Sal Heavy Lift Announces Safety Measures During COVID-19 Crisis

Sal Heavy Lift announces safety measures during COVID-19 crisis:

To customers and friends of the shipping community,

We at SAL are working to ensure that we can deliver your cargo around the world, despite the challenges that the global COVID-19 crisis bring upon us all. All our vessels remain fully operational and our office staff are all on the job, either in office or at home, but all dedicated to keep vessels, business, and – first and foremost – your cargo moving.

Safe and Sound

We put safety as our number one priority, which of course include the health and well-being of our employees. We are taking measures in accordance with recommendations from relevant authorities, making sure that we do our utmost to protect our staff whether onshore or at sea. Here is a short outline of our latest measures:

On board

Our seafarers live in a virologic microcosm on board the vessels. Regretfully, this is even more the case today, as international travel restrictions make it almost impossible to make any crew changes. Nevertheless, there are measures in place to protect our many seafarers during their daily work. First and foremost, we make sure that distances are kept and that only limited contact takes place with shore people when our vessels are in port. In contrast to our usually open and welcoming approach on board, we aim to keep any visits to an absolute minimum, and ask for your kind understanding that we cannot accommodate visitors on our vessels for the time being. If on-board attendance cannot be avoided, we ask all visitors to register their visit early so that individual risk assessments can be done and any mitigation measures based on purpose and extend of the visit. While on board our vessels we ask everyone to comply with the safety rules and to keep distance to one another. We keep the right to reject any visitors who do not comply with our hygiene and safety regulations on board. As a general measure, there are sanitation protocols in place, and crews receive regular instructions on the latest preventative and hygiene measures.

In port

Due to the many quarantine restrictions that have been put in place by governments around the world, our vessels can be exposed to longer waiting times at ports. We put our greatest efforts into our vessel planning around the latest updates from governments, to minimize our exposure to any delays caused by COVID-19 regulations.

Our Chartering and Operations staff will do their best to keep you updated on ports and vessel schedules which could impact your cargo shipments. We are available at all times if you wish to talk to us.

In office

The majority of our staff is currently working from home, but everyone is fully operational. Our main offices in Hamburg and Bremen are manned, however only with a minimum of staff at the moment. We are happy to take meetings with you, but prefer to keep it digitally. You can reach out to your usual SAL contact even if it is just for a virtual coffee!

We wish you all to stay safe and sound and look forward to bringing our shipping services to you.