Purpose of this report
This report provides an analysis of marine incidents reported in the 2023 calendar year, along with trends from 2019-2023, for Domestic Commercial Vessels (DCVs),1 foreign-flagged vessels and regulated Australian vessels (RAVs).
Marine incident data from this report combined with other safety data from inspections and investigations and further supporting research is used to identify safety issues. AMSA considers the findings of analysis from safety data in the development of the National Compliance Plan, which sets out targeted activities to address prioritised safety issues for the 2024-2025 financial year.
This report is not intended as a complete overview and/or comprehensive technical analysis.
Marine incident and safety concern reporting
Reporting is essential to maritime safety as it helps provide a more holistic picture of the risks affecting the industry. Information on marine incident reporting is available on the AMSA website.2
In addition to marine incident reports, AMSA receives notifications of marine safety concerns. Marine safety concerns can be reported by anyone who observes an event or practice that may endanger, or if not corrected could endanger, the safety of a commercial vessel or persons on board a commercial vessel.
In 2023 reporting of marine safety concern increased by 3.6% (428 reports) from 2022 (413 reports).
Classification of marine incident reports and follow up investigations
AMSA classifies all reported marine incidents into one or more occurrence types3 to consistently describe what happened and help identify patterns and areas for further analyses.
The focus of this report is on consequence, technical and operational occurrence-types, and their sub-types as these comprise most reports received by AMSA.
In addition to classifying types of incidents based on what happened, AMSA reviews and classifies domestic commercial vessels (DCVs) investigation reports to describe how and why the incident occurred using a safety framework. Marine incidents are a result of many factors and underlying safety issues that often are not directly linked to the incident outcome – such as organisational issues. To capture underlying safety factors, AMSA developed and maintains a maritime safety framework based on research and data to classify investigation findings.
Footnotes
1 AMSA publishes monthly updates of very serious and serious incidents for DCVs.
https://www.amsa.gov.au/vessels-operators/incident-reporting/2022-monthly-domestic-commercial-vessel-incident-reports and monthly safety lessons briefs based on marine investigation reports which are intended to target owners, operators and crew https://www.amsa.gov.au/marine-incid ent-reporting/annual-and-monthly-incident-publications/monthly-safety-lessons-domestic
3 Note that multiple occurrence types can apply to the same incident. For example, an incident may include more than one consequence (i.e., collision and injuries)