Lesson No. 1: Be Prepared

For shipping lines plying the perilous seas off the Somali Coast, risk management begins long before vessels enter the Indian Ocean or the Gulf of Aden.

A pirate hijacking is not like anything else a shipowner is prepared for or one it can manage through a normal emergency response program.

“It’s a highly stressful and frustrating negotiating process,” said Jeroen Meijer, vice president and national practice leader for crisis management at the Washington office of London-based Control Risks Group, which advises companies hit by pirate attacks. He said the average piracy incident lasts 50 days.

The owners of ships and the cargo onboard them cannot assume their assets will be safe from pirate attacks because many of the world’s navies are patrolling the pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa. There are still too few warships on patrol, and the area is far too vast to guarantee safety of the vessels, so the burden of security is falling on shipowners.

Although many shipowners are adding defensive measures such as fire hoses, barbed wire and locked safe rooms and training their crews in how to evade pirates, experts with firsthand experience in dealing with vessel hijackings say they need to do much more.

They have to prepare in advance for what happens before and after a pirate attack. Preparing defensive measures in advance is relatively straight forward because they involve physical security, crew training, insurance coverage and considering alternate routes. After an attack, issues surrounding crisis management get complicated because they involve differing legal jurisdictions, ransom negotiations and, most important of all, the safety of the crew and the emotional well-being of their families.

Increasingly, shipowners are clustering their ships in convoys through the Gulf of Aden, but even convoys can’t guarantee their safety because the navy may not reach a ship under attack in time. The navies in those waters will try to reach ships under attack in 30 minutes, but the Somali pirates can deploy huge numbers of high-speed skiffs.

The typical attack involves three high-speed boats that can board a ship in 15 minutes. While helicopters from Canadian and Italian warships were able to thwart an attack on the U.S.-flag Maersk Virginia on May 21 and capture the pirates, other pirates were able to board the slow-moving ship Victoria when it was steaming in a convoy earlier in the month and seize its Romanian crew.