← All vessels
Glossary
The words the Coast Guard record uses, in plain terms. Every one is a
fact about what was written down, not a judgement about a vessel.
- Activity id
- The Coast Guard's own number for one recorded inspection or visit. It can be quoted back to the Coast Guard, and it is how a record on this site is matched to theirs.
- Administrative event
- An inspection record whose recorded type is a paperwork or process step — a certificate issued, a document reviewed — rather than someone examining the vessel. Maury groups Coast Guard vocabulary into this and physical examinations; the grouping is Maury's reading, not a Coast Guard fact (how the split is derived).
- Call sign
- The radio call sign assigned to the vessel, as recorded.
- Casualty
- An incident the Coast Guard investigated and recorded: a collision, allision, grounding, fire, flooding, loss of steering, an injury or a death aboard, and so on. A vessel appears in a casualty record when it was involved, and involvement is not fault.
- CGMIX
- The Coast Guard Maritime Information Exchange, the public website through which the Coast Guard publishes its inspection (PSIX) and incident (IIR) records.
- Cohort
- A group of vessels sharing a type, a build decade and a length band. A figure for a cohort is a median across the group and says nothing about any one vessel in it.
- Data current through
- The date of the latest activity in the Coast Guard records Maury holds. Anything the Coast Guard recorded after that date is not on this site yet. The records are refreshed weekly and re-pulled in full monthly.
- Deficiency
- A condition an inspector wrote down as not meeting a requirement, with the system it concerns (hull, machinery, lifesaving, fire protection and so on), the date it was issued, and sometimes a due date and a resolution. A deficiency is what was written down on the day; it is not a statement about the vessel now.
- District, sector, marine safety unit
- The Coast Guard command that recorded an activity: a district covers a region, and a sector or marine safety unit is the local office within it. Names are shown exactly as the record names them; offices have been renamed over the years and no mapping is applied.
- Filed operator
- The company named as operating the vessel in that year's US Army Corps of Engineers vessel return. The return records who files, which is not always the owner, and a change of filed operator is not proof of a sale.
- Former and variant names
- Names the Coast Guard wrote against this hull in incident records in earlier years. Some are renames and some are spelling variants; Maury shows them as recorded and does not decide which is correct. This is the only public source that carries them.
- IIR
- The Coast Guard's Incident Investigation Reports, the source of every casualty record on this site.
- IMO number
- A permanent seven-digit number the International Maritime Organization scheme assigns to larger sea-going ships. Most barges and towing vessels do not have one, so a blank here is the normal case, not a gap.
- Inspection (recorded inspection)
- Any activity the Coast Guard recorded against the vessel, whether a physical examination, an administrative event, or a visit with no type recorded. The count on a vessel page is a count of these records.
- Lift
- In the findings: a group's rate divided by the rate across the whole population. A lift of 1.00 means the group is indistinguishable from the population; 2.00 means twice the population's rate. It is a comparison, not a probability for any one vessel.
- Median
- The middle value: half the vessels in the group are at or below it. Used instead of an average so that one hull with hundreds of records cannot move the figure for the group.
- MISLE id
- The Coast Guard's Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement system is where inspection records are kept, and the MISLE id is its number for the vessel. Maury's page addresses are built from it: psix-, then the MISLE id.
- Official Number
- The number the Coast Guard's National Vessel Documentation Center assigns to a documented US vessel. It stays with the hull through renames and changes of owner, which is why it is the identifier to search when a name does not match.
- Operational control
- An order the Coast Guard placed on a vessel restricting what it may do: a Captain of the Port order, a detention, a no-sail order, a letter of deviation and the like, with the date it was imposed and, where recorded, the date it was removed. “No removal date recorded” means the record holds no date on which it was lifted — that is what the record says, and it does not by itself mean the control is still in force.
- Physical examination
- An inspection record whose recorded type indicates someone examined the vessel — a hull exam, a drydock exam, a certificate of inspection exam. See administrative event.
- PSIX
- The Port State Information Exchange, the Coast Guard's public record of vessel inspections. Every inspection, deficiency and operational control on this site comes from it.
- Recorded resolution
- A date or note on a deficiency saying it was resolved. “No resolution recorded” means the record holds none. It does not say the deficiency is still open; many are corrected on the spot and never written up again.
- Serious Marine Incident
- A casualty that met the Coast Guard's threshold for a serious incident — a death, an injury beyond first aid, property damage above a set amount, a discharge of oil, or the loss of a vessel — as classified in the incident record.
- Sparse record
- A vessel with one or two recorded inspections and nothing else. That is what the archive holds; it is not evidence of compliance and not evidence of a problem.
- Tow unit
- A towing vessel and the barges it was pushing or pulling, inspected together under one activity. Maury lists the other vessels in the same activity. The list is a floor: only barges and towing vessels are in this archive, so any other vessel type present that day does not appear.
- USACE vessel return
- The annual filing every operator of a commercial vessel makes to the US Army Corps of Engineers. It is the source of the filed-operator names on this site, and the reason operator history moves once a year.
- Vessel class and vessel type
- The class is the broad group the Coast Guard files the vessel under — Barge or Towing Vessel, which is what this site covers. The type is the more specific description in the record: Freight Barge, Tank Barge, Towing Vessel and so on.
- Vessel-year
- One vessel in one calendar year. The findings count vessel-years so that a hull with a twenty-year record and a hull with a two-year record are compared year for year.
- Year built
- The build year in the Coast Guard record, shown as recorded. Many older hulls have none.