Page 10: of Marine News Magazine (March 2018)

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BY THE NUMBERS

Towing Industry Safety:

AWO & USCG Joint analysis – By the Numbers

For 17 years, three measures have been used to track over- just 919 barrels escaped inland marine transportation car- all trends in safety and environmental protection. While riers. There is room for improvement here.

not all-encompassing, the measures are considered useful The [projected] oil spill rate for 2016 is approximately indicators of towing industry trends. The measures are: one gallon of oil spilled per 2,160,000 gallons trans- • Crew fatalities per 100,000 towing industry workers. ported, or 0.42 of a gallon spilled per million gallons of oil transported. The tank barge oil spill rate is calculated • Gallons of oil spilled from tank barges per million gallons transported. using Coast Guard spill data, along with data from the

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 2015, the amount • The number of vessel casualties (overall or by incident severity). of oil transported by barge increased by 1.1 billion gal- lons; a 1.0% increase over 2014. The 1.0% increase in

This report contains towing industry data and mea- sures for calendar years 1994 to 2016. This report also the amount of oil transported by barge and the decreased includes summary statistics on crew member injuries, amount spilled in 2015 resulted in a decrease from 2.6 which the National Quality Steering Committee began to 1.9 in the oil spill rate. The oil spill rate continues tracking in 2006, for calendar years 2006 to 2016. This to be relatively low considering the volumes transported, and the fact that oil transportation volumes by barge have annual effort – now in its 17th year – is a worthwhile ef- fort and the Coast Guard and the American Waterways steadily increased since 2011 (a 22% increase over the last

Operators do a