Fleet Intelligence

Marine Casualty Trends

The marine-casualty record over time: accident-investigation occurrences counted by year, occurrence type, severity and vessel segment. Built from open accident-investigation records and rolled up into a single time series.

51,953

casualties · 1975–2025

Fleet AnalyticsUpdated · 27 Aug 2026

Casualties on record

51,953

1975–2025 · sparse records back to 1912

Years covered

distinct calendar years

Occurrence types

taxonomy categories

Peak year

1989

1,543 occurrences

The two commonest types — Machinery Failure and Grounding — make up 40% of the record between them. But how common a type is says little about how harmful it is: Machinery Failure records are <1% Serious or Critical, against 100% for Damage/Unseaworthy.

Occurrences over time, by type

Casualty occurrences per calendar year, stacked by occurrence type. The taxonomy collapses the granular accident-investigation strings into a small, stable set; the long tail of rarer types is folded into “Other (rest)”. Counts reflect the records we have matched, not the entire world casualty record.

Severity over time

The same occurrences split by assessed severity (Critical / Serious / Moderate / Minor), as one line per band. Severity is assigned at import from recorded fatalities, serious injuries and occurrence class — read the critical/serious lines as the human-cost signal.

Where casualties concentrate

The total over all years, by occurrence type and by vessel segment. Segment is resolved through the shared fleet classifier. Only a minority of these (largely historical) records match the fleet by IMO, so the segment chart shows the classified occurrences and states the unmatched share beneath it rather than letting an UNKNOWN bar dwarf the real segments.

By occurrence type

By vessel segment

Segment matched for 4,544 of 51,953 occurrences; the other 47,409 (91%) carry no vessel-type match and are excluded from this breakdown.

Severity by occurrence type

Each occurrence type re-expressed as the share of its records in each severity band. A type can dominate the counts and still be almost entirely Minor, so read this against the frequency ranking above — bar length there is volume, and this is harm.

Critical is a thin tier — 1,301 of 51,953 occurrences (2.5%) — and by rate it concentrates in Other (13% of its records) and Sinking/Capsize (11%), not in the higher-volume types that fill the counts.

Method & caveats

Time series is a roll-up of accident-investigation occurrences by calendar year, occurrence type, severity and vessel segment — derived entirely from records we already hold, so it never re-scans the raw feed on each request.
Taxonomy: the granular accident-investigation strings are collapsed into a small, stable, publishable set (Grounding, Collision, Contact/Allision, Fire/Explosion, Machinery Failure, Sinking/Capsize, Personal Injury, Damage/Unseaworthy, Near-Miss, Pollution, Cargo Shift/Loss, Other) — a near-miss (“risk of collision”) is counted apart from the actual event it was near. The chart legend folds rarer types into “Other (rest)”.
Severity (Critical / Serious / Moderate / Minor) is assigned at import from recorded fatalities, serious injuries and occurrence class. Segment uses the same shared classifier as the rest of the platform; unmatched vessels are shown as UNKNOWN rather than guessed.
Coverage caveat: these are the records we have matched, not the entire world casualty record — counts are a floor. Year-on-year movements also reflect changes in source coverage, so read levels with care and trends over short windows cautiously.
Reported span: the 1975–2025 range shown is where coverage is continuous. A handful of much older, anecdotal records reach back to 1912 but are isolated by a decades-long gap, so we do not present the raw earliest year as if the series ran unbroken from it.

Fleet Intelligence

Marine Casualty Trends

51,953

casualties · 1975–2025

Fleet AnalyticsUpdated · 27 Aug 2026

Casualties on record

51,953

1975–2025 · sparse records back to 1912

Years covered

distinct calendar years

Occurrence types

taxonomy categories

Peak year

1989

1,543 occurrences

Occurrences over time, by type

Severity over time

Where casualties concentrate

By occurrence type

By vessel segment

Segment matched for 4,544 of 51,953 occurrences; the other 47,409 (91%) carry no vessel-type match and are excluded from this breakdown.

Severity by occurrence type

Method & caveats

Time series is a roll-up of accident-investigation occurrences by calendar year, occurrence type, severity and vessel segment — derived entirely from records we already hold, so it never re-scans the raw feed on each request.
Taxonomy: the granular accident-investigation strings are collapsed into a small, stable, publishable set (Grounding, Collision, Contact/Allision, Fire/Explosion, Machinery Failure, Sinking/Capsize, Personal Injury, Damage/Unseaworthy, Near-Miss, Pollution, Cargo Shift/Loss, Other) — a near-miss (“risk of collision”) is counted apart from the actual event it was near. The chart legend folds rarer types into “Other (rest)”.
Severity (Critical / Serious / Moderate / Minor) is assigned at import from recorded fatalities, serious injuries and occurrence class. Segment uses the same shared classifier as the rest of the platform; unmatched vessels are shown as UNKNOWN rather than guessed.
Coverage caveat: these are the records we have matched, not the entire world casualty record — counts are a floor. Year-on-year movements also reflect changes in source coverage, so read levels with care and trends over short windows cautiously.
Reported span: the 1975–2025 range shown is where coverage is continuous. A handful of much older, anecdotal records reach back to 1912 but are isolated by a decades-long gap, so we do not present the raw earliest year as if the series ran unbroken from it.