Commercial Marine Shipping Accidents Understanding Risks Canada

Chapter 4 Impacts
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4 Impacts
Key Findings
Shipping accidents involving the release of cargo can create a series of environmental impacts, which can in turn create social,
cultural, health, and economic impacts.
The impacts of oil spills have been subject to extensive research and are likely to be significant. Spills of some HNS have not been
well studied but have the potential to create major impacts.
The nature and extent of impacts from any pollution event is a function of many factors, including time of year, location, cargo type,
volume spilled, weather and environmental conditions, and the ways in which nearby communities use the marine environment.
The speed and efficacy of the response to a pollution event are critical for reducing its impacts. Overall, Canada has a well-developed
oil spill response regime, though recent developments have identified areas for improvement. Gaps include a lack of response
organizations and support infrastructure in the North and remote areas, and the lack of an HNS preparedness and response regime
across Canada.
The overall risk of a marine shipping accident 15 is determined
by the probability that an accident will occur and by the
potential type and magnitude of any resulting impacts.
Chapter 3 dealt with the first part of the risk equation
(the likelihood of an accident and the likelihood of resulting
casualties or pollution) while this chapter considers the
second element (the consequences — the potential impacts
of an accident and factors that can influence impact).
The great majority of accidents primarily involve damage to
property (e.g., hull damage, damage to cargo) and/or crew
injury. These health and economic impacts can be significant
(as with a crew fatality), and tend to involve the ship, crew,
and related families and communities, often without affecting
the natural environment. While recognizing that serious
injuries and deaths have a great toll, these impacts are not
specific to shipping and nor are they particularly elevated in
marine shipping relative to other modes of transportation.
This report does not attempt to offer insights into the nature
of these impacts. Other types of accidents, although far less
frequent, could include environmental impacts as a result of
cargo and/or fuel spills, which then also lead to impacts on
human health, societies, cultures, and economies. This suite
of impacts associated with these types of accidents has been
the subject of significant research and is central to current
debates about the future of marine shipping in Canada; it
is thus the primary focus of this chapter. Other potential
impacts such as supply chain disruptions are acknowledged
briefly in this report and this limited discussion reflects the
availability of research in this area.
4.1 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
Environmental impacts of marine shipping accidents
have been subject to extensive research, primarily tied to
a few major oil spills (e.g., the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in
Prince William Sound, Alaska). Accidents in which pollutants
are released into the environment have impacts on air
quality, individual species, habitats, and the ecosystem,
among others (Peterson et al., 2003). Lessons from previous
incidents are used to inform oil spill risk assessments, typically
factoring in three components that influence environmental
impacts: physical sensitivity (e.g., type of substrate, depth);
biological sensitivity (e.g., species, habitat); and human
and socio-economic sensitivity (e.g., economic activities)
(DNV, 2011; Reich et al., 2014). The potential environmental
impacts of a spill vary by location, time of year, and amount
and type of cargo spilled. Both the nature and degree of
environmental impact heavily depend on whether a ship
is carrying petroleum products, HNS, or less hazardous
cargo. There is also a risk of a ship losing its own fuels — in
fact, fuel oil is the type of oil that is most frequently spilled
from ships in Canadian waters (WSP Canada Inc., 2014a).
The potential impacts of oil spills discussed below are also
15 Although shipping data classify incidents and accidents separately, for simplicity this chapter nevertheless uses accident to refer to the kinds of major
events likely to lead to significant impacts beyond the ship itself.