INLAND SAFETYThe Maritime Safety Journey:The Maritime Safety Journey:An unlikely and remarkable story.By Craig Philip and Paul Johnsonate last year, the Transportation Research Board re-leased a major study that was undertaken “in response Lto the rapid development of domestic sources of en-ergy and questions about the safest ways to move these products.” The Study Committee examined the opera-tional responses of the three primary modes impacted by the fracking revolution – rail, pipeline and maritime. A primary observation of this work was that that the “Ma-rine Transportation System Offers a Model for Robust Safety Assurance….the challenge for the rail industry and regulators is to develop a safety assurance system that has a high degree of robustness like that of the maritime sector.”The study was undertaken in 2016 in part as a result of the multiple, high consequence derailments of ethanol and crude oil in North America, as “crude-by-rail” vol-umes grew along with domestic crude production. The study also concluded that although the increase in barge movements of crude oil has not attracted as much pub-lic attention, the total volumes of oil transported by barge have exceeded those of rail. A possible reason for the lack of public attention is the exemplary safety record of this mode, which has had no reports of signi