SECUMAR-servicing teams investigated:
A quarter of all lifejackets defective!
The servicing department of the lifejacket manufacturer SECUMAR has produced some alarming findings. Of the lifejackets sent in to the company annually by their owners, approximately one quarter show signs of defects, some of which are serious. Most of the lifejackets are in such a bad condition that they would not help in an emergency.
Most of the problems were discovered with the carbon dioxide cartridges , the gas from which is used to inflate the buoyancy chambers. The cartridges were either pierced and empty, or some of them were missing completely. In emergency situations that would have meant: the automatic inflator would not have functioned, the safety factor in cases of unconsciousness would not have existed. The wearer would have had to inflate his lifejacket with difficulty using the oral valve – an almost impossible task after capsizing in a storm.
Further sources of defects which were discovered by the SECUMAR servicing teams were corroded cartridges and, in seldom cases, missing protective caps or leaking buoyancy chambers.
Furthermore, it was determined that the majority of the lifejacket owners had not kept to the prescribed servicing intervals. The date concerned can be seen on the service sticker; the principle is the same as the MOT-system for car testing. In 20 percent of cases of lifejackets sent in to SECUMAR, the servicing interval had been exceeded. In some cases, a year had even elapsed between the prescribed date and the actual date of submitting the lifejacket.
The problem becomes even more vivid when one considers the hidden number of lifejackets not submitted or never submitted for servicing, a similar percentage of which (when compared to the percentage uncovered by servicing statistics) are surely also non-operational.
For these reasons SECUMAR is appealing urgently to the owners of lifejackets to take note of and keep to the servicing intervals marked on their service stickers.
You can get further information under the telephone number +49 4103 125 0 or through Servicing.