scope:

Introduction

For the year 2017 edition of the Rules for Building and Classing Bulk Carriers for Service on the Great Lakes, the Rules have been re-organized and re-formatted for the purpose of improving their ease of use. In this regard, we advise the following primary changes.

The year 2017 edition is a complete re-print of the Great Lakes Bulk Carrier Rules.

A new numbering system was incorporated into the Rules, in accordance with Table 2, which organizes the requirements into "Parts," "Chapters" and "Sections". A comparison of the old "1978" numbering system versus the new "2017" numbering system is shown in Appendix 1 as a guide map for users who are familiar with the existing Rules.

The 2017 edition of the Rules becomes effective on 1 January 2017.

The effective date of each technical change is shown in parenthesis at the end of the subsection/ paragraph titles within the text of each Part. Unless a particular date and month are shown, the years in parentheses refer to the following effective dates:

The Rule Changes contained in the previously published Notices 1 through 4 to the 1978 Great Lakes Bulk Carrier Rules (together with Corrigenda) have been incorporated into the text of the reformatted 2017 Great Lakes Bulk Carrier Rules.

Until the next edition of the Great Lakes Bulk Carrier Rules is published, Rule Change Notices and/or Corrigenda, as necessary, will be published on the ABS website - www.eagle.org - and will be available free for downloading. It is not intended to publish hard copies of future Notices and/or Corrigenda to existing Rules or Guides. The consolidated edition of the Rules for Building and Classing Bulk Carriers for Service on the Great Lakes, which includes Notices and/or Corrigenda using different colors for easy recognition, will be published on the ABS website only when Notices and/or Corrigenda are issued.

The listing of CLASSIFICATION SYMBOLS AND NOTATIONS is available from the Rules and Guides Downloads page of the ABS website www.eagle.org for download