The American Boat & Yacht Council meets with Project Technical Committees throughout the year to review, update and create new standards for the annual supplement to Standards and Technical Information Reports for Small Craft. The new ABYC Standard S-32, Warnings and Safety Signs for Boats, was first published in July 2022. Data shows it was a much-needed standard.
According to the Coast Guard, 11.9 million boats were registered in the United States in 2021. In that same year, there were 4,439 accidents that resulted in 658 deaths, 2,641 injuries and $67.5 million in property damage. Where cause of death was known, 81% of fatal boating-accident victims drowned; of those, 83% were not wearing a life jacket. Where vessel length was known, three of every four boaters who drowned were in vessels smaller than 21 feet. There were 188 accidents in which at least one person was struck by a propeller; of those, 24 people died. The most common vessel types involved in reported accidents were open powerboats (47%), personal watercraft (19%) and cabin powerboats (13%). The vessel types with the highest percentage of deaths were open powerboats (44%), kayaks (15%) and pontoon boats (10%).
“We found that the contributing factors [to boating accidents] were related to things we can’t design out,” says Brian Goodwin, ABYC technical director. “They tended to be more related to human factors. So we took those topics and said, ‘OK, can we create a standardized warning for those topics?’ ”
Funded by a Coast Guard grant from the Sport Fish Restoration and Boating Trust Fund, the ABYC project that led to S-32 was based on the findings of a National Marine Manufacturers Association study that analyzed five years’ worth of Coast Guard information (an earlier sample than the 2021 data cited here).
“We want safe boating for everyone,” says Wendy Sanders, chair of the ABYC Product Interface Project Technical Committee. Sanders has been working with marine-accident reconstruction since 2006, predominantly with recreational boats. “We knew that if we could home in on the issues that pose the greatest risk, that’s the biggest bang for the buck in terms of putting energy and effort into boater education, into trainings, into warnings — everything we can do to help people boat safely.”
Of her work with the accident data, Sanders says, “We want to understand whether a particular accident type is a rare event, or if there’s an issue that’s starting to surface. We want to understand these things not just reactively but proactively to look for accident trends. We want to see what kinds of things could help — not just warning labels, but, for example, education.”
Having sorted the accident types into those that merited warning labels, the committee next grouped contributing factors by boat type: open powerboat, cabin powerboat, pontoon boat, houseboat, auxiliary sailboat and inflatable. S-32 provides exceptions for PWC, canoes and kayaks, and human-powered craft — not because the committee ignored them but because warning labels for those vessel types are addressed in other standards.
S-32 requires that each label contains the hazard intensity signal word (such as danger or warning), the nature of the hazard, consequences that can result if the instructions to avoid the hazard are not followed, and instructions on how to avoid the hazard. The standard also specifies locations for warning labels within the boat: helm, transom, occupant-deck, occupant-cabin.
The recognition of “occupants” raised a problem that the Product Interface Committee addressed in nuanced ways. To ensure the greatest number of people would comprehend the warning labels, the committee followed guidelines laid out by the American National Standards Institute, particularly ANSI Z535.4: Product Safety Signs and Labels. The committee then took comprehensibility another step further.
“ANSI Z535 gives you a lot of guidance,” Sanders says. “But you have to ask, ‘Is the message I’m trying to convey actually being understood?’ ”
The committee tested the warning labels for comprehensibility. “We did it in a couple of different formats,” Sanders says. “One was sitting outside a secretary of state office and asking people to sit with us for 10 or 15 minutes and take a survey on a piece of paper.”
Why a state office and not a marina? “We wanted people who could operate a vehicle but not necessarily boaters,” Sanders says, adding that not every occupant aboard a boat is a trained or experienced operator.
In addition, comprehensibility tests were developed and administered online for a larger, nationwide sample. Recommended pictograms communicate warnings across language differences. Uniform colors signify levels of severity.
“S-32 is an industry conformity standard,” Goodwin says. “The idea is to get everyone to do it the same way so the consumer is seeing the same message. It shouldn’t matter what boat they’re getting on.” Every label in S-32 is categorized by severity: whether the hazard could or will cause injury or death.
ABYC recommends compliance with S-32 after July 31.
Tim Murphy is education project manager for the American Boat & Yacht Council.
This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.
