Coverage, known gaps and method

Maury publishes what the US Coast Guard recorded about US barges and towing vessels, and nothing else. It does not score, rate, or grade vessels, and it publishes no opinion about any vessel's condition. Source: USCG Port State Information Exchange (PSIX) — 121 exports covering 3 March 1972 through 23 August 2026, all retrieved 5 September 2026. 532,794 vessels, 1,610,541 recorded inspections, 434,070 deficiencies, 37,489 operational controls.

This is predominantly the Mississippi–Ohio inland river system: 41.1% of all records in the archive come from a single Coast Guard district. Coastal and Alaskan activity is included, but any national reading of these figures should carry that concentration with it.

38,259 inspections cover more than one vessel — a tug and the barges in its tow, recorded under one activity.

Maury is built from PSIX exports filtered by vessel class: every vessel the Coast Guard classes as Barge or Towing Vessel. That is not the same as every barge and towing vessel in the United States, and the difference is not small or theoretical.

PSIX assigns a class per vessel, and the class does not always describe the hull. One vessel in the record measures 460.1 ft by 84.1 ft at 24,213 deadweight tons, and the Coast Guard classes it a General Dry Cargo Ship with a service type of Freight Ship. Whether that hull is functionally a barge is precisely what the labels cannot tell you — and it is not in this archive either way, because the class filter that built Maury did not select it.

How big is the gap? An all-class PSIX pull covering 2016–2026 holds 504,983 hulls, of which 22,217 are classed Barge or Towing Vessel. The rest are overwhelmingly recreational, fishing and passenger vessels that no one would call a barge.

The gap cannot be measured from the labels. In that same pull, 0 vessels carry a barge, tow or tug vessel type while being classed as something else — none. Class and type never disagree, so a hull shelved under the wrong one cannot be found by comparing them. It can only be found by looking at the hull: length, beam, and whether it is powered. Those figures are being retrieved from the Coast Guard's vessel-particulars service, and this section will carry a measured number when they land.

So: every inspection on record for the vessels in this archive is a claim Maury can make. Every barge in America is not, and Maury does not make it.

The archive holds 532,794 vessels. The site publishes 50,028 of them, under one rule:

include where the Coast Guard classes the vessel as Barge or Towing Vessel.

Every vessel that rule includes has a page, with no recency filter — hulls last recorded decades ago are here. Vessels the rule excludes are held in the archive and are not published, and the reason is recorded per vessel rather than implied by the absence of a page. When the rule changes it will be added as a new version beside this one, so a change in what the site publishes is itself auditable.

41.1% of the inspection records in this archive were written by a single Coast Guard district. Maury is predominantly a record of the Mississippi–Ohio inland river system, with coastal and Alaskan activity included. Unit and district names are recorded as PSIX holds them for that activity; offices have been renamed over the years and no attempt is made here to map an old name onto a current one.

Three ranges are missing entirely because the USCG CGMIX export failed at source: barge 2009-10-01 to 2009-12-31; barge 2011-01-01 to 2011-05-31; barge 2013-01-01 to 2013-05-31. Figures for those years are correspondingly low.

2020 incident records come from two sources, and the year is near-complete for barges and not for towing vessels. The Coast Guard produced no incident export for 2020. Maury holds 2,268 incidents dated 2020: 2,089 that surfaced in neighbouring years' exports and 179 recovered from the Coast Guard's IIR web service. Judged by the class of hull involved, that is 599 incidents touching a barge against about 637 in a typical neighbouring year (94%), and 1,037 touching a towing vessel against about 1,290 (80%). Any reading of 2020 restricted to towing vessels should treat the year as incomplete. Web-service records do not carry the originating unit, the activity owner, or the number of people dead, injured or missing; those fields are shown as not carried, never as zero, and an export record replaces a web-service record for the same incident as soon as one exists.

56.1% of inspection records carry no inspection type at all, and the share is far higher before 2000 than after 2015. A count of physical examinations is therefore a count of what was written down, not of what was done, and it is least complete for the oldest records.

322,952 vessels have no build year recorded, and 129 carry a build year later than their last recorded inspection. Both are shown exactly as recorded. Nothing is reconciled or inferred.

346,246 vessels are in the barge class but carry a vessel type that does not name a barge. They are included because the Coast Guard classed them as barges.

Tow-unit lists are a floor, not a manifest. This archive was retrieved for barges and towing vessels only, so any other vessel type inspected in the same activity does not appear.

Glossary — the words the record uses, in plain terms.
What Maury does not do — the full statement of what a page here can and cannot tell you.
Correcting a record — what we do when a record is wrong.
Cohorts and operators of record — populations from the archive.
Vessel history reports — every record for one hull, in one document.

PSIX records inspection type as a multi-value text field with no published taxonomy. Maury groups those values into physical examinations and administrative events. That grouping is Thalor's reading of Coast Guard vocabulary, not a Coast Guard fact, and it is the only derived field on this site. Every other figure is a count of records or a date, as recorded. Where a value could not be defended either way it is left unclassified rather than forced.