Maritime Emergency Preparedness and Management

Since time immemorial humans have had beneficial interactions with the sea—for food, transport, and pleasure. However, these interactions have not always been without cost—the risk of death has always been present. In the maritime fraternity, we tend to think of this risk in terms of ship incidents: capsizing, foundering, grounding, collision, fire, man-overboard. Over the past century improvements in technology, safety standards, enforcement of regulations, and education have reduced these risks for commercial vessels, and concurrently tremendous improvements have been made in rescue response. This article will focus on the improvements, past, present and future, in rescue response to maritime incidents. In the 1820s there were about 1,800 shipwrecks each year around the British Isles alone. Amongst maritime folk the risks of going to sea were understood; significant loss of life was expected. Often in sight of a coastal community, a sailing ship would be blown aground, the crew would take to the rigging to try to survive, townsfolk would see the plight of the hapless sailors and often would put to sea, in whatever craft they may have at hand, at significant risk to their own lives. These occurrences eventually led to the first purposedesigned lifeboat, the Original, built on the northeast coast of England in 1789.