Summary

Maritime conference in Helsinki in September on the dissemination of incident reports at sea to improve future safety and rescue efforts

The sea's waves remain an appealing passage for both commercial and leisurely travel. However, with increased traffic, safety becomes ever more important. One way to improve sea safety is to apply stringent methods of incident reporting while at the same time making such information available to the proper authorities. At present the number of "near miss" incident reports at sea remains low, such reports in fact just represent a fraction of maritime accidents that occur and go unrecorded each year. The International Maritime Incident and Near Miss Reporting Conference (IMISS) 2011 will dedicate itself to improving the state of things.

The conference is to be held in Helsinki, Finland on 1-2 September 2011. The Aalto University School of Engineering at Helsinki will host the event. IMISS 2011 is part of the Project Competitive Advantage by Safety (CAFE), co-ordinated by the Kotka Maritime Research Center at Kotka, Finland.

The conference will bring together scientists and academics from around the world researching maritime safety, government and corporate authorities and experts working on the related maritime safety issues in general.

The focus of the conference is how to best disseminate information concerning maritime incidents and accidents as well as monitoring the use of incident reporting systems in the future. IMISS 2011 will host presentations helping to improve methods of reporting on maritime affairs. This will indeed benefit overall coverage on incidents, thus making risk modelling an invaluable tool to prevent further mistakes.

Each year maritime accidents lead to loss of life. In many cases, however, these numbers are falsely reduced as maritime accidents go unreported due to certain shortcomings with the dissemination of such information. This misinformation subsequently exaggerates the problem. Without proper facts and numbers, prevention efforts are thwarted.

The deadline for registration is August 1st, 2011.