Special Issue Article

Proc IMechE Part O:

J Risk and Reliability
2019, Vol. 233(1) 35–47
Ship accident consequences and Ó IMechE 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
contributing factors analyses using ship sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1748006X18768917

accident investigation reports journals.sagepub.com/home/pio

Liye Zhang1 , Hua Wang2,3, Qiang Meng3 and Hongbin Xie4

Abstract
Ship accident consequences, including life loss, property/cargo damage, and environment pollution, could be caused by
various factors. This study aims to quantitatively analyze the association between ship accident consequences and related
contributing factors based on real ship accident investigation reports. We propose a two-step research methodology. In
the first step, we standardize the necessary contributing factor–related information that is extracted from the ship acci-
dent investigation reports. In the second step, three statistical analysis methods, including nonparametric statistics of
Kendall’s tau coefficient, Cramér’s V analysis and Kruskal–Wallis test, are carried out to figure out the import contribut-
ing factors with respect to ship accident consequences. The proposed methodology has been assessed based on 477 ship
accident reports. Some insightful findings are obtained: (1) vessel speed is the most significant factor contributing to fatal-
ity and injury of collision accidents, whereas no remarkable relationship holds for grounding accidents; (2) for collision
accidents, crew number shows a strong association with injury and fatality, but it exhibits weak linkages to other conse-
quences of ship damage, cargo damage and oil spill; and (3) the consequence of oil spill is strongly related to collision
position, especially in head-on and crossing collisions.

Keywords
Ship accident consequence, risk analysis, heterogeneous data, nonparametric statistics, accident reports

