Emergency response & crew welfare
A 24/7 emergency line for your vessels that answers instantly, runs your own procedures and alerts your duty manager. Scheduled welfare checks keep every crew accounted for, with a timestamped record of every call.
Vessel profiles
A ship on an ocean passage and one working the coast don't carry the same connectivity. Each vessel gets its own profile: cellular, satellite and WhatsApp, in whatever order and combination suits it. It decides how emergency alerts and welfare calls reach that vessel, and you change it yourself when its trade changes.
MV Coral Meridian
Bulk carrier · Ocean passage
Bass Strait Trader
General cargo · Coastal
Kimberley Star
Offshore supply · Remote coast
Illustrative examples, not real vessels.
How it works
Generic answering services run the same process for every kind of business. OpenWater ERT is designed around crews, vessels and the way an incident actually unfolds at sea, with an emergency line first and welfare checks alongside it.
A number crews can call at any hour. It answers instantly and runs a structured intake: vessel, position and incident type, from collision and flooding to fire or injury. Once the incident type is identified, it texts the vessel your written procedure as it starts reading back your company's immediate actions, while your duty manager is alerted in parallel.
Calls go out to each vessel while it's at berth. The crew member answers a short set of welfare questions you define, and every answer is recorded against the vessel, the call and the time.
See each vessel’s last known position and speed alongside its welfare checks, with the time it was last reported. Welfare checks still run at exactly the times you set.
Compliance
Run from Sydney, with Australian data hosting on the way: the website and the calling service run in Australian regions today, and the database moves to Sydney as part of a planned platform upgrade. Each organisation's records are isolated by the database itself, not just hidden in the interface, so one company's data never appears in another's.
Every emergency call, escalation step, welfare answer and retry is timestamped and kept as a structured log, aligned to seafarer welfare recordkeeping expectations rather than a list of raw call times.
The line answers at any hour without depending on who is rostered on. Multi-channel escalation means a single failed call doesn't stall the chain.
We know what a call for help at 0300 needs to sound like, and what a clear, timestamped record is worth when someone asks what happened. OpenWater ERT comes from the team behind OpenWater LMS, and is built around how ships actually operate.
Founding clients
We’re onboarding our first operators now. Their names will appear here once they’ve agreed to be listed, and not before.
Ask about becoming a founding clientFAQ
A call centre puts a person on a shared script, so each call depends on who answers and how busy they are. OpenWater ERT answers every emergency call instantly and runs the same structured intake each time, designed specifically for vessels. You set the procedures and the escalation roster yourself, and every answer is stored as a timestamped record rather than a summary written up afterwards.
No. Each company writes its own emergency procedures for each incident type. Once the incident type is identified, the line texts your written procedure to the vessel and reads back your immediate actions word for word, while your duty manager is alerted in parallel. It never improvises. If you haven't written a procedure for that incident type, the line says so and escalates.
An unanswered or dropped call doesn't stop the process. The call is retried according to the vessel's communication profile, and a parallel alert goes out on another channel, such as WhatsApp, to the contacts on your escalation roster. Every attempt and its outcome is recorded in the audit trail.
Yes. The escalation roster is yours: you choose who is contacted, in what order and on which channels, and you can change it at any time from your dashboard without contacting us.
Yes. Each organisation's records are isolated at the database level, not just hidden in the interface, so one company's data never appears in another's. On hosting: the website and the calling service run in Australian regions, and database hosting is moving to Sydney as part of a planned platform upgrade. Ask us where that stands if data residency matters for your fleet.
Cellular, satellite and WhatsApp, in any combination. Each vessel has its own communication profile, so a coastal vessel and one on an ocean passage can be set up differently.
Pricing depends on the size of your fleet. Book a walkthrough and we'll take you through it.
Book a walkthrough to see OpenWater ERT set up around your vessels, your emergency procedures and your escalation roster.