Recently, Tianjin Maritime Safety Administration signed the “Memorandum of Cooperation on Search and Rescue Cruise Capability Building” with 10 shipping companies, officially establishing the first batch of maritime search and rescue volunteer fleets in Tianjin jurisdiction, providing important support for improving the perception and handling of abnormal situations in mid-to-deep sea waters and the efficiency of emergency incident response.
This volunteer fleet consists of nearly 200 vessels of various types, including bulk carriers, container ships, and ro-ro ships, owned by 10 companies such as CNOOC Tianjin Branch, Zhejiang Shipping Group, COSCO Shipping Co., Ltd., and Ningbo Ocean Shipping Co., Ltd. Tianjin Maritime Safety Administration has established a communication and liaison mechanism with the volunteer vessels and their companies to collect abnormal behavior information and emergency search and rescue information in real time and transmit responses. In addition to undertaking emergency search and rescue duties for unexpected incidents, each volunteer vessel will also assist in tasks such as collecting and forwarding maritime safety information, and reporting and verifying abnormal maritime situations, effectively addressing issues such as insufficient regulatory capacity in mid-to-deep sea waters within the jurisdiction.
In the next step, Tianjin Maritime Safety Administration will steadily expand the scale of the volunteer fleet, deepen cooperation with volunteer vessels and their shipping companies in areas such as emergency response coordination and communication and navigation equipment support, and jointly discuss and promote the integration of external CCTV video feeds from vessels into the smart maritime monitoring system, sharing volunteer fleet resources with all direct maritime safety administrations around the Bohai Sea.
