PHMSA "5800.1" Hazmat Transportation Incident Reports

Federal law requires transportation-related spills, explosions, and other safety-endangering incidents involving hazardous materials to be reported to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

Specifically, "each person in physical possession of a hazardous material at the time that any of [certain types of incidents] occurs during transportation (including loading, unloading, and temporary storage) must submit a Hazardous Materials Incident Report on DOT Form F 5800.1 [...] within 30 days of discovery of the incident".

These "5800.1" forms include details about the location of the incident, mode of transportation, parties involved, hazardous materials involved, causes of failure, fatalities, injuries, financial cost, and more.

PHSMA publishes the submitted reports through an online portal. That portal, however, is brittle and does not provide a straightforward mechanism to download the full set of submitted reports.

This repository, developed by the Data Liberation Project, aims to do the following:

• Automate the downloading of all data available through the portal
  • Status: 🟢 All data, going back to January 1971, has been fetched, and recent months' data is being updated on a regular schedule
• Develop documentation to aid in the interpretation of the reports
  • Status: 🟢 Completed, now available here
• Provide RSS feeds with the latest available incidents, nationally and by state
  • Status: 🟢 Completed, now available here
• Generate filtered data focusing just on the most serious reports
  • Status: 🟢 Completed, now available here
• Generate one file that contains a subset of fields (to keep size within GitHub's limits) for all reports
  • Status: 🟠 Not yet started
• Provide RSS feeds listing incident updates
  • Status: 🟠 Not yet started
• Standardize/normalize the data
  • Status: 🟠 Not yet started

Available Data

In the data/fetched directory, you can find CSVs containing the report information, with one month of data per CSV. Note that recent months' data may be incomplete (due to yet-unsubmitted reports), and will be regularly updated.

You can clone or download the repository to get the full set of files. Alternatively, you can access them individually via URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/data-liberation-project/phmsa-hazmat-incident-reports/main/data/fetched/YYYY-MM.csv, swapping out YYYY for the year and MM for the two-digit month.

The files are split into months to stay within GitHub's file size limits. You can combine them with your preferred toolset. For example, using xsv, you could run xsv cat rows data/fetched/*.csv > combined.csv.

A set of all years incidents filtered to just the most “serious” are available in the data/processed/filtered/ directory.

Resources

• The Data Liberation Project's documentation of the data
• PHMSA's data dictionary for the report data
• PHMSA's Serious Incident Definition

Notes

• Some reports are represented by more than one row. This happens when the report includes multiple values for a field that the data exports only represent as a single column, such as the name and quantity of the material released. You can identify these multiple-row reports via the Multiple Rows Per Incident column.
• Although the vast majority of entries represent hazardous materials incident, some do not. The Report Type column provides that detail, and includes values such as "Undeclared Shipment with no Release" and "A specification cargo tank 1,000 gallons or greater containing any hazardous materials that [...]".
• As of the initial publication of this document (Feb. 28, 2023), PHMSA says on its incident data page, "We are experiencing a delay in processing 5800.1 hazardous materials incident reports due to an extraordinary influx in new data submