Safety Flash Reporting
Contribute to our Safety Flashes
IMCA Safety Flashes and systems for incident reporting and analysis are an important tool for sharing vital information. By publishing them, IMCA helps its members around the world identify potential hazards, share lessons learned and avoid repetition. Safety Flashes should be succinct, specific, factually correct and written in clear language. The Secretariat will assist with this through formatting and checking of the material submitted.
Anonymity
All submissions are handled in the strictest confidence, with information anonymised, checked before issue and published only with clear permission from the originator.
IMCA remains aware that it is sometimes necessary for members to take legal advice before sharing incident information, and we would stress that published Safety Flashes are always completely anonymous. IMCA does encourage members to continue to share information about incidents, hazards and lessons learnt, as far as is reasonably practical.
IMCA Contact
Nicholas Hough
Technical Adviser – HSSE and Offshore Survey
Contact
Review and Approval Process
When a member incident report is received by IMCA, it will firstly be reviewed by a Technical Adviser. A draft ‘IMCA version’ of the incident will be prepared, and this will be sent back for review to the originator. No further action is taken until the originator signals clearly that the incident is ready to be published. Sometimes a number of iterations of this process are required before the incident report is ready for publication.
What Should be Included?
Members can help by following a number of pointers:
- Indicating which of the IOGP Life-Saving Rules (if any) were dominant factors in this incident
- The title should be concise and focus on the main issue
- The focus should be on lessons learnt and how to prevent a recurrence, rather than on the incident itself
- The content should be succinct, specific and, as far as possible, a common theme or pattern should be followed:
- What happened? an incident or an issue will be described
- Why? What were the immediate causes and, if appropriate, the root causes
- Learning: what can members learn from this
- Action: what are the recommendations for members
- Ideally there should be photographs or illustrations.
A Safety Flash incident report should provide sufficient detail and communicate risks, precautions and necessary actions effectively without releasing information about the people or organisations involved. For further information, please contact the Secretariat.
To contribute use our Submission Template below or email us your own format.
Third-Party Safety Flashes
Sometimes IMCA receives links or references to incidents published by other organisations (for example, the Marine Safety Forum (MSF)), or to incidents that are otherwise already in the public domain. If it is considered that further sharing of these incidents would be of use and interest to members, we will create a short note within a Safety Flash providing a link to that incident.
News & Events
‘Routine’ task, non-routine result: Finger injury during welding
A member has reported an incident in which a welder injured his finger whilst at work. The welder was finishing cutting and noticed there was some loose slag built up […]
Read more‘Routine’ task, non-routine result: Batteries stored sideways leak battery acid
A member has reported a near miss incident in which there was a spill of battery acid. An electrician had charged the wet cell batteries of two motion reference units […]
Read more‘Routine’ task, non-routine result: A fall from a crane ladder leads to an LTI
A member has reported an incident in which a crewman fell from a fixed ladder injuring himself. The incident occurred when, after familiarising the shore-side crane operator, an Able Seaman […]
Read moreAbrasion of metal casing
A member has reported a case of serious abrasion on the metal casing of the flame arrester on an oxygen hose. This was discovered during ‘routine’ replacement of the securing […]
Read moreAccidental discharge of bilge water in dry dock
A member has reported an incident in which there was an accidental discharge of bilge water during a dry dock. The incident occurred when dry dock personnel mistakenly opened the […]
Read moreAirline coupling failure
We have received the following report of an incident which occurred during internal cleaning operations in a produced water de-gasser which was being undertaken by two contract cleaners. This vessel […]
Read moreBail-out whip failures
We have a safety alert from Hydrasun Limited concerning reported failures of 3/8″ R6 hose type bail-out whip assemblies.
Read more