Summary: | Commercial fishing safety is an important problem in Alaska. The kinds of problems which exist differ for different fisheries in Alaska - safety problems in the Bering Sea crab fishery are different than those in the southeast troll fishery. This makes it more difficult to define the nature of the Alaska commercial fishing safety problem or to figure out how to deal with it. The same things are true at the national level. Commercial fishing safety is an important problem throughout the United States. The safety problems in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fisheries are different from those in Alaska fisheries. These kinds of differences contribute to the difficulty of defining or addressing the commercial fishing safety problem at the national level. This presentation reviews elements of a report entitled Fishing Vessel Safety: Blueprint for a National Program to provide a picture of what emerged in its exploration of safety problems at the national level. All of the data and graphs are from the committee's report, except some additional data for Alaska. Any opinions expressed are the presenters, not the committee's or the authors of the original report. Presented at the National Fishing Industry Safety and Health Workshop in Anchorage, Alaska on October 9, 1992
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