TT Talk - August 2026: When routine becomes risk: vehicle deck safety in port operations

Vehicle deck operations are among the most familiar activities in the Ro-Ro and ferry environment. Trailers are marshalled, reversed, parked, trestled, lashed and released countless times each day across ports and terminals around the world. Precisely because these tasks are so familiar, risk tolerance can increase through over-familiarisation, where repeated exposure to a hazard without a negative outcome reduces the perception the associated risk The recent UK P&I Club “Lessons Learnt” animation, developed as part of the collaborative work between TT Club and UK P&I Club, provides a powerful reminder that routine operations can rapidly become high-consequence events when visibility, communication, supervision and segregation fail.