One of the consequences of maritime incidents is the direct cost of repairs, which are usually born by pools of Insurers, the Hull and Machinery (H&M) Underwriters.

It is obvious that one of their targets is to reduce to the minimum the exposure and to understand which are the most expensive circumstances of damage.

Numerous databases are therefore organized and some of them are available to the public. They have the aim to analyze the maritime casualties from a purely economic approach and to provide statistical tools to calculate the risk.

The paper examines some results obtained from a few of them, from the privileged point of view of the surveyor attending the incident on behalf of the Underwriters.

It was found that they were hardly comparable, partly due to uncertainty about the way in which the data were collected and partly to the non-homogeneous categorization of damages, nevertheless it was clear that the three main categories of damage were:

• Fire and explosions
• Navigation related damages (collisions, groundings, adverse weather)
• Machinery damages.

The next step was to evaluate which category of event was found to be more expensive, and the same surveyors were requested to provide some indications about the percentage of occurrence of various types of damage and about the gross amount of the resulting claims.

Finding that the information appeared to be sufficiently reliable and coincident between different surveyors, a small population of damage and insurance related claims was examined more in detail.

The database allowed some considerations about the root causes of the damage and about the cost of some kind of events out of the total claimed expenses.