Contents

• Concept of Accident Types

• The Basics of Risk Assessment
• The Elements of Risk Assessment

1
 Concept of Accident Types

• Ship accidents are usually classified according to the type of

energy release involved.
• The typical accident phenomena/types are shown in Table 4.

2
• In order to understand the nature of ship accidents, one must
study the failure mechanisms related to systems or functions. A
ship includes several systems and functions that are necessary
for it to perform its mission, and some of these are presented
in Table 5.

3
• Both reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) analysis and
risk analysis are performed on these systems and functions to keep
them available (i.e. to reduce the probability of failures) and to
minimize the effects of failures.

Different degrees of seriousness with respect to consequences

include:
– An accident
– An incident
– An operating disturbance
– A non-conformance

4
A common characteristic of accidental outcomes is the
release and/or transformation of energy. Figure 2 gives
examples of energies involved in shipping. It should be kept
in mind that any one failure might lead to different
consequences with different degrees of seriousness.

5
• In the introduction to this part, an accident was defined as an
undesirable event that results in damage to humans, assets and/or
the environment.
• Incidents are, on the other hand, undesirable events that are
detected, brought under control or neutralized before they result in
accidental outcomes. If incidents (e.g. small fires in the machinery
space of a ship) occur frequently, this indicates an inadequate level
of safety. Suddenly one may not be able to bring one of these
undesirable events under control, resulting in an accident with
harm to personnel, property and/or the environment.

• An operating disturbance may take different forms but may be

defined as a situation where the operating criteria for a system or
component are violated.

6
• Typical operating disturbances include:
– Reduced efficiency
– Reduced capacity
– Loss of function
– Operating in emergency mode
– Outside operating performance limits (vibration, wear)
– Temporarily idle

7
• A non-conformance is usually defined as a situation where the
operation is outside certain criteria that define what is acceptable.
• The causes of accidental outcomes may be highly diverse and
are often a combination of several factors. The main groups of
accidental causes are listed in Table 6.
• The main objective of performing a risk analysis is to measure the
importance of the possible causes for a system and its functions,
and to generate and implement safety measures preventing
these causes from occurring and/or reducing the consequences if
they occur .

8
 The Basics of Risk Assessment
• Risk assessment is the process of gathering data and
synthesizing information to develop an understanding of
the risk of a particular enterprise. To gain an
understanding of the risk of an operation, one must
answer the following three questions:
– i) What can go wrong?
– ii) How likely is it?
– iii) What are the impacts?
• Qualitative answers to one or more of these questions are
often sufficient for making good decisions. However, as
managers seek more detailed cost/benefit information upon
which to base their decisions, they may wish to use
quantitative risk assessment (QRA) methods.
9
The Elements of Risk Assessment.

10
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