Date received: 26 September 2017; accepted: 11 March 2018

Introduction contributing factors.4 For example, Celik and Cebi5

With a continuous increase in international seaborne
trade, we have witnessed a rapid growth of shipping
industry in recent decades. Shipping activities become
more and more frequent and consequently make some
navigation waters congested. Intensive shipping activi-
ties inevitably bring a high likelihood of ship accidents
including ship collision, contacting and grounding. Ship
accidents could result in various catastrophic conse-
quences in terms of human life loss, cargo damage and
environmental damage. For example, on 16 April 2014,
a passenger ferry capsized near South Korea coast and
304 people died or went missing.1 The maritime author-
ities, ship owners/operators and the public are con-
cerned with these consequences.2 Hence, it is important
to examine possible contributing factors for the ship
accident consequences.
A vast body of ship accident analysis has been
reported in the literature.3 As the critical components
of the ship accident analyses, the accident-contributing
factors and consequence estimation models are widely
studied. Some studies focus on investigating the
proposed an analytical Human Factors Analysis and
Classification System (HFACS) based on a fuzzy ana-
lytical hierarchy process to identify the role of human
errors in shipping accidents. Root cause analysis
(RCA) is another method to investigate the contribut-
ing factors of the accident. Akten6 used this method to
analyze the accidents in Istanbul Strait. Similarly, Kum
and Sahin7 proposed a RCA method to clarify the acci-
dent causes and prevent the future incidents from hap-
pening in the Arctic region. Leveson8 investigate the
1
2
Institute of High Performance Computing, A*Star, Singapore
School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai, P.R.
China
3
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, National University
of Singapore, Singapore
4
Navigation College, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, P.R. China
Corresponding author:
Qiang Meng, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
National University of Singapore, 1 Engineering Drive 2, 117576
Singapore.
Email: ceemq@nus.edu.sg
36
contributing factors including the harbor design and
traffic scheduling. These methods depend a lot on the
experience of experts who carry out the analysis mod-
els. Some other studies identify the contributing factors
and build specific models to quantify the relationship
between contributing factors and the consequences.
These approaches mainly include the event tree models,
statistical analysis models and mechanical models.
The event tree models developed for ship accident
analyses are based on expert judgments and/or histori-
cal data. The International Maritime Organization
(IMO)9 published a series of formal safety assessment
(FSA) reports using the event tree–based risk assess-
ment frameworks for various vessels—container ships,
crude oil tankers, cruise ships and liquefied natural gas
(LNG) carriers. Note that the event trees in IMO9 were
built using expert judgments. Guided by the FSA
framework of IMO, a few FSA studies have been con-
ducted for some particular water areas or scenarios.
Fowler and Sorgard10 used the fault and event tree
models to estimate ship accident consequences in North
Sea area. Ronza et al.11 proposed an event tree model
to predict the frequency of ship accidents in port water
areas, in which 828 historical ship accidents were used
to identify the consequences of these accidents includ-
ing ship release, fire and explosion. Weng et al.12 inves-
tigated the ship collision risk in the Singapore Strait
using the event trees proposed by IMO.9 These event
tree models can hardly be validated in practice because
their establishment largely depends on experts knowl-
edge and their empirical and subjective judgments.
To reduce the bias of experts subjective judgments,
quite a few researchers are devoting to develop statisti-
cal consequence estimation models based on massive
data of historical ship accident records. For example,
COWI13 proposed a neural network model to estimate
the consequences of ship grounding, including cargo
loss, fuel spill and sinking probability. In COWI,13 all
consequences were converted into monetary cost to
provide a unified comparison among different risk con-
trol options. Almaz et al.14 developed an empirical sta-
tistical consequence estimation model in Delaware
River using the historical accident data from 1992 to
2008. Due to the lack of detailed ship accident data,
these two models are unable to include some important
contributing factors such as ship sailing speed and ship
course. Recently, several consequence estimation mod-
els have been proposed using Bayesian networks.15 For
example, Zhang et al.16 formulated a Bayesian network
model to assess the navigational risk of the Yangtze
River, including the probability and consequence esti-
mation of ship accidents. Goerlandt and Montewka17
applied the Bayesian network approach to evaluate
accidental cargo oil outflow in ship-to-ship collisions.
Bayesian network models have a noticeable shortcom-
ing that the prediction of probabilistic damage distribu-
tions is highly dependent on the latest information of
occurred ship collision and grounding events, which
are scarce or difficult to obtain in practice.18
Proc IMechE Part O: J Risk and Reliability 233(1)
A few researchers focus on developing mechanical
models to simulate the ship collision, and these
mechanical models need to determine the energy
released to cause the ship structure damage. Servis and
Samuelides19 analyzed the damage to the struck ship
by the finite element method. Their method can be used
to assess the collision behavior of a ship under a partic-
ular collision scenario and consequently to compare
the survivability of different structural arrangements.
Pedersen and Zhang20 developed an analytical model
to quantify the damage of RoRo passenger ships when
the characteristics of both the striking and struck ships
are known. Pedersen and Li21 proposed an approxima-
tion method to formulate the energy released as the ini-
tial kinetic energy minus the kinetic energy of the
floating vessels after the ship collision or contact event.
These models focus on the mechanical change process
of the collisions, rather than the causal factors. In other
words, these models can be used to evaluate the relia-
bility of ship structures by naval architects rather than
the policymakers who are of interest in identifying con-
tributing factors in ship accidents.
The aforementioned three research approaches are
criticized for not having sufficient evidence from the
real ship accident data. Mazaheri et al.4 pointed out
that the capabilities of these models for mitigating ship
traffic risk remain unknown, and the methodologies
based on the evidence of real ship accidents would be
more suitable for the purposes of ship risk manage-
ment. A few researchers have made some attempts to
conduct the ship accident consequence analyses based
on real ship accident database. Chai et al.22 investigated
the shipping accident injury severity and fatality using
the ship accident database of Lloyd’s List Intelligence
