01122503

Component

With increasing attention being given to vulnerable United States transportation system infrastructure, several different types of risk assessments are being performed. As this applies to marine transportation, one area of risk analysis is safe transport on the inland waterway network. Along the approximately 10,000 miles of navigable waterway in the United States reside major bridges, locks and dams and population centers. Not only could an incident impact human health, property and the ecology, but were it to make the network impassable, this could also cause a ripple effect throughout the U.S. economy. This paper will explore how emerging information technology can be used for identification and visualization of hazardous locations along U.S. navigable waterways. More specifically, geographic information systems (GIS) technology is employed to analyze inland waterway segments rapidly in terms of historical accidents and vessel traffic (commodity flow). While the original intent of this research was to determine the locations along the inland waterways with the most accidents and highest accident rates using GIS, it soon became apparent that there were significant quality issues with the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) accident data. Consequently, visualization using satellite imagery (in programs such as Google Earth) proved valuable in validating accident locations and understanding how characteristics of each location may have contributed to accident causation and consequence. This paper therefore also discusses how emerging technologies can be meaningfully applied to marine casualty data analysis and validation. Several examples are presented to illustrate the value of this approach.

01120148

09-1697

English

18p

2009

Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures (4) ; References; Tables (4)

Data analysis; Environmental risk assessment; Geographic information systems; Information retrieval; Information technology; Inland waterways; Risk assessment; Water transportation; Water transportation crashes

Marine Transportation

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2009 Paper #09-1697

TRIS, TRB

Jan 30 2009 5:57PM