Sea Accidents

(Intro)Sea route is covering a big part of the international trade as well as transportation which makes shipping more and more important every day. Sea accidents influence these trades and transportation dramatically. For the last decades ship accidents covers a large part of the accident related deaths and environmental pollution. It is important to understand the reasons of these accidents. All around the world these accidents are reported, recorded and institution examine them in detail in order to figure out how to decrease the amount of the accidents. European Maritime Safety Agency [EMSA] is one of the biggest and most important worldwide institutions that records and analyzed sea accidents. In order to understand ship accidents

(IA)The first category is the accidents by ship types. There are several types of ships which each of them has different impact on the accidents. The first categories of the ships are the ones that carry goods around the world. These kinds of ships have few personnel and tones of goods on them. One of them is cargo ships. Cargo ships are the one that carries cargo goods, and materials from one port to another. Most of the sea accidents are caused by cargo ships. In 2009 36% of the accidents were done by cargo ships. It was decreased compared to past years. It was 43% in 2007 and 41% in 2008 (EMSA, 2010, p.8). As it can be seen in the Table 1 it decreased in 2010. One of the most significant cargo ship accidents is on 16th February 2006 around East of Dongshen Island (China) when Heng Da 1 cargo ship grounded and its hull divided into two. Unfortunately only one of the crew members survived. (Bogalecka, Popek, 2006, p.179). One of the other ship types is tankers. Tankers usually carry chemical liquids and gaseous products. Due to this reason, their accidents are the most dangerous one. About 10% of accidents

Passenger ships are the biggest examples of this. Passenger ships’ primary function is to carry people. Ferries and cruise ships can be given as an example to passenger ships. There was almost 10% increase in the number of accidents in 2010 compared to 2008 and 2009. 147 accidents were recorded and 126 of them were ferries. These rates were the second highest rates of the sea accidents in 2010 and contained around 35% of the overall accidents in total. As seen in the Table 4, most of the passenger ship accidents were due to collisions and contacts (EMSA, 2010, p.11). The most well-known passenger ship accident was happened in 1912 when a passenger ship named Titanic collided with iceberg and sank within three hours. One of the biggest ship accident occurred in the last decade was on 13th January 2010. The luxury cruise ship named Costa Concordia ran aground near Italia. Four Thousand people was safely evacuated, at least three people died (Mirror, 2012). One of the other examples of the ships that carry more people is fishing vessel. According to the reports, although the numbers of sinking of fishing ships were low, they were accounted almost 56% of the overall sinkings in 2010 (EMSA, 2010, p.12). One of the shipping accidents reported in 2014 is on November 29th when a 73-foot-long fishing vessel Blazer sank with 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel and