ABSTRACT
In our book that established the existence of the learning curve (Duffey & Saull 2002), we examined many case studies.
We highlight in this paper the data and information for marine events and their learning trends. We have also found data for oil spills at sea. Since spills are just another accident in a homo-technological system (HTS), namely a ship operated by people, it was interesting to show if the usual everyday marine accidents do exhibit learning. Marine accident outcomes include groundings, collisions, fires and all manner of mishaps. The most recent data we found were on the web in the Annual Report for 2004 of the UK Marine Accident Investigation Board (MAIB, for short, at www.maib.gov.uk). The MAIB responsibility is to examine reported accidents and incidents in detail. The MAIB broke down the accidents by type of ship, being the two broad categories of merchant ships that carry cargo, or fishing vessels that ply their trade in the treacherous waters off the UK islands.
