ABSTRACT
To evaluate the likelihood of marine incidents, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement (MISLE) and Transportation Safety Board of Canada's Marine Safety Information System (MARSIS) incident databases were analyzed to identify and count observed incidents from 2002 to 2019. Vessel types for hazard probabilities were categorized, and due to a limited number of observed incidents, some vessel types were consolidated as such: tank ship, tank barge and articulated tug and barge (ATB), passenger ship, container ship, general cargo ship, bulk carrier, and large fishing vessel. Seven hazard categories were considered: allision, capsize/sinking, collision, loss of propulsion, loss of steering, grounding, and other. The process involved mapping MISLE and MARSIS incident and vessel categories to our selected categorizations. Automated text processing was necessary to extract relevant information from the incident summaries in the databases. The research indicated that, marine incidents are rare events and oil spills from marine incidents are even rarer. There were 32,779 incidents from 2002 to 2019 in the bi-national area (United States and Canada). Of these, over 65% were categorized as loss of propulsion, loss of steering, and other. Excluding the hazard type category “other”, collisions were the largest contributor to oil spills. A formal validation was hindered by the scarcity of hazard probabilities in the existing literature.