iFish6

Introduction: Vessel disasters (e.g., sinkings, capsizings) are a leading contributor to fatalities in the U.S. commercial fishing industry. Primary prevention strategies are needed to reduce the occurrence of vessel disasters, which can only be done by developing an understanding of their causes and risk factors. If less serious vessel casualties (e.g., loss of propulsion, fire, flooding) are predictors of future disasters, then reducing vessel casualties should in turn reduce vessel disasters and the accompanying loss of life.

Methods: A case-control study design was employed. Cases were defined as commercial fishing vessels that were involved in vessel disasters in Alaskan waters during 2010-2015, identified from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Commercial Fishing Incident Database (CFID). These were compared with controls, defined as commercial fishing vessels active in Alaska during the same time period but not involved in disasters. Vessel casualty history was the primary risk factor of interest. Other vessel characteristics were also examined: age, length, hull material, safety decal, and documentation. Logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) to measure the association between the exposure variables and the outcome (disaster).

Results:  Seventy cases and 210 controls were included. Twenty-five percent of cases had a history of reported vessel casualties, compared to only 9% of control vessels. The multivariable analysis revealed that vessel casualty history was a significant predictor of a vessel disaster (OR=2.98; 95% CI=1.29-6.89). Other significant predictors included having an expired safety decal (OR=2.41; 95% CI=1.09-5.30) and steel hull (OR=3.29; 95% CI=1.12-9.68).

Conclusions: The results of this analysis emphasize the importance of implementing vessel-specific preventive maintenance plans. At an industry level, specific prevention policies should be developed focusing on high-risk fleets to identify and correct a wide range of safety deficits before they have catastrophic and fatal consequences.

Fishing is considered one of the most dangerous occupations in the world with a large occurrence of adverse outcomes (e.g., incidents, accidents, and casualties) intimately linked to safety. Statistics on fishing safety (including occupational safety) and health face several major challenges, in particular relating to data availability, quality, timeliness, coverage and comparability. In addition to this, collecting data on occupational or safety accidents in the fishery sector has never received sufficient attention. At academic level there are limited initiatives to deal with this issue although some research has been carried out. There are other initiatives like voluntary reporting using the web whose results are not known yet. At regional level intergovernmental organizations such as the European Union have developed initiatives to combine information on accidents and fatalities in one database. This session or oral presentation will review existing initiatives (e.g., NIOSH, EMCIP), explore collaboration among FAO, IMO and ILO and other agencies in establishing a global database, review database components and discuss ways forward.

It’s no surprise that fishing is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous industries in the world. Earlier estimates for fishing fatalities included the 1999 ILO figure of 24 000, and the revised 2019 FAO estimate of 32 000. However, research by the FISH Safety Foundation – an international non-profit working to make the global fishing industry safer – found that those figures hugely underestimate the scale of the problem.

The FISH Safety Foundation report ‘Triggering Death. Quantifying the true human cost of global fishing’ estimates the fisher fatality number at over 100 000 a year. See: https://www.the-human-cost-of-fishing.org/

The report highlights an issue many marine scientists will be familiar with—a lack of data. For the Triggering Death report, FISH Safety Foundation looked at both official and unofficial records. We used everything, from whistleblowers to print and social media to research reports. Even so, the 100,000-per-year figure is likely to be a significant underestimate because the recording and reporting of fisher mortalities isn’t generally required by National and Inter-Governmental Authorities, nor are they necessarily captured in the media or research either.

It should be noted that lack of reporting isn’t isolated to low-income countries that lack the infrastructure needed to capture mortality information. Even in Europe – arguably the most regulated fishing sector – many jurisdictions only collect information on fishing vessels of 15 meters and larger, while over 80 percent of the EU fishing vessels are smaller than 15 meters.

This presentation will examine the FISH Safety Foundations’ research into fisher fatality numbers, the impact of common ‘drivers’ (including illegal fishing, climate change, weak governance, poverty and reduced fish stocks) on this unacceptably high rate, as well as examining the need for the development of a global repository to collect and analyse fisher incident and fatality information.

There is a paradox within the world of safety: while many organisations say that they want to learn from the experiences of others, and that they actively seek to identify and adopt ‘best practice’ from other parts of the industry, they are often unwilling to share their data with others for fear of adverse reputational or commercial reaction from others, particularly competitors and customers. As a result, incidents that could be averted through the timely sharing of knowledge across organizational boundaries are repeated elsewhere, and the number of potentially avoidable deaths, injuries and equipment damage remains stubbornly high.

In this presentation, CHIRP challenges the barriers to cross-organisational reporting and proposes that a ‘safe space’ into which all organisations can report to, and draw on, their own and others’ experiences to improve safety across the sector.