From today (8 September), ballast water management will form part of port state control inspections but samples will not be routinely taken, the secretary general of the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Port State Control, Richard Schiferli, told BWTT yesterday.

His organisation has prepared guidelines for inspections, but he does not anticipate that inspectors will focus on equipment or sampling “unless there are clear grounds to do so,” he said. Asked whether the MoU was planning to mount a concentrated inspection campaign (CIC) of the sort it is currently conducting into navigational safety, he said there were no plans for a ballast-treatment CIC in the near future “taking into account the developments at IMO.”

But he added: “After the first six months we should have a better picture of the implementation of the BWM Convention.”

The MoU’s guidelines are “in line with the IMO guidelines,” he said, which were issued as Resolution MEPC.252(67) in 2014. They set out a four-stage inspection process that, in summary, consists of:

• An initial inspection, focusing on documentation and ensuring that an officer has been nominated for ballast water management on board the ship and to be responsible for the BWMS, and that the officer has been trained and knows how to operate it.
• A more detailed inspection, when the operation of the BWMS is checked and the PSC officer clarifies whether the BWMS has been operated adequately according to the ballast water management plan.
• A third stage, during which sampling is envisaged to occur to identify whether the ship is meeting the ballast water management performance standard described in regulation D-2.
• A fourth stage, if necessary, incorporates detailed analysis to verify compliance with the D-2 standardSource: https://www.rivieramm.com/news-content-hub/news-content-hub/psc-starts-ballast-management-checks-but-not-sampling-27280