MARINE SAFETY

from Pacific Ports - Volume 2, Issue 3, September 2021

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MARINE SAFETY Clear Seas launches interactive mapping dashboard that visualizes marine shipping safety

An online dashboard developed by the Clear Seas Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping (Clear Seas) based in Vancouver, British Columbia, provides a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind publicly available picture of marine shipping incidents and accidents in Canadian and U.S. waters.

“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,” says Paul Blomerus, Clear Seas’ Executive Director. “By learning from previous events, we’ll be able to better assess risk, and help ensure safer, more responsible marine shipping.”

To create the Marine Incidents and Accidents dashboard, Clear Seas accessed 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 vessels (both commercial and non-commercial), government vessels, pleasure craft, and other types of vessels are not included in the dataset. While Clear Seas is focused on issues related to commercial marine shipping traffic, the visibility and importance of ferries and cruise ships justifies their inclusion in this dataset. For some parts of the country, smaller passenger vessels make up a significant amount of traffic and incident reports. In the future, a more comprehensive analysis that includes these vessel types may be completed.

The dashboard and the project’s summary report are available on the Clear Seas website (clearseas.org).

Of the 5,220 vessels involved in incidents or accidents that occurred in this period, 157 were considered serious. “This relatively small number of serious incidents over the span of a decade should reassure Canadians that we have a safe maritime transportation system and robust regulations in place,” Blomerus says.

Public opinion surveys conducted for Clear Seas show that the safety of commercial marine shipping is a key concern for Canadians. This is especially true when it comes to commercial vessels carrying hazardous materials or oil as either cargo or fuel. Results and an analysis of a 2020 public opinion survey conducted by the Angus Reid Institute and Clear Seas on the topic of marine perceptions in Canada are available on the Clear Seas website (clearseas.org).

And the threat of pollution from an accident doesn’t just come from Canadian waters. Some of the heaviest marine shipping traffic areas such as the Salish Sea and Great Lakes include both Canadian and U.S. territory. “With changing winds and tides, disabled ships and pollution don’t respect international boundaries,” says Blomerus.

For this reason, the project team pulled together data from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSBC), the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The creation of the dataset that forms the dashboard is an important development in collating and charting North American maritime incidents and accidents in a common format and presenting those results on a map.

Blomerus says that the power of the Clear Seas dashboard means that a range of users — from a member of the public to a professional risk analyst in the marine industry — can use it to understand trends and distributions in any area of interest. “We hope this will help users understand the breadth and scope of marine incidents and accidents in Canada, and in doing so contribute to a safer marine environment,” he says.

Kim Baird, a member of Clear Seas’ board of directors and former Chief, Tsawwassen First Nation sees it being of great use to Indigenous Peoples along Canada’s coastal areas. “As First Nation communities and organizations increase their participation in marinerelated matters, having accessible data to fully understand shipping impacts to their territories is crucial.”

From a marine industry perspective, Serge Le Guellec, President & General Manager, Transport Desgagnés and a Clear Seas board member, sees a similar benefit. “Providing information on maritime incidents and accidents which occurred in Canadian waters serves a clear purpose: ensuring that trends are

This powerful new resource enables users to analyze trends, learn from past events, better assess risk, and helps build a safer and more responsible marine shipping industry.

Paul Blomerus, Executive Director, Clear Seas

identified, that causalities are understood, that lessons learned are shared with all stakeholders and that Safety Management Systems are strengthened to prevent re-occurrence,” he says. “Sharing information with the public via Clear Seas’ new Incidents and Accidents dashboard is therefore a matter of trust and transparency for the industry and is core to Clear Seas’ raison d’être.”

Clear Seas is a not-for-profit independent research centre funded by Canada’s provincial and federal governments as well as industry. It provides impartial information on marine shipping in Canada to policy makers and the public. Its mandate is to initiate and interpret research, analyze policies, identify best practices, share information, and facilitate dialogue. The organization’s research agenda is defined internally in response to current issues, reviewed by a research advisory committee, and approved by a board of directors. All reports are available at clearseas.org.

Dashboard highlights:

• The different types of marine incidents and accidents, and vessels involved in such events in and around Canadian waters. • The number of vessels involved in marine incidents and accidents in Canadian and transboundary waters over the course of a decade. • The regions where higher numbers of marine incidents and accidents have occurred historically.