Analysis of tanker casualties after the Oil Pollution Act (USA,1990)

Abstract

A prime concern of maritime transport is to enhance ship safety and to reduce marine pollution related to ship incidents and accidents. Since the elimination of marine accidents is practically unrealistic, a reasonable target for the maritime industry and relevant regulatory bodies is the mitigation of accidents in terms of minimization of the probability of occurrence and of the associated consequences. The present study focuses on a comprehensive analysis of recorded accidents on medium and large oil tankers (deadweight over 20,000 t), which occurred after the introduction of the Oil Pollution Act (USA, 1990) up to the present. Raw casualty data were reviewed and re-analysed in order to produce appropriate statistics useful for the implementation of risk-based assessment methodologies. The main outcome of this particular study is the identification of the significant qualitative historical trends of tanker accidents and of the quantitative characteristics of particular tanker accidents, such as the overall frequencies of accidents per ship year, the frequency of each major accident category and per tanker ship size, the ship types or designs and ages, the degrees of severity of accidents and the tonnes of oil spilled per ship year.

Keywords

Tanker casualties marine oil pollution risk analysis and assessment tanker hull design

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