, then you may not appreciate that exercises can range from short, a couple of hours, tabletop discussions, to massive multi-day endeavors and everything in between. In our case “full scale” meant actually playing out events that would follow a collision of a 149-passenger, 30-vehicle car ferry with an Offshore Supply Vessel or OSV. The day of the exercise, “dummies” went into the water, Coast Guard and fire rescue vessels responded, and passengers were transferred off the ferry when de-wa- tering efforts couldn’t save the simulated sinking vessel. The work to put together a full -scale event is significant, but so are the payoffs for the participants! The first step in planning our event was to contact our nearby USCG Sector Contingency Planning Staff. We have a lot of pride in our relationship with Sector Mobile, and yet were still surprised with the enthusiasm the Coast Guard met our request with to conduct an exercise! I think they were also a little amused at our ambition to go right to a “Full Scale Exercise.” Many vessel operators opt to ease into the mass rescue drills by starting with a tabletop exercise followed by a limited company endeavor before attempting a full-scale exercise. Nevertheless, the Coast Guard guided us through every step of the process and brought together many of the regional players that could benefit by participating. We quickly gained a much greater understanding of how much Coast Guard Planning Teams like it when industry wants to partner up for these types of exercises. We also gained a much better understanding of how important it is to clearly define your objectives for the exercise. The key objective for us on this exercise was to test our plans. For the Mobile Bay Ferry this included our Vessel Emergency Plan (VEP), Safety Management System (SMS) and our HMS Global Maritime Corporate Incident Response Plan. The USCG made it clear that if you don’t have plans in place then you really aren’t ready conduct an exercise. This reminds me of the old saying “failing to plan is planning to Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail By Tim Aguirre, HMS Ferries Alabama “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Sector Mobile, this is the Ferry Vessel Fort Morgan. We have just had a collision with an OSV and we have people in the water!” Using dummies, first responders “assist an injured victim” during a full-scale exercise aboard an Ala- bama ferry. Photo courtesy of HMS Ferries Alabama.