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More than 140 people were killed last week when the ferry Moby Prince
collided in dense fog with an oil tanker moored in the Italian port of Livorno.
Exactly a month earlier, the ministers in charge of commercial shipping
in Europe refused to endorse a safety system which might have prevented
the accident.

Aldo Manos, head of the UN Environment Programme’s Mediterranean office
in Athens, says a radar system for tracking ships close to the shore was
developed by the European Community four years ago. The system would work
along the same lines as air traffic control, monitoring shipping with radar,
then establishing radio contact with captains to determine the identity
and destinations of ships. The shore control could then offer advice.

Environment ministers from Europe’s coastal states have been calling
for the system to be installed since 1985. But in March, European ministers
in charge of commercial shipping met in Paris, and despite strong support
for the radar system from the UN, they refused to endorse it.

‘There is great opposition to a traffic control system from the merchant
marine,’ says Manos. ‘They think it interferes with a captain’s independence.’