The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) has decades of experience with waterways safety risk assessment and has developed a suite of tools designed to address various aspects of waterways safety. However, there has never been a review to understand the effectiveness of the tools and identify where, collectively, redundancies or gaps within these tools might exist. Furthermore, since these tools were developed, they have not been reviewed to ensure that they account for changes in waterway usage and their impact on safety risk.
The authors use a risk management framework to evaluate six waterways safety risk assessment tools used by the USCG. They also identify occurrences of fragmentation, overlap, and duplication across the tools and options for improving waterways safety risk assessment in the USCG. Finally, they offer recommendations to better align the suite of USCG waterway risk assessment tools with a risk management framework derived from established practice, to address the implications of fragmentation and overlap, and to provide a more holistic understanding of safety risks to a given waterway.
