This Polluting Incidents Compendium is intended to provide general information to the public, the maritime industry and other interested persons, about spills that have been reported to the U.S. Coast Guard. As such, this is a static, periodic publication. The reader should be aware that the Coast Guard's official records system, the Marine Safety Information System (MSIS), is continually reviewed for data quality and completeness. In addition, MSIS is a dynamic system, which receives new information on a real-time basis. Therefore, as corrections and updates are made, there may be differences between the values in this compendium and the official MSIS records. Requests for information from the MSIS system, under the Freedom of Information Act, should be directed to the records custodian at this address:

Further, this data is provided "as reported", with no interpretation or filtering. For example, incidents that fall within the jurisdiction of other agencies, or that are not required to be reported under existing Coast Guard regulations, may be included in the compendium. Thus, data used or published elsewhere by the Coast Guard may differ from this compendium, depending upon the intended purpose, constraints or focus of the specific report or study.

The Coast Guard and the United States shall not be liable for any loss, damage or harm arising from any use of the information in this database, or for any reliance on its accuracy, completeness or timeliness.