Company. However, such database does not contain
detailed information on ship accident processes, which
is shown in the real ship accident investigation reports.
The ship accident investigation reports contain a
large amount of detailed information on the ship acci-
dents in the process of the during-accident stage and
post-accident stage. These reports are obligatory in
many countries, and they are documented by accident
investigators following the IMO’s guideline. Few
researchers have used the real ship accident investigation
reports to conduct the cause and effect analyses of ship
accidents. Some tentative ones are made by Johnson23
and Mazaheri et al.4 Johnson23 highlighted the impor-
tance of a tangible tool/framework for the ship accident
analyses using the ship accident investigation reports.
Mazaheri et al.4 proposed the HFACS to analyze the
socio-technical factors causing ship accidents by means
of the ship accident investigation reports.
We in this study aim to develop a tangible research
methodology based on the ship accident investigation
reports for the analyses of ship accident consequence
and contributing factors. The developed research meth-
odology can guide to extract the necessary standardized
information from the heterogeneous-source ship acci-
dent investigation accident reports for supporting the
Zhang et al.
contributing factor analyses. This study gains insight
into the ship accident consequence by examining the
occurrence frequency and quantifying the relationship
between accident consequences and the contributing
factors.
The contributions of this study are twofold. First, we
propose a tangible ship accident investigation reports–
based systematic framework for the analyses of ship
accident consequences and contributing factors. A
series of nonparametric statistical methods are adopted
by the developed framework to investigate the relation-
ship between the ship accident consequences and contri-
buting factors. Second, we carry out an empirical study
using 484 real ship accident investigation reports to
validate the developed framework and related statistical
analysis approaches.
Research methodology
Standardizing the necessary information extracting
from ship accident investigating reports
Most maritime nations provide accident investigation
reports to the public under the instruction of IMO.
Figure 1. Accident reports’ outline.
37
Although different countries may have their own man-
agement policies on ship accident reporting, the docu-
ment structures and main contents of the reports are
more or less the same. A typical report is usually com-
posed of four components: (1) accident summary, (2)
description of ship accident–related factors, (3) analysis
of accident causes and (4) recommendations to improve
maritime safety. A ship accident report not only pro-
vides a summary on ship accident consequences but
also records the details of navigation events and deter-
minant factors that probably cause the accidents.
Figure 1 shows the contents of two accidents’
reports, respectively, from Denmark and Australia, and
it can be seen that both reports contain the aforemen-
tioned four components. Take the report of Denmark
shown in Figure 1(a) as an example. After reading this
20-page report, we can extract the follow information.
(1) It was a collision accident between a general cargo
ship and a fishing ship, which resulted in one death. (2)
The accident occurred in crossing courses with good
visibility, calm seas and clear weather, and the speeds
of the cargo ship and the fishing ship are 9.0 and
7.8 knots, respectively. (3) The main reason for the acci-
dent is that the two ships do not maintain an effective
38
Figure 2. The cause and effect diagram of ship accidents.
lookout. (4) The government should implement the use
of inflatable life jackets while working on deck.
Although the accident reports contain a large amount
of detailed accident information, they cannot be directly
used for quantitative risk analysis due to the following
reasons. First, these reports are written in different natu-
ral languages with their own abbreviations and even
contain misspellings. Second, these reports are usually
in text format, and not all reports use a standard tem-
plate. For example, in the two accident reports shown in
Figure 1, the wind conditions are described as there was
no significant wind, and the wind speed is from 15 to
20 knots. They can be easily grasped by the humans but
cannot be easily understood by computers. Although
there have been many attempts to extract information
from accidents’ reports automatically, there still exist
intractable challenges before practical use.24 Thus,
human efforts are the practical ways to extract accident
information from accident reports and establish a digital
database for quantitative accident analysis.
A framework is needed to reduce the subjectivity and
standardize the extracted information in reviewing acci-
dent reports. Several researchers have shown the effec-
tiveness of this kind of frameworks to extract
information from accident reports for specific analysis
purposes.4,23,25 For example, a framework named
HFACS-grounding (HFACS) is adopted to review acci-
dent reports to study human factors in accidents with
RoPax.25 This article aims to study the relationship
between accident consequences and the dominant con-
tributing factor of both during accident and post-acci-
dent. Thus, we develop a customized framework
focusing on the ship accident consequence analysis.
Proc IMechE Part O: J Risk and Reliability 233(1)
As shown in Figure 2, the proposed framework
depicts the accident consequence and the directly rele-
vant factors in two phases, namely, the during-accident
phase and post-accident phase. We define two types of
elliptical nodes, namely, the white nodes and the gray
nodes. The former nodes denote the accident
consequence-relative events, such as accident injury
and oil spill; the latter ones represent the contributing
factors for accident consequence, including (1) ship
parameters, for example, ship sailing speed and radar
number; (2) human factors, for example, the number of
crews; and (3) environment factors, for example, wave
and visibility conditions.
The information extracted from the accident
reports should be standardized for conducting quanti-
tative analysis. The accident information is usually
presented as numerical variables, described in implicit
languages, or even shown in graphs. For the informa-
tion described in nature languages, it should be
reviewed by the reviewers and converted to category
variables according to the background knowledge of
the reviewers and the rules in the proposed framework.
The reviewers are trained to familiar with the rules to
convert this information. For example, the wind speed
is usually described as continuous numbers or in
nature language. When the wind is described using the
phrases of the calm sea or the good weather, it can be
considered as no wind. For the information shown in
the graph, it should be converted using the maritime
knowledge. For instance, the collision position some-
times can be calculated according to the ship courses
shown in the graph. In most accidents’ reports, the
ship damage, cargo damage and installation damage
Zhang et al. 39

