Response to a maritime casualty, and ultimate responsibility, rests with the ship’s owner and operator. However Commonwealth, State and Territory governments have a key role in overseeing such incidents, as well as responding directly when the marine environment is at risk from actual or potential ship-sourced pollution.

The AMSA Response Centre is the central point for the reporting of incidents and accidents such as machinery failures, collisions, flooding, fires or groundings for commercial shipping. As such, we maintain an ever-changing awareness of our search and rescue area. We have continued to build our domain awareness capability leveraging our intelligence, triage and response capabilities. We aim to pre-empt incidents and anticipate trends likely to impact vessel safety or mitigate the grave and imminent threat of a significant pollution event.

To provide a robust first strike response capability, AMSA has a range of contracted Emergency Towage Vessels strategically located around Australia capable of deploying within a few hours to render not just marine towage, but also firefighting and salvage capabilities—a significant way we can ensure maritime casualties will not escalate to something more serious and assure vessel safety.