Commercial Fishing Safety Training

Details

• Personal Author:
  Dzugan J
• Description:
  This project increases the availability of commercial fishing safety workshops. This is done by continuing to build and reinforce a network of port based fishing safety instructors around Alaska and the U.S. The goal is for fishermen to have credible fishing safety instructors from the fishing industry who know the local area and local fishery risks and meet federal safety training requirements for fishermen and decrease their risk of death in a worker environment that is remains high risk. We have assured in this report that none of the EDCs or other trainees in this report are duplicated in reports by other NIOSH fishing safety grant recipients, nor have the same trainees been reported again in AMSEA's other NIOSH fishing safety projects. The training took place on five levels. 1. Deliver Marine Safety Instructor-Training (MSITs) to train port based trainers who can provide accessible training to the US's far-flung commercial fishing fleet. COVID-19 and travel restrictions and shutdowns restricted delivery and the availability of trainees to be able to take this training in this full year under pandemic. However, to make up for small class size, we offered more MSIT courses. Great efforts were made to continue to train new instructors and follow federal, local and our own COVID guidelines to prevent illness to students and staff. Following federal, state, local and our own protocols under COVID, and revision of training methodology to ensure distancing and masking resulted, in no one being infected with COVID in any of our training. The objective in this 5th year was to offer three MSIT classes for 36 people. Despite the pandemic this year, we coordinated and held four in-person MSITs in the Alaska fishing ports of Ketchikan, Nome, Seward and Sitka, for a total of 26 people attending which reached 130% and 72% of our objective respectively in this 5th year. The objectives during this 5-year project was to conduct 15 MSIT workshops and train 180 new fishing vessel safety instructors. We reached 93% (n14) and 70% (n126) respectively of this objective despite the limitations of the pandemic. 2. Deliver Emergency Drill Conductor (EDC) training to commercial fishermen to qualify them to conduct required monthly drills on their fishing vessels. The objective in this 5th year was to offer 95 EDC workshops and train 700 EDCs. COVID restricted training opportunities due to 2 safety of staff and students. It was not until the Spring of this year that we were able to conduct almost the EDC training in this report. 240 EDCs were trained in 32 courses, mostly in Alaska. It took much more effort and expense and number of courses to train smaller groups of fishermen. Instead of an average of 10 fishermen per course prior to COVID, there are now only 7.5 fishermen per course since the pandemic started. In addition, at the beginning of this 5-year project, AMSEA instructors across the U.S. were teaching EDC classes under our Coast Guard approval, and we were able to claim the EDCs these instructors were training with our support. Now however, most of our east coast instructors are teaching EDCs under their own (FPSS) NIOSH funding. Although we still support these instructors with our instructor training, Coast Guard course approval, curriculum development and printed training materials, we are not including their EDC trainees. Thus we no longer count the number of EDCs other NIOSH supported projects train, to avoid what could be viewed as overlapping support from differing NIOSH projects. Thus we are not counting 83 EDCs from 10 EDC workshops conducted under the FPSS as a part of this project to avoid double counting their trainees In this fifth year of the project, and despite the travel and risk constraints of the pandemic, the number of courses we actually planned and promoted in this project were about double what was actually held. However, these classes had to be canceled due to COVID spikes experienced in rural fishing ports cases and were not acceptable risks for instructors or fishermen trainees. Also our Coast Guard Accepted courses for MSITs and EDC do not allow for a switch to an online delivery methodology. Despite these impediments, in this year 5 we successfully held 32 EDC courses and trained 240 new EDCs which met 37% and 34% of our objectives respectively for the year. The five-year objective was to hold 380 EDC workshops for 4,500 EDC fishermen. We held 97% of the EDC workshops we projected to conduct (n368), not counting another 90 classes that were promoted but not held due to lack of students. We also trained 80% of the students we projected to train (n3,579). The pandemic of the last two reporting years was the only issue responsible for this smaller than expected turnout of students despite our herculean efforts. 3. Our best results over the last 5-years was in the delivery of short safety workshops for fishermen in topics such as vessel stability, damage control, cold water survival and other short safety workshops. Although the objective in this 5th and last year was to offer 50 specialized safety workshops and train 600 fishermen, all short safety workshops in our 5-year objectives have been previously meet. The five-year objective of delivering 170 short safety workshops to 2,000 fishermen was exceeded by 524% (10,473 fishermen in 1,023 workshops were trained) after only 4 years in this project. This objective demonstrated that short one to five-hour safety workshops on a greater variety of topics was much preferred by commercial fishermen as opposed to Emergency Drill Conductor refresher training (see objective 4 refresher training following). 3 Distance delivered portals were used much more for this delivery in the final two years of this project due to the pandemic. 4. This objective was to deliver refresher training for both MSITs and EDCs to maintain currency in marine safety topics and updates. Refresher training continued to be very slow in the last two years of this project due to the lack of Coast Guard enforcement of refresher training. The objective in this 5th year was to offer 3 MSIT refresher training courses for 25 new instructors and EDC refresher training to 400 fishermen. In this final year 19 EDCs and only 6 MSITs were refresher trained due to training shutdowns caused by COVID-19 and the lack of enforcement of refresher training by the Coast Guard. This represents only 5% and 24% of our respective objectives for the year. The five-year objective of refresher training 100 MSITs and 1,350 EDCs resulted in only 55% (n55) and 23% (n310) respectively being refresher trained. This was mostly due to the lack of a Coast Guard regulation mandating refresher training and the difficulty presented by the current pandemic and travel restrictions. However, there were thousands of fishermen (see objective 3 results) who did receive refresher safety training in shorter workshops, greatly exceeding our expectations. 5. Further development of curriculum outline and training resources for future proposed training mandates. and field testing of new curriculum took place in this 5th year. The objective was to train 300 fishermen in new curriculum. Further refinement in curriculum developed included Stability, Sleep Deprivation, Fishermen's First Aid, Risk Management and Ergonomics and new slide decks were developed. Training in these and other new fishing vessel safety topics was given in 26 workshops to 228 fishermen in this year alone. The five-year objective of training 550 fishermen in new curriculum was 79% met. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Communicable Diseases Disaster Planning Emergencies Hunting Occupational Health Safety Staff Development
• Keywords:
  COVID-19 Curriculum Development Emergency Preparedness Fishing Industry Information Dissemination Injury Prevention Marine Workers Safety Education Safety Programs Training Grants
• Series:
  Grant Final Reports
• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Grant
• Genre:
  Final Grant Report
• Place as Subject:
  Alaska ; OSHA Region 10
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Division:
  OEP - Office of Extramural Programs
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1-7
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20064455
• NTIS Accession Number:
  PB2022-100420
• Citation:
  Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, T03-OH-008631, 2021 Sep; :1-7
• Contact Point Address:
  PI/Program Director: Jerry Dzugan, Alaska Marine Safety Education Association, 2924 Halibut Point Rd. Sitka, Alaska 99835
• Email:
  director@amsea.org
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2021
• NORA Priority Area:
  Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing
• Performing Organization:
  Alaska Marine Safety Education Association, Sitka, Alaska
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20050701
• Source Full Name:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• End Date:
  20260630
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:37d0ba25eb21d016eb14f234f16bd7227b105c33d98997dbc8b900da3118ca4b9bb08565c35377421c206d38f4022fa63604aea5c19e49eee74f738f69bba38b
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/219096/cdc_219096_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 186.93 KB ]