Table 1. Accident-contributing variables and statistical description.

Variables Measurements Mean (SD) (%) Range

Ship factors
1. Ship type (xship ) 1. For liquefied natural gas/liquefied 1–1.50 1–8
petroleum gas ships
2. For oil tanker 2–7.99
3. For roll-on roll-off 3–4.51
4. For bulk carriers 4–13.37
5. For general cargo ships 5–15.67
6. For container ships 6–10.61
7. For passenger ships and cruises 7–16.86
8. For other small ships 8–29.94
2. Vessel speed (xv ) Ship speed measured in knot 10.626 (7.355) 0–44
3. Position of impact (xpos ) The points of impact of two vessels, where 1 1–12.30 1–3
denotes the ‘‘head-on,’’ 2 denotes 2–23.53
‘‘overtaking’’ and 3 denotes ‘‘crossing’’ 3–64.17
4. Radar number (xradar ) Number of radars working well 1–42.32 1–4
2–50.17
3–5.99
4–1.52
Environment factors
5. Search and rescue (xres ) 1. For visual AtoN fully adequate 1–44.23 1–4
2. For visual AtoN barely meets the 2–23.08
requirement for safe navigation 3–5.13
3. For visual AtoN inadequate 4–27.56
4. For no AtoN at all
6. Wind condition (xwind ) 1. For wind speed exceeding 10 knots 1–49.35 1–3
2. For moderate, wind speed of up to 2–10.39
10 knots 3–40.26
3. For calm, no wind
7. Visibility (xvis ) 1. For clear visibility (. 10 NM) 1–74.44 1–3
2. For moderate visibility (210 NM) 2–23.30
3. For poor visibility (\ 2 NM) 3–2.26
Human factors
8. Causes of failure (xfail ) 1. For no fault 1–3.06 1–4
2. For mechanical failure 2–13.78
3. For human error 3–73.98
4. For others 4–9.18
9. Crew number (xcrew ) The number of crews 18.080 (9.343) 3–51
10. Passenger number (xpsg ) The number of passengers only for passenger 104.800 (282.475) 4–2256
ships
11. Operation status (xope ) 1. Represents that the vessel is under way 1–86.83 1–3
2. Represents that the vessel is not under 2–6.83
command 3–6.34
3. Represents other status

