An Approach to Calculating the Minimum Safety Distance Against the Potential Risks of Shipwrecks

From the perspective of sustainable marine environmental management, the threats posed by shipwrecks to navigation and the environment, as well as the difficulty of intervening in them, highlight the importance of a detailed risk assessment. Therefore, the safe management of wreck sites remains an ongoing study issue. However, international regulatory frameworks for maritime use have not established a direct distance standard for the possibility of interaction with wrecks. This study aims to contribute to the calculation of safety distances by examining safe management strategies against the potential risks of shipwrecks from a technical perspective. A mathematical approach was proposed for determining the minimum safety distance required, taking into account the position of the sunken ship on the seabed and the possibility of contact at anchor, which is relatively higher than at sea. This was applied in a risk assessment conducted using case studies of different conditions, and a set of risk measures was added, specifying the required safety distance for each risk. Then, scenarios with and without this intervention option were compared based on the ALARP principle. The results show that it is possible to reduce risk scores with less effort in situations where the response option with a safety margin is included.