In 2013, MuckRock’s Michael Morisy used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records from the US Coast Guard’s database of recreational boating accident reports. The records cover accidents, deaths, injuries, and involved vessels from 1995–2012.
The Coast Guard provided the records as a Microsoft Access database. To expand the accessibility of this data beyond users of Microsoft Access, this Data Liberation Project repository contains the following:
- A copy of the original records the Coast Guard provided (for archival purposes, via MuckRock’s website).
- A simple shell script that uses the
mdbtoolsconversion suite to convert the database to CSV-formatted files. - The converted files: a database schema and four CSV files (
Accidents.csv,Deaths.csv,Injuries.csv, andVessels.csv).
For more context, please see the form that the Coast Guard uses to collect the data, as well as the agency’s Privacy Impact Assessment regarding the database.
In January 2023, the Data Liberation Project filed a FOIA request for more recent (and historical) data. To be notified when those records are available, express your interest, sign up for the Data Liberation Project’s newsletter and/or follow the request’s RSS feed.
The original materials are government records and are in the public domain. The Data Liberation Project is releasing the conversion script and converted CSVs under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, though kindly requests that you attribute reasonably if republishing.