The Maritime Safety Authority of Fiji (MSAF) has admitted it is years behind on investigating vessel groundings, blaming the backlog on a chronic shortage of manpower.
Chief executive officer Joeli Cawaki revealed yesterday that investigations had been delayed for years, prompting the formation of a working group to fast-track outstanding cases.
“In all these groundings we had, one of the problems with us over the years is that we were very delayed in our investigation,” Mr Cawaki said.
“We are catching up now. We are having a working group within MSAF now to catch up on all our investigations.
“Some of the causes here were basically due to the manpower that we have.”
He said all maritime incident probes were handled internally.
“We have surveyors and our enforcement. These are the people doing the investigations.”
Mr Cawaki also confirmed a dedicated unit will soon be set up within MSAF to improve efficiency and accountability.
“We are restructuring and hopefully very soon we are going to create a unit within MSAF for investigation that will make it easy for us.
“That will make our investigations easy and quicker.
“But at the moment, as I said, we are having a working group on investigation that we are trying to fast-track and make relevant of all the past years’ incidents that have not been investigated.”
