The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) has decades of experience with waterways safety risk assessment and has developed a suite of tools designed to address various aspects of waterways safety. The authors of this report assess these tools, focusing on fragmentation and overlaps across the tools and options for improving waterways safety risk assessment in the USCG.

A Review of Coast Guard Waterways Safety Risk Assessment Tools

Eric Cooper, Susan A. Resetar, Rahim Ali, Jeff Anderson, Karishma R. Mehta, Millard McElwee, Rachel Steratore, Sarah Weilant, Michelle D. Ziegler, Adaeze Ibeanu, et al.

ResearchPublished Mar 23, 2026

The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) has decades of experience with waterways safety risk assessment and has developed a suite of tools designed to address various aspects of waterways safety. However, there has never been a review to understand the effectiveness of the tools and identify where, collectively, redundancies or gaps within these tools might exist. Furthermore, since these tools were developed, they have not been reviewed to ensure that they account for changes in waterway usage and their impact on safety risk.

The authors use a risk management framework to evaluate six waterways safety risk assessment tools used by the USCG. They also identify occurrences of fragmentation, overlap, and duplication across the tools and options for improving waterways safety risk assessment in the USCG. Finally, they offer recommendations to better align the suite of USCG waterway risk assessment tools with a risk management framework derived from established practice, to address the implications of fragmentation and overlap, and to provide a more holistic understanding of safety risks to a given waterway.

Key Findings

The six tools evaluated each have strengths and weakness

  • The tools vary in the extent of their coverage of the seven the elements of the risk management framework: (1) goal setting, (2) risk assessment, (3) risk characterization, (4) risk evaluation, (5) risk management, (6) risk monitoring, and (7) engagement, collaboration, and communication.
  • The tools tend to be stronger in addressing hazards and priorities and weaker in characterizing, evaluating, and managing risk.
  • None of the tools adequately covers risk monitoring, which suggests that important feedback mechanisms for identifying and managing risk are lacking in all the tools.

There are areas of overlap, duplication, and fragmentation across the tools

  • All or most of the tools consider some of the same risk drivers, such as surface vessel and traffic volume risks, geography, weather, and critical infrastructure.
  • At the same time, several drivers, including cyber risks and human vulnerabilities, have minimal to no coverage across the tools.
  • The tools routinely enlist stakeholder input from the same pool of candidates.
  • Each of the tools serves a different purpose, which can create fragmentation when each focuses on different geographic areas, risk reduction strategies, processes, methodologies, or timelines.
  • Risk assessment methods differ, leading to a fragmented understanding of risk levels and limiting information sharing across tools.
  • Risk monitoring is an identified gap across all the tools.
  • Following any risk assessment, there is no established mechanism or process to routinely update the risk driver parameters or assess whether mitigations are implemented or effective.

Recommendations

Consider redesigning the USCG waterways safety risk assessment process to better leverage the information gathered and outputs generated by each tool

  • Establish a standard to designate critical waterways based on impacts to national strategic interests if the waterway was no longer usable.
  • Designate a phased approach to conducting a Ports and Waterways Safety Assessment (PAWSA).
  • Incorporate any new Waterway Suitability Assessments (WSAs) or Navigation Safety Risk Assessments (NSRAs) into the annual review to determine whether the cumulative effects of new structures or activities affected the waterway to an extent that exceeded the risk tolerance or severity level that would necessitate a new PAWSA.
  • Conduct a Waterways Analysis Management System (WAMS) study following a PAWSA.
  • Establish a common risk index across the WSA, NSRA, and other tools to enable comparing risk levels.
  • Create a consolidated, accessible database for risk assessments. Catalog data, reports, and decisions made during WSAs and NSRAs, which would be made available for use in future PAWSAs as baseline material.

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Citation

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Cooper, Eric, Susan A. Resetar, Rahim Ali, Jeff Anderson, Karishma R. Mehta, Millard McElwee, Rachel Steratore, Sarah Weilant, Michelle D. Ziegler, Adaeze Ibeanu, Isabelle Winston, Kristin J. Leuschner, and Jacob Kaufhold, A Review of Coast Guard Waterways Safety Risk Assessment Tools. Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center operated by the RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3612-1.html.
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This research was sponsored by USCG Office of Investigations and Casualty Analysis (CG-INV) and conducted within the Infrastructure, Immigration, and Security Operations Program of the RAND Homeland Security Research Division, which operates the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center.

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