Risk Management and Human Error in Recreational Boating. Volume 2: Analysis of Human Error in Recreational Boating;Final Report

摘要

This report documents a project to assess the role of human error in recreational boating accidents. In so doing, it reveals both the dominant role of human-error in boating accidents, and the strong relationship between the type(s) of boats involved in an accident and their most-important human-error causes. These relationships are portrayed in tables that present the results of analyizing over 3000 accidents that occurred over a recent 3-year period, (including all the fatal accidents on which sufficient information was available,) in terms of the human-error causes of accidents involving each of nine standard boats types for which data are available. This outcome is useful in developing safety strategies that effectively impact the most important causes of boating accidents. Related to this, the report also documents the development of a process for determining human-error accident causation on a routine basis, as part of a national system of boating accident statistics. The reports of field investigations that form this system flow from the states into a national Boating Accident Report Database (BARD) that is maintained by the U. S. Coast Guard. In recent years, the BARD had developed to the point of including the narratives of investigative reports, as well as standardized accident descriptors, in an electronic form adaptable to automated access and analysis. For the first time, this allowed convenient viewing of masses of reports that included both accident narratives and the standard accident parameters (which had been manually coded for decades.) The accessibility of the narratives added critical information that allowed insight into the human causes of accidents. This discernment was coupled with a human-error-accident-causation taxonomy which was developed in stages through four years of the project to allow methodical coding and automated analysis of accident causes. Stages of development of the human-error taxonomy are documented in the report, beginning with over 300 logicallyimplied categories, refined and limited to the more common, re-expressed in terms particular to different boat types, tested in use over the 2002 boating season in six states, (in computerized and tabular format,) and incorporated into a prototype of a Web-based version of BARD. The approach has wider application in transportation safety.