A Preliminary Investigation of Risk Control Options for Maritime Accidents in Arctic Waters

Abstract

Abstract Effective risk control options (RCOs) are the key issue for risk management of maritime accidents, especially for practical risk prevention and control in a rapidly changing environment in ice-covered Arctic waters. This paper conducts the identification of RCOs for maritime accidents in Arctic waters by using a text mining approach. First of all, we recognize the potential risk control measures (RCMs) for maritime accidents by deeply excavating from the global marine accident investigation reports (MAIR) in Arctic waters and the extensive ice-covered waters based on grounded theory. Second, we identify the critical RCMs considering the frequency of the potential RCMs in the existing MAIRs and related references, and the relationship between risk influencing factors (RIFs) from environmental, technical, human and organizational aspects. Third, we further analyze the dependencies among RCMs, RIFs and maritime accidents in Arctic waters. The text mining software NVivo is used to conduct preliminary text mining of the MAIRs. Furthermore, we propose RCOs for the typical maritime accidents (e.g., ship-ice collision, grounding, fire/explosion) in ice-covered waters based on the critical RCMs. The results can be used to make RCOs in Arctic shipping.