A new online dashboard has been developed to provide public access to information on marine shipping incidents and accidents in and around Canadian waters.
Developed by the Clear Seas Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping (Clear Seas), the Marine Incidents and Accidents dashboard was built using more than 140,000 reports of vessels involved in marine events, which were filtered to create a spatial dataset of cargo ships, tugboats, cruise ships and ferries involved in occurrences over a 10-year period from January 2009 to December 2018.
The dashboard focuses on events involving commercial shipping, so fishing and government vessels as well as pleasure craft are not included. Of the 5,220 vessels involved in incidents or accidents that occurred in this period, 157 were considered serious accidents.
“Simply put, we need to be able to look to what happened in the past to anticipate and prevent what could happen in the future. By learning from previous events, we’ll be able to better assess risk, and help ensure safer, more responsible marine shipping,” said Paul Blomerus, Clear Seas’ Executive Director.
“This relatively small number of (157) serious incidents over the span of a decade should reassure Canadians that we have a safe maritime transportation system and robust regulations in place.”
The project team pulled together data from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSBC), the US Coast Guard and the US National Transportation Safety Board. The dataset that forms the dashboard collates and charts North American maritime incidents and accidents in a common format and presents those results on a map.
Clear Seas expects the resource to be accessed by a wide range of users, from members of the public through to professional risk analysts in the marine industry.
