Islands: Designing a Comprehensive Risk Assessment

Citation

Research Board of the National Academies, T. (2010), "Islands: Designing a Comprehensive Risk Assessment", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 274-274. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2010.19.2.274.1

More than 4,500 vessels annually traverse Unimak Pass at the western end of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a 1,200‐mile‐long economically and ecologically important chain offering the shortest transportation route for ships traveling between western North America and Asia.

This intensity of commerce makes the area particularly vulnerable to maritime accidents, illustrated by the 2004 oil spill of 336,000 gallons from the wreck of the tanker Selendang Ayu. The settlement of the Selendang Ayu case provided that a portion of the funds be used to conduct a risk assessment for the region's transportation. This book provides an outline for the design of that assessment. The TRB offers an outline of the proposed assessment, not conclusions. But a graph in the appendix on page 211 of the report provides an indication of where things might be headed. Of 3,158 incidents examined of all vessel types, 1,964 of them −62 percent –had as their “top‐level root cause” either “situational awareness” or “situational assessment” – what we might call “operator error.”