Personal Watercraft Insurance, Safety and Accidents
The number of PWC accidents involving injury varies by State. California reported 385 PWC-related accidents during the 1996 boating season, resulting in 298 injured persons, 8 fatalities, and $508,000 in property damage. Although PWC accounted for 16 percent of the registered vessels and 14 percent of the fatalities in California, they were involved in 45 percent of all recreational boating accidents and 55 percent of the persons injured.
Collisions with another vessel made up the majority of recreational boating accidents (69 percent), and of these collisions, 71 percent involved one PWC colliding with a second.6 Similarly, Florida had 751,153 registered vessels in 1996, 9 percent of which were PWC, yet PWC accounted for 37 percent of the accidents (464 of 1,260), 48 percent of the persons injured (389 of 804), and 7 percent of the fatalities (4 of 59).7
In Minnesota, PWC accounted for 3 percent of the number of boats (23,844 of 758,666), yet they were involved in 29 percent of the accidents (41 of 139), 45 percent of the persons reported as injured (22 of 49), and 17 percent of the fatalities (2 of 12).8 The Safety Board could not determine whether PWC are over-represented when compared to other types of recreational boats or if usage type varies by type of boat because accurate data on usage and exposure time for different types of recreational boats are not available. (Exposure data are discussed further in chapter 2). PWC injury reports taken from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showed that over a 6-year period, the number of PWC in operation increased nearly three-fold (from 241,500 in 1990 to an estimated 760,000 in 1995), while the number of PWC-related injuries increased four-fold (2,860 in 1990 to an estimated 12,000 in 1995).9
According to the CDC analysis, the rate of PWC-related injuries (injuries per number of PWC) requiring emergency medical treatment was 8.5 times higher than the rate of injuries from motorboats. The Safety Board notes that many PWC accidents analyzed for this study involved injury but no reported property damage. The Board suspects that PWC-related injuries are not reported on boating accident forms but are being treated at local hospital emergency rooms (and are thereby entered in the NEISS data of the CDC).
