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Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts

https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/press-room/press-listing/press-release/2026/alarm-overload-is-undermining-safety-at-sea-as-new-research-shows-crews-face-tens-of-thousands-of-daily-alerts/
32•geox•1h ago

Comments

sklargh•1h ago
When everything is important nothing can be important. I was particularly struck by the reduction of crew rest to service alarms. I'd sort of thought this was a problem for watch standers only but it makes sense that some alarms require a specialist or the crews are too thin. Heck, I bet the captain, engineer and first mate all have monitors in their staterooms.
abanana•1h ago
Same sort of problem we have in modern cars? Speed, lane assistance, blind spot, etc, sometimes apparently beeping for the hell of it.

For some it's distracting and frustrating, even increasing aggression and thereby increasing the risk. For others it breeds complacency, a "boy who cried wolf" scenario such that the alarms become meaningless. Either way, it doesn't work as intended.

Interesting to know ships have followed the same pattern, apparently to a worse extent. I wonder how many more walks of life, and industries, are suffering in the same way.

nsavage•55m ago
My Volkswagen has assistance features which routinely fail on snowy days and can’t seem to be disabled. The best you can do is disable them for a minute (!) at which point they start blaring again. Its ironic because the time you need the most focus is the time the car lets you focus the least.
DoingIsLearning•45m ago
It can absolutely be disabled they just wouldn't get the same brownies points in EuroNCAP by allowing _you_ to disable it.

If I spent more than 50k on a car like that, I would absolutely return it and file a complaint.

Car companies care a great deal about after sales stats. This trend will continue because we as users on average tolerate it.

B1FIDO•21m ago
I rented a car last July, and I specifically picked out a small one because I wouldn't need to carry any cargo or passengers around.

As soon as I drove off the lot, 3 warning indicator lamps lit up, including "Tire Pressure" so I stopped at a service station, thought for a moment, then drove back to the rental lot.

The other indicator had something to do with crash protection, and I think we worked out how to disable the system. After putting air into my tires, I was good to go.

So I'm thankful that those lamps indicated some actual conditions. I always kind of make a point of taking out the Owner's Manual and leafing through it, however briefly, just to see that it covers everything. They're still fairly comprehensive. I really appreciate that.

michaelt•59m ago
Excessive alarms aren't just a problem at sea.

There have also been fatal aviation accidents where there's a problem with a common system (a dip in the power supply or hydraulic pressure, or a problem with a critical sensor) and dozens of systems sound alarms at the same time [1].

And for a technology example, a database server disappearing might raise a single alarm, but the applications that rely on that database might raise countless alarms as attempts to connect fail over and over again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight...

ApolloFortyNine•19m ago
This is the flight where one pilot tried to pull up to recover from the stall, and the warning for dual input (which Airbus just averages together) was snoozed by the system yelling about the other errors and was reduced to a light they didn't notice. The captain commented towards the end"no don't climb". The stall alarm was the one the system chose to display over all others and was mishandled (by the pilot who didn't know how to recover from a stall).

Boeing there's physical feed back, when one control moves so does the other.

This was not the first time pilots were having conflicting input without noticing.

>https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf

1e1a•48m ago
Direct link to the report PDF: https://maritime.lr.org/AM-report-2026
paulnpace•37m ago
I didn't look at the PDF, but the sample size reported in the article is 11 ships(!), which makes me wonder how this might look across a larger population of ships.

I wonder how much labor expense has to be saved to make up for a future catastrophic event?

seb1204•30m ago
Internalize gains, externalizing cost of events or accidents.
chriskanan•16m ago
This has been a major problem in hospitals where there are many false alarms and often concurrent alarms for hospital beds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/

This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatally flawed.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/
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Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts

https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/press-room/press-listing/press-release/2026/alarm-overload-is-und...
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