Compendium of Arctic Ship Accidents (CASA)

The shipping accident information in the 2009 AMSA Report covered 1995-2004 and is thus outdated. Since then, human activity, including shipping, in the Arctic region has increased and diversified with the reduction of seasonal sea ice. To obtain more current Arctic shipping accident information, PAME undertook a project led by the USA jointly with the Arctic Council’s EPPR Working Group to develop a compendium of Arctic ship accidents covering 2005-2017.

To develop the CASA, PAME and EPPR invited all Arctic States to submit their Arctic ship accident data to the project lead (USA). While the USA provided initial guidance on the scope and types of accident data requested, it accepted all data submitted. Six Arctic States submitted relevant data. Sweden and Finland had no relevant data.

Given the various forms and format of the information submitted, the USA devoted significant effort to reformatting, restructuring, and standardizing the data in a consistent fashion to compile it into a single table with one record/row per accident. Also, the USA identified and removed duplicate records.

The result of this process was the identification of 5,004 unique accident records in the CASA data table.

Unsurprisingly, Arctic States have different ship accident reporting thresholds, do not require that the identical types of accident information be reported, and do not require the identical level of detail for information that is reported. These differences made it challenging to standardize the data received with complete and perfect uniformity.

PAME Collection of Arctic ship accidents

The U.S. is proposing a follow-on PAME project for the 2021-2023 Work Plan to develop a standardized and uniform Arctic ship accident reporting template so that any future updates of the CASA project may be accomplished more easily with greater congruency and consonancy in the data submitted. This work is planned.