are described by the words like serious, moderate and
severe. They can be categorized according to the acci-
dent report guidelines by IMO.9,26 For example, the
ship damage level is considered as minor when there is
only ‘‘local equipment damage.’’9 For the visibility
level, the threshold is determined according to the
Reports on Marine Casualties and Incidents of IMO,
which considers the visibility below 0.5 NM as very
poor and considers that below 2 NM as poor.26 From
the perspective of maritime safe control, 0.5 NM is the
threshold which is considered as the poor visibility.27
However, from the perspective of the navigators, the
safety range around the ship is typically set as 2 NM.28
Thus, we consider the visibility below 2 NM as poor in
this study.
Finally, 500 reports are reviewed by 12 research fel-
lows and/or research engineers with maritime traffic
background, from Centre for Maritime Studies,
National University of Singapore. The research domain
of all these reviewers is maritime traffic engineering
and eight of them hold the PhD degree. The accident
reports reviewing is guided by two field experts, who
are former senior operators of the leading shipping
company, APL (American President Lines Ltd.). These
reviewers are trained before reading the accidents’
reports. The details of the background of the experts
can be found on the website.29 The review work takes
more than 2 weeks.
The information of 17 variables, of which 11 are
dependent variables and 6 are independent variables,
are extracted and standardized (see Tables 1 and 2). As
shown in Table 1, the contributing factors are categor-
ized into three groups: (1) ship factors, (2) environment
factors and (3) human factors.
40
Table 2. Accident consequence variables.
Variables
1. Ship damage (yship )
2. Injuries (yinj )
3. Fatalities (yftl )
4. Cargo damage (ycargo )
5. Damage on installations (yins )
6. Oil spilled (yoil )
Table 1 shows some statistical features of the contri-
buting factors. It can be found that small ships and
passenger cargo ships are most likely to appear in the
accidents, followed by general cargo ships. We can also
see that the majority of the accidents occurred in good
visibility conditions under navigation status. Moreover,
73.98% of the ship accidents are caused by human
errors, and the second most significant factor is
mechanical failure. The statistical features of the acci-
dent consequences will be elaborated in the next
section.
Identifying the important contributing factors with
respect to the ship accident consequences
Understanding how do the factors exert impacts on the
occurrence of a ship accident is one fundamental task
of ship accident consequence analysis. There are several
methods in the literature to resolve this task, such as
correlation analysis and regression models.30,31
However, these methods are not suitable for evidence-
based ship accident consequence analysis using accident
reports. First, it is almost impossible to calibrate the
distributions of influential variables (for both continu-
ous and categorical variables) related to accidents.
Second, the ship accident samples should be categorized
according to some characteristic factors. The limited
sample size restricts the tractability of the conventional
regression models. In this study, we decide to use non-
parametric statistics method to identify the relationship
between contributing factors and accident conse-
quences. Such method used for association analysis
depends on the data types of the variables. We intro-
duce three nonparametric statistics tests to assess the
relationship for the following variable combinations.
Nonparametric statistics test for the case with two continuous
variables. In detail, for two continuous variables, both
Spearman rank coefficient and Kendall’s tau coefficient
can be used.32 In general, Kendall’s tau coefficient is
more suitable for the case with sparse samples. Thus,
Kendall’s tau coefficient is chosen, denoted by t. It
takes the values between 21 and 1, and a larger abso-
lute value means a stronger relationship between two
variables. The positive value indicates a positive corre-
lation and vice verse. In addition, we conduct a null
hypothesis test of zero correlation between the
Proc IMechE Part O: J Risk and Reliability 233(1)
Measurements
1 for minor, 2 for moderate, 3 for severe
The number of injuries
The number of fatalities
1 for minor, 2 for moderate, 3 for severe
1 for minor, 2 for moderate, 3 for severe
Oil spill in tonnage
contributing factors and the accident consequences,
showing the p value denoted by Pz . Let xik be the con-
tributing factor k of the ith accident report and yim
denote the consequence m of the ith accident report.
Let k 2 1, 2, . . . , 11 represent the set of 11 contributing
factors listed in Table 1, and let m 2 1, 2, . . . , 6 be the
set of the accident consequences given in Table 2.
Kendall’s t coefficient between contributing factor xk
and accident consequence ym is defined as follows
2St Xn Xn
t= , St = signfri  rj g ð1Þ
n(n  1) i=1 j=i+1
where ri and rj are the ranks of xik and yjm ,

