Event Tree Analysis of Marine Accidents in Bangladesh

Abstract

The frequency of marine accidents in Bangladesh is observed to be one of the highest in the world. Maritime disasters in the country took more than 10,000 lives in past three decades. Each time an accident occurs with terrible loss of lives, the issue goes viral through newspapers and social media for several days, and then it is simply consigned to oblivion. Most of the records kept of marine accidents are limited to unsubstantiated news reports with a few exceptions marked in a handful of accidents that were subjected to detailed reporting conducted by maritime authorities. Several research works have been carried out to point out the core reasons behind accidents. But there was a demand of time to find out and represent the sequence of events leading to an accident with the help of a tool more effective than those used in earlier papers. The tool used in this paper is event tree, showing how a single factor, when coupled with other factors or not, is likely to lead to an accident. Despite being a widely-used tool for accident analysis, event tree has been applied for the first time with quantitative study in analyzing maritime accidents in Bangladesh. The research work didn’t end up using event tree as a tool only, but it also conducted a probabilistic analysis. In this research work, the factors, most likely to lead to a disaster, has been identified and then assessed with the data of previous accidents. The probabilistic analysis yielded to the finding that the number of accidents can be reduced considerably if the problem of poor visibility, when the vessel is overloaded, can be solved. The event tree showing the sequence of events will help future researchers and system designers to find out and eliminate the factors contributing to marine accidents and eventually curb the very high frequency of disasters.