Box 15-C
Aggregating Oil Spill Data
Until
late 2001, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) summarized reported oil spill data in
its Pollution
Incidents In and Around
U.S.
Waters, A Spill Release Compendium: 1969-2001. USCG aggregated the source data into five categories:
marine vessels, pipelines, facilities, other, and unknown. For the previous two
editions of this report, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) reviewed USCG's detailed source data and classified each
transportation-related reported oil spill incident by transportation mode. In
December 2001, USCG changed the database used to produce the spill compendium,
and many of its tables were altered. The new database system, Marine
Information for Safety and Law Enforcement (MISLE), is intended to collect data
more efficiently. MISLE does not explicitly identify nonmarine spill sources, including aircraft, highway, rail, and pipeline. USCG is working
on possible methods for extracting nonmarine-related
sources but no tools are currently available. As a result of these issues, BTS
was unable to update oil spills data for this report.
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