1 if z50
sign(z) = , n is the number of the acci-
1 if z \ 0
dent reports.
Nonparametric statistics test for the case with two nominal
variables. For two nominal variables, such as ship type
and collision position, Cramér’s V is used to measure
their association. In statistics, the nonparametric meth-
ods, such as Cramér’s phi coefficient and contingency
coefficient, are all suitable for nominal variables.32
However, phi coefficient can only be used for two-row
and two-column tables. Cramér’s V, denoted by v, var-
ies from 0 to 1. When v is close to 0, it indicates a weak
association between two variables. In contrary, when v
is approaching 1, a strong association appears. Note
that chi-square test is conducted with the null hypoth-
esis of an independent relationship between two nom-
inal variables. The p value of chi-square test is denoted
by px . When xk and ym are nominal variables, whose
values have r categories and j categories, respectively.
Cramér’s V can be calculated as follows
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Xr X j  2
x2 =n 2 nij  ni nj =n
V= , x =
min(c  1, r  1) i=1 j=1
ni nj =n
ð2Þ
where n is the total accident report amount, nij is the
number of the accident reports where xk is level i and
ym equals to level j; ni is the number of the accident
reports whose xk equals to level i; nj is the number of
reports with j level of ym ; r and c are, respectively, the
number of rows and columns of the contingency table,
and x 2 is the chi-square test statistics.
Zhang et al.
Nonparametric statistics test for the case with one continuous
variable and one nominal variable. For xk and ym ,
when one is nominal and the other is continuous,
Kruskal–Wallis test is utilized to examine how close is
their relationship.32 For example, we can conduct
Kruskal–Wallis test to investigate the association
between xvis and yoil . The null hypothesis of Kruskal–
Wallis test is that all m groups of populations have
same locations. If the null hypothesis is rejected, the
pairs of the categories can be found by
S = f(i, j)jDij . ckw g
where S is the set of the category pairs which differ
from each other; Dij is the absolute difference between
the average rank of category i and category j, which is
calculated as follows
Dij = jRi  Rj j
where Ri = Ri =ni , Rj = Rj =nj and Ri and Rj are the
sums of the ranks of category i and j, respectively; ckw
is the threshold value calculated as follows
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
   large size of cargo ships. For large ships, the amount of
n(n + 1) 1 1 cargo damage would be large once cargo damage occurs.
ckw = x k1;a + ð5Þ
12 ni nj
where x k1;a is the critical value of the chi-square distri-
bution used in classical Kruskal–Wallis test at the sig-
nificance level of a; n is the total amount of the
accident reports; and n and nj are the accident report
amounts of category i and category j. The correspond-
ing p value is denoted by pkw .
Data collection and analysis
Ship accident reports are reviewed to extract evidence
information using this framework. We collected 500
ship accident reports from the following sources:
Marine Accident Investigation Branch of UK,
European Maritime Safety Agency, Denmark Maritime
Accident Investigation Board, Australian Transport
Safety Bureau and Marine Accident Investigation and
Shipping Security Policy Branch of Hong Kong. A
report is considered incomplete if no accident conse-
quence is quantitatively reported. To reduce subjective
errors, reviewers are asked to leave this information as
missing data if no explicit description of damage level is
found in the report. A total of 447 accident reports
have been finally reviewed, and all these reports contain
information of property damage, human casualty and
environment impact and the details of the accident pro-
cess. The numbers of collision, grounding and contact
accidents are 231, 213 and 33, respectively.
The descriptive statistics
The ship accident frequency is analyzed by distinguish-
ing accident types and accident consequences. The ship
accidents are classified into three types, namely,
41
collision, grounding and contact. In this study, six
types of consequences are investigated: ship damage,
cargo damage, installations damage, injuries, fatalities
and oil spill. Note that only the consequences explicitly
mentioned in the report are taken into account. For
example, if the injury number is not explicitly reported,
it is considered as missing data, rather than zero. The
frequencies of different types of consequences are ela-
borated as follows.
Ship and cargo damage. As shown in Figures 3(a) and (b),
ð3Þ the frequencies of ship damage and cargo damage are
430 and 133, respectively. It is not surprising that the fre-
quency of ship damage is higher than that of cargo dam-
age because cargoes are often on-board fixed with inhaul
cables. As shown in Figure 3(a), most ship damages are
not serious. Moreover, with the increase in damage level,
ð4Þ the total number of ship damage accidents decrease sig-
nificantly. However, the frequency of cargo damage is a
bit different, where the number of serious accidents is
larger than moderate ones, as shown in Figure 3(b). One
possible explanation would attribute to the trend of the
Another possible reason would be the statistical bias
caused by insufficient sample size (only 34 for accidents
with cargo damage of levels 2 and 3).
Regarding the accident types, more serious damages
occur in collision and grounding accidents compared to
contact accidents. As displayed in Figure 4(a) and (b),
the collision accidents falling into the group of ship
damage levels 2 and 3 occupy 49.80% of total collision
accidents which cause ship damage. The percentages
for the grounding accidents and contact accidents are
only 34.50% and 24.10%, respectively. The cargo dam-
age statistics show a similar trend. The accidents which
cause cargo damage of levels 2 and 3 in collision and
grounding accidents are, respectively, 26.10% and
26.60%, which are higher than that of contact acci-
dents (12.50%).
Damage on installations. As shown in Figure 3(c), the fre-
quencies of installation damage of levels 1–3 are 64, 6
and 4, respectively. Moreover, only 5.4% of these
installation damage accidents are serious. It can be seen
that the probability of installation damage accidents is
rather low, and their consequences are in general not
serious compared to the accidents causing ship damage
and cargo damage. This would be because the commer-
cial ships are usually maneuvered with the help of tugs
and pilots in port waters and with comparatively low
speed of course. It can also be found in Figure 4(c) that
the percentage of serious installation damage in
grounding accidents is higher than that in collision and
contact accidents.
Injuries and fatalities. The human injury and fatality are
extremely frequent compared to other types of conse-
quences. In Figure 3(d) and (e), the numbers of the
42
Figure 3. Ship accidents’ consequence distribution: (a) ship damage, (b) cargo damage, (c) damage on installations, (d) injuries, (e)
fatalities and (f) oil spill.
reports which explicitly record injuries and fatalities are
417 and 424, respectively. Among these accidents,
14.15% of them cause injuries, and 11.32% of them
lead to fatalities. Moreover, 0.72% of the accidents
have the injury number over 50; whereas only 0.24% of
the accidents involve fatalities.
The distributions of injuries and fatalities vary
remarkably with different accident types and ship
Proc IMechE Part O: J Risk and Reliability 233(1)
types. As can be seen in Figure 4(d), the percentages of
collision, grounding and contact, of which the numbers
of injury above zero, are 21.00%, 5.34% and 23.33%,
respectively. Similarly, as shown in Figure 4(e), the per-
centage of accidents leading to fatalities for collision,
grounding and contact accidents are 16.91%, 6.73%,
and 3.33%, respectively. We can see that the collision
accidents are more likely to cause injuries and fatalities.
Zhang et al.
Figure 4. Consequence statistics of different accident types: (a) ship damage, (b) cargo damage, (c) damage on installations, (d)
injuries, (e) fatalities and (f) oil spill.
For contact accidents, the percentage of injuries is as
high as collision accident. However, the percentage of
fatalities in contact accidents is relatively low, only
3.33%. Moreover, the average number of injuries of
passenger ships is 26.8, which is much higher than that
of non-passenger ships (only 2.87). This is not surpris-
ing because of the large difference between the number
of persons on the cargo ship and that on passenger
43
ships. Similarly, the passenger ships suffer higher fatal-
ity numbers (10.6) than non-passenger ships (3.97).
Oil spill. As shown in Figure 3(f), the percentage of the
accidents causing oil spill is relative low; that is, only
10.82% of 268 accidents explicitly report the quantities
of oil spills. With respect to the oil spilling events,
44 Proc IMechE Part O: J Risk and Reliability 233(1)

