Lloyd’s Register data shows alarm overload has crossed from nuisance to safety risk

Lloyd’s Register’s latest work exposes a widening gap between alarm systems and how crews actually operate.

After examining more than 40 million alarm-related events across 11 operational ships, the report shows that alarm systems routinely generate volumes that exceed human capacity, particularly over long operating periods.

LR’s data shows that many ships generate thousands of alarms per day, that fewer than half meet the benchmark of under 30 alarms per hour, and that on vessels with unattended machinery spaces, alarms interrupt rest in the majority of cases.

The result is that alarm systems have become a safety risk in their own right, capable of undermining situational awareness and increasing the likelihood of serious incidents.

Nuisance alerts are the real problem

During an early visit to a ship’s bridge, Orca AI’s Product Director, Elad Volman, stood in a control room filled with alarms. The most persistent sound in the space was not a collision warning or a navigational alert, but a printer running out of paper. A small moment that captured a larger issue: attention on the bridge was already saturated, and many of the signals competing for it were not tied to an operational decision at all.

Lloyd’s Register’s analysis reflects the same pattern at scale. A large share of alarm load comes from repetitive or low-value alerts linked to routine conditions, degraded sensors, or configuration choices rather than developing risk. These alerts do not change how a watch is conducted, yet they dominate the alert environment and dilute the meaning of alarms as a whole.

Crews adapt. Alarms are silenced without acknowledgement, panels are bypassed, and alerts fade into the background, particularly during night watches and extended transits.

Fatigue accelerates this process. When rest is fragmented by constant alerting, watches begin with diminished recovery, and the ability to distinguish relevant signals from routine noise declines further. Even well-designed alerts struggle to remain effective in environments where attention is already consumed by filtering.

Incidents show how overload and fatigue converge

Collision investigations continue to show how these dynamics play out operationally. In the 2024 Hafnia Nile incident, collision alarms had been silenced following port operations, and the Second Mate was operating on minimal rest after overnight travel and disrupted sleep. A developing close-quarters situation went unnoticed, the bridge was briefly unattended, and the sequence escalated into entanglement and fire with fatal consequences.

Lloyd’s Register notes similar patterns across incidents, where extended fatigued watches and dense alert environments reduce sensitivity to change. Risk does not disappear under these conditions. It becomes harder to distinguish from routine traffic and background activity.

This is the context behind LR’s Global Head of Technology Duncan Duffy’s warning that alarm systems, when poorly managed, undermine situational awareness rather than reinforcing it, and that without sustained attention to performance and human factors, alarm fatigue will continue to increase the likelihood of serious incidents.

Designing alerts around how crews actually work

The LR report ultimately points back to a familiar conclusion: safety systems are effective only when they are designed around human perception, prioritization, and decision-making. Alarm systems that generate more information than crews can act on dilute their own value, especially during fatigue-heavy operations.

Orca AI approaches alert fatigue through smart contextual alerts that prioritize navigational risk and tie alerts directly to decisions crews need to make. By fusing sensor data into ranked collision scenarios and filtering out non-threats, the platform aims to ensure that when an alert appears, it carries operational meaning. The focus is on supporting human judgment and reducing cognitive load during long watches, high-workload periods, and fatigue-prone night hours, without increasing the background noise crews are already managing.

Alarm overload is not a future concern waiting to materialize. It is already influencing how crews rest, how they allocate attention, and how effectively they respond to developing risk. The Lloyd’s Register report is a reminder that safety gains now depend as much on restraint and relevance as they do on detection, and that alarm systems must be judged by the decisions they enable rather than the events they record.