Correlation between the Ship Grounding Accident and the Ship Traffic – A Case Study Based on the Statistics of the Gulf of Finland

Abstract

Ship traffic is one of the factors that is presented in almost all of the existing grounding models, and is considered as one of the factors on the likelihood of a grounding accident. This effect in grounding accidents is mostly accepted by experts as common sense or simply by just generalizing the ship-ship collision cases to grounding accidents. There is no available research on the actual causal link between the ship traffic and grounding accident in the literature. In this paper, the authors have utilized the statistical analysis on historical grounding accident data in the Gulf of Finland between the years 1989 and 2010 and the AIS data of the same area in year 2010, as the source of ship traffic data, to investigate the possible existence of any correlation between the ship traffic and the grounding accident. The results show that for the studied area (Gulf of Finland) there is no correlation between the traffic density and the grounding accident. However, the possibility of the existence of a minor relation between the traffic distribution and grounding accident is shown by the result. This finding, however, needs further investigation for more clarification.