Table 3. Effect size analysis.

Factors Injuries Fatalities Ship damage Cargo damage Oil spilled

Collision accidents
 
xtype1 pkw \ 103 pkw = 0:340 v = 0:691 (pz = 0:040) v = 0:434 (pz = 0:060) pkw \ 103

xtype2 pkw = 0:042 pkw = 0:243 v = 0:130(px = 0:792) v = 0:102(px = 0:057) pkw = 0:812
xv1 t = 0:201 (pz = 0:002) t = 0:268 (pz = 0:093) pkw = 0:017
xv2 t = 0:049(pz = 0:156) t = 0:135(pz = 0:395) pkw = 0:788 pkw = 0:599 t = 0:044(pz = 0:172)
xcrew t = 0:109(pz = 0:096) t = 0:149(pz = 0:157) pkw = 0:298 pkw = 0:878 t = 0:020(pz = 0:105)
xpsg t = 0:007(pz = 0:405) t = 0:008(pz = 0:791) pkw = 0:752 pkw = 0:550 t = 0:027(pz = 0:754)
xpos pkw = 0:227 pkw = 0:302 v = 0:144(px = 0:121) v = 0:204 (px = 0:151) pkw = 0:007
xradar t = 0:066(pz = 0:115) t = 0:011(pz = 0:042) t = 0:008(pz = 0:063) t = 0:12(pz = 0:498) t = 0:075(pz = 0:312)
xres pkw = 0:713 pkw = 0:214 v = 0:021(px = 0:015) v = 0:227 (px = 0:051) pkw = 0:517
xwind pkw = 0:418 pkw = 0:171 v = 0:201(px = 0:119) v = 0:142(px = 0:061) pkw = 0:612

xvis pkw = 0:681 pkw \ 103 v = 0:130(px = 0:176) v = 0:121(px = 0:175) pkw = 0:674

xfail pkw = 0:217 pkw = 0:052 v = 0:271(px = 0:292) v = 0:321(px = 0:201) pkw = 0:546
xoper pkw = 0:314 pkw = 0:029 v = 0:016(px = 0:053) v = 0:003(px = 0:871) pkw = 0:748
Grounding accidents
xtype pkw = 0:128 pkw = 0:020 v = 0:195(px = 0:253) v = 0:278(px = 0:128) pkw \ 0:811
xv t = 0:118(pz = 0:107) t = 0:084(pz = 0:150) pkw = 0:019 pkw = 0:089 t =  0:010(pz = 0:901)

xcrew t = 0:155(pz = 0:022) t = 0:239 (pz = 0:052) pkw \ 103 pkw = 0:001 t =  0:036(pz = 0:331)
3 
xpsg t = 0:012(pz = 0:220) t = 0:258 (pz = 0:052) pkw \ 10 – t = 0:258 (pz = 0:484)
xradar t = 0:051(pz = 0:103) t = 0:018(pz = 0:138) t = 0:008(pz = 0:079) t = 0:089(pz = 0:498) t = 0:080(pz = 0:409)
xres pkw = 0:923 pkw = 0:150 v = 0:123(px = 0:022) v = 0:322 (px = 0:306) pkw = 0:646
xwind pkw = 0:454 pkw = 0:112 v = 0:149(px = 0:104) v = 0:124(px = 0:171) pkw = 0:714

xvis pkw = 0:727 pkw \ 103 v = 0:149(px = 0:251) v = 0:160(px = 0:183) pkw = 0:567
xfail pkw = 0:113 – v = 0:143(px = 0:292) v = 0:256 (px = 0:437) pkw = 0:363
xoper pkw = 0:211 – v = 0:119(px = 0:249) v = 0:082(px = 0:906) pkw = 0:380

– represents no statistical result because of the too small sample size.

