There's many a slip between safety and ship

THE American Club, one of the 13 big mutual protection and indemnity (P&I) insurers of the shipping industry, has taken a close look at why its pays out something like US$40 million a year in injury claims.

An industry-wide project analysed more than 12,000 injury records with a financial cost of US$246 million over a six-year period and a further 100,000 near-miss reports from the ABS and Lamar Mariner Safety Research Initiative (MSRI) and nearly a decade of data from the American Club.

The insurer says the research offers unprecedented insight into the nature of accidents at sea. There was a problem, though. As often happens when you try to look at shipping industry data, the project data was inconsistent and information from different sources was not directly comparable.