In recent years, the inland and coastal barging industries have been anticipating the introduction of regulations to implement the congressional directive that towing vessels become a class of inspected vessel. With the recent publishing of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, 2012 will be a year to focus on the ultimate form of these regulations and hopefully to move toward implementation.
These regulations should raise the bar of safety and compel all operators to do what most do already: maintain a safety management system that will reduce risk and eliminate accidents. This has been what industry has clearly and vocally supported from the outset. If the rules do this, all will benefit.
The challenge in 2012 will be to convince the government to implement a program that addresses the human factors that cause most accidents in our segment of the industry, rather than place too much emphasis on equipment standards that are the hallmark of traditional inspection regimes and could add great without doing much to improve safety.
At the same time, we as a nation need a long-term plan to recapitalize and maintain our inland waterway system. The industry worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to develop a comprehensive solution which prioritizes waterway capital investments, changes the project delivery system to make it more efficient, adjusts the cost share formula to increase equity and increases the inland operators’ contributions to the Inland Waterways Trust Fund.
This solution has been in the shadows, as the focus of Congress and the administration has been on broader budget discussions. Reinvestment in the inland waterway system must be a national priority and should be part of either the budget solution or addressed separately in 2012.