NEW YORK : America’s top transportation safety agency is urging maritime operators to re-examine their daily operations against recent real-world casualties as familiar hazards continue to drive costly and catastrophic marine accidents.
“It is critical for owners, operators, mariners, and vessel designers to keep in mind the circumstances of accidents aboard similar vessels while reviewing their own operations,” the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) states in its Safer Seas Digest 2025, a summary of marine investigations completed last year. “By considering our lessons learned or finding your own lessons learned from the accidents we investigated, it is our hope that mariners can make changes to avoid similar accidents.”
The latest 136-page edition – which has more than tripled in size from the first edition published in 2013 – examines 49 investigations that looked at accidents including capsizings, collisions, contacts with fixed objects, fires, floodings, groundings, and machinery damage. As it did in the previous two editions, the report noted that most of the casualties investigated were preventable.
Among the investigations completed in 2025 and documented in the report are that of the 9,962 teu containership Dali, which suffered a total loss of power while leaving the Port of Baltimore in which led to a direct contact with and subsequent collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in 2024; the Aframax/LR2 class product tanker Hafnia Amessi, which experienced severe hydrodynamic bank effect and shoaling in the Cooper River near Charleston, South Carolina, in 2024; and the 210.92 metre con-ro vessel Grande Costa D’Avorio, which caught fire while being loaded at Port Newark, New Jersey, in 2023.
The latter casualty specifically was called out in the report by NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy.
“Establishing emergency procedures, continuously reassessing and updating them, and routinely training crews and other personnel on procedures can greatly reduce the impact of an accident,” Homendy said. “Sadly, that is not what happened” in the case of Grande Costa D’Avorio,” she said. “The land-based firefighters who attempted to extinguish the fire lacked both the necessary emergency procedures and training to respond to a vessel fire.”
Those factors resulted in an ineffective response, contributing to the fire’s spread, the death of two firefighters, and injuries to six emergency responders. NTSB issued 11 new recommendations to address the gaps uncovered in the subsequent investigation of the casualty.
Among commonalities that NTSB investigators found in cases completed last year that all mariners should consider include:
Performing maintenance effectively.
Effective voyage planning and management.
Detecting and containing vessel fires.
Assessing the condition of waterfront infrastructure.
Ensuring watertight integrity.
Accounting for bank effect.
Combating fatigue and distraction.
Properly securing and monitoring lithium-ion batteries.
Mitigating the risks of a loss of electrical power.
Planning and training for emergencies.
Operating in strong currents or heavy-weather conditions.
Operating equipment and machinery systems as designed.
