The Mariner Safety Research Initiative (MSRI) project is a collaborative effort with Lamar University (Beaumont, Texas) and maritime industry partners around the world to create a large international database and online repository of maritime injury and close call (near miss) reports. The information can be and has been analyzed to identify trends, possible causes and lessons learned to develop benchmarking statistics and relevant training requirements. The project has collected more than 100,000 injury and close call records from 31 data sources. ABS is collaborating with Lamar University (Beaumont, Texas) and maritime industry partners around the world on this project to publicly share data and put the data into usable context for owners and operators.

History of the MSRI:

The Mariner Personal Safety (MPS) project was initiated in 2009 with Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. The initial focus of this project was on the shipping side of the maritime industry, in order to establish a clear path for the project. The goal of the MPS project is to support the ABS Safety & Human Factors group efforts and Lamar University research interests including but not limited to:

• Sharing results with industry to improve overall safety and health for mariners
• Identifying and reviewing common shipboard injuries and near misses and providing information on how to hopefully reduce or prevent incidents from happening
• Identifying potential areas for white papers, tool box talks, or other safety related guidance documents

Lamar performs a sanitizing function on the data removing crew member, vessel names and ports of entry or any other potentially identifying characteristics. ABS and industry partners who share incident data receive access to the database that has been completely sanitized. Since the creation of the databases there have been many improvements on the functionality and capabilities of the database. Some of the notable improvements which were incorporated based on user feedback include: stemming, synonyms, filtered drop-down lists, alphabetized drop-down lists, and additional categories to search. The database is continuously being modified and updated to reflect incoming incident reports.

In 2015, it was proposed to create a public portion of MPS called the Mariner Safety Research Initiative (MSRI). The databases and safety related material have historically only been available to industry partners. The MSRI provides an opportunity for all of industry to benefit from all the work completed through the MPS project. It also opens the door for additional partnerships between maritime academies, outside research groups, universities, and industry groups to become involved in the MSRI.

The goal of this initiative is to share data that has been generated from the databases and put into a usable context for owners and operators. As the data in the MSRI databases continues to be analyzed, supportive documentation will be developed and shared with industry. It is intended that industry will use this data to support improvements in corporate safety management systems to help achieve operational and performance safety excellence.