*
pkw \ 0:05 or jtj . 0:5, or v . 0:5; **pkw \ 0:15 or jtj . 0:2, or v . 0:2.

44.83% of them are over 50 tons, and 13.9% of them
are more than 500 tons. It can be seen that oil spill is
not frequently reported. However, once it is reported,
the amount of oil spill is usually large. In Figure 4(f),
we can see that the distributions of oil spills in three
types of accidents are quite similar. Concerning ship
types, the average oil spills of oil tankers are much
larger than that of non-tanker ships, which are 291.00
and 75.92 tons, respectively. In a certain degree, the
accident type is not a significant influential factor for
the level of the oil spill, compared to ship type.
Associations between contributing factors and
accident consequences
In this section, we make the association analysis results
that are obtained by the proposed method. All testing
models are fulfilled using statistical programming lan-
guage R. The results are given in Table 3. We only ana-
lyze the grounding and collision accidents. Given the
fact of quite limited samples (only 33), we do not evalu-
ate the associations for the contact accidents. Also, we
have not conducted analysis on accidents causing instal-
lation damage for the same reason.
Collision accidents. As can be seen in Table 3, the factor
xtype1 is significantly related to the number of injuries.
However, no noticeable association exists between
xtype1 and the number of fatalities. This might be
because fatality events are fairly scarce and only hap-
pen in certain situations such as extreme weather or
serious human error, and ship type is not the domi-
nant factor in this situation. It is also found that the
factor xtype1 exhibits a much stronger association with
casualty than xtype2 . This is quite straightforward that
xtype1 and the casualty number are all pertinent to the
subject ship, whereas the information of xtype2 is col-
lected from the other ship. We can also see that there
is a significant association between the ship type and
the oil spill, which is consistent with the existing
studies.33,34
According to Table 3, xv1 is positively associated
with injuries and fatalities. Although xv1 is also posi-
tively related to the amount of oil spilled, the linkage is
not so strong (t = 0:017). This might be because that
the speed-limiting regulation exists in most port waters
and thus the speed of oil tanker does not vary dramati-
cally as passenger ships.
As shown in Table 3, human factors are also strongly
associated with ship accident consequences. We can see
that the crew number of ship 1 is negatively related to
fatalities. This would be because that the more crew a
ship has, the stronger is its ability against fatal acci-
dents. It should be noted that the relationship is not so
significant (t = 0:149). However, the crew number
exhibits a positive relationship with the consequence of
injury. Nevertheless, there seems no linkage between
crew number and other consequences, including ship
damage, cargo damage and oil spill.
Zhang et al.
From Table 3, we can easily see that there is a strong
linkage between collision positions and oil spill. We fur-
ther investigate the effects of collision types. Although
the samples of different collision types belong to the
same population, they still reveal a few interesting find-
ings. Specifically, the amount of oil spill differs signifi-
cantly between crossing and head-on accidents. A
similar phenomenon can be observed between the cross-
ing sample and overtaking sample. So does the situa-
tion between crossing collisions and head-on collisions.
This might be owing to the fact that collisions during
crossing situations result in more structural damages.
However, the linkages between collision positions and
other types of consequences are not so significant.
Grounding accidents. As can be seen in Table 3, the ship
factors such as ship type have strong linkages with ship
accident consequences (e.g. pkw = 0:02 for fatalities).
However, it shows that the radar number has no signif-
icant relationship with ship accident consequences.
This may be due to the fact that at least one radar
works well during the accidents according to Table 1,
and the lack of attention caused by human errors is the
dominant contributing factor. In general, ship type is
strongly related to injuries, fatalities and ship damage.
However, it shows a weak association with oil spill
which is different from the collision accident. One pos-
sible explanation is that single-hull oil tankers have
been widely replaced with the double-hull oil tankers,
which can significantly reduce the oil spill.34 It is very
interesting that the crew numbers are significantly
related to ship damage and cargo damage in grounding
accidents (pkw \ 103 and pkw = 0:001 for ship damage
and cargo damage), but not in the case of collision acci-
dents. One possible explanation would be that there is
adequate time or buffer time to save cargoes when
groundings occur (compared to the case that ship colli-
sions happen). It should be noted that other factors
such as the position of grounding (rocky coast or sand
beach) would also be related to this.
Environment factors are important contributors to
ground accidents. As shown in Table 2, both wind con-
dition and visibility condition are positively related to
ship damage and cargo damage. In addition, there is a
strong linkage between visibility and fatality, whereas
the linkage between visibility and injury is relatively
weak. This would be explained by the fact that the seri-
ous accidents occurred in poor visibility conditions (at
night) are more easily to incur fatalities. This fact has
also been revealed by previous studies.35,36
Discussion
Improvement of accident data collection
Although the accident reports are successfully used for
consequence analysis, there are still many challenges.
First, a lot of effort is needed to pre-process the acci-
dent reports manually. In this study, even though 12
45
experts spent more than 2 weeks on reviewing the acci-
dent reports, only 477 reports are processed. Thus, the
problem of scarce sample inevitably becomes an obsta-
cle to the more advanced and attractive statistical mod-
els. Second, the accident reports are suffered from
under-reporting and incompleteness problems. For
example, 500 reports are reviewed in this study, but
only about 95% are effective.
In the era of big data, it would be beneficial that the
traditional accident-reporting mechanism is reformed
under the guidance of IMO. First, different countries
should strictly follow a unified and standardized acci-
dent report template using the same data format under a
data sharing system. As a result, all involved countries
could benefit from this sharing system. Second, new
positioning and communication technologies, such as
AIS (Automatic Identification System), can be used to
collect the detailed information during ship accidents.
With the automatically recorded data and the accident
reports, more advanced evidence-based models could be
developed to desire insightful findings of ship accidents
and to design safety improvement/control schemes.
Contributing factors for ship accident consequences
Using the framework proposed in this study, we have
successfully extracted a large amount of knowledge
about the associations between contributing factors and
accident consequences from real ship accident cases.
Some of these relationships could not be straightfor-
wardly perceived by our sights or even experts’ experi-
ence. For example, the analysis results show that the
impacts of weather and visibility for fatalities are much
stronger than that for injuries. Another example is that
the number of crews is negatively related to the number
of the fatality but shows no linkage in the case of oil
spill. Such knowledge would be helpful for decision
makers to flexibly and effectively mitigate the risk of
ship accidents by controlling the most important fac-
tors. Moreover, compared with the existing research
such as RCA method or HFACS method, the knowl-
edge extracted in this study is based on the accident
reports, which records the facts during the occurrence
of the accidents. The proposed method depends on the
evidence of the real accidents and does not directly
depend on the experience of the experts.
However, it is more attractive if the accident conse-
quence models could characterize the relationships
among the factors, rather than only the causality con-
nections between contributing factors and accident con-
sequences. This kind of models can reveal more
interesting insights of ship accidents. When the accident
data collection is improved, the advanced statistical
models can be developed. Furthermore, this study only
considers the direct impacting factors during the occur-
rence of accidents and investigates the linkage between
the factors and seriousness of the accident consequence
rather than the possibility of the accident. Due to the
constraint of data collection from the accident reports
46
mentioned in the last section, not all impact factors
could be involved in this study. For example, the acci-
dent location impacts not only the accident frequency
but also its consequence.7,35 It is found that the bigger
number of mortalities is associated with shipping acci-
dents occurred far away from the coastal area/harbor/
port.35 In the accident reports, the position information
is usually in the format of text rather than the accurate
longitude and latitude value and thus it cannot be easily
quantified. In the future, the framework of evidence-
based consequence can be hopefully extended to study
the cases with available big data.
Conclusion
This article proposed an approach to quantitatively
analyze the association between ship accident conse-
quences and the contributing factors based on ship
accident investigation reports. First, a systematical
framework is proposed to review the accident reports,
which focuses on accident factors of both the during-
accident stage and the post-accident stage. Then, the
consequence distributions are explored according to
accident types and consequence types. Consequently,
the association between contribution factors and acci-
dent consequences is investigated using Kendall’s tau
coefficient analysis, Cramér’s V coefficient analysis and
Kruskal–Wallis test, which could to some extent solve
the issues of sparse sample and mixed-type data of acci-
dent consequence analysis using accident reports.
A large amount of background knowledge has been
extracted from 477 real accident reports using the pro-
posed approach. First, the results show that the signifi-
cance of linkages between contributory factors and
accident consequences exhibit distinguished diversity
regarding accident types and consequence types. For
example, ship sailing speed is significantly related to
injury and fatality in collision accidents, whereas no
significant linkage is shown in grounding accidents.
Similarly, in collision accidents, the crew number shows
a significant association with injury and fatality but it
shows insignificant linkage with the consequences of
ship damage, cargo damage and oil spill. Moreover, in
grounding accidents, wind and visibility conditions are
strongly related to fatality, whereas the linkage between
injury is relatively weak. It is also found that the oil
spill is strongly related to collision position, especially
for head-on and crossing collisions. These kinds of
results directly from real accident cases would be useful
for ship safety management.
Accident reports are extremely challenging to be pro-
cessed automatically, as they are currently in the format
of text files and even in the format of scanned images in
many countries. This is a relatively large-scale evidence-
based ship accident consequence study compared with
the existing studies. With the improvement of ship acci-
dent data collection, more advanced and complex mod-
els can be developed based on homogeneous big data.
Proc IMechE Part O: J Risk and Reliability 233(1)
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following finan-
cial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article: This study is supported by the
joint research project Formal Safety Assessment
System for Ship Traffic in Port Waters with Global
Maritime and Port Services Pte Ltd, funded by the
Maritime Innovation and Technology (MINT) Fund
of Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA).
This project is also supported by the research project
Impact Analysis of Large Ships on Ship Traffic in the
Straits of Malacca and Singapore funded by Singapore
Maritime Institute.
ORCID iD
Liye Zhang https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0965-2374
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