U.S. Recreational Boating Safety: Risk Management and Human Error Analysis. W. W. Becker, Marine Safety Foundation; and A. J. McKnight, Transportation Research Associates
About 75 million Americans engage in recreational boating each year. Many suffer accidents of varying severities. (The annual fatality figure roughly equates to that for general aviation.) Upwards of two-thirds of serious accidents are thought to be due primarily to human error, this has been hard to assess. There is an integrated national recreational boating safety program that includes aspects of regulation, education, law enforcement and different forms of facilitation and assistance. On a national level, this effort is composed of the boating safety efforts of the federal government, the individual states, numerous private organizations, the boating public and industry. Nationally, it is led by the U.S. Coast Guard. This amalgam of interests, molded by a 1971 federal law, is a working model (on a graspable scale) of principles for risk management and government coming to the fore in other areas. This presentation by participants in an ongoing Marine Safety Foundation study of risk management and human error in boating safety introduces and briefly illustrates these principles of diverse constituent cooperation, techniques of risk boating safety risk analysis (including an approach for developing a graduated series of levels of acceptable risk appropriate to different activities and actors,) and a new method of statistical assessment of human accident causation, based on computerized accident information provided by the states, that is unique, at least among national transportation accident reporting systems.
This work was performed by the Marine Safety Foundation under a cooperative agreement funded by the Aquatic Resources (Wallop-Breaux) Trust Fund administered by the U.S. Coast Guard. Opinions are solely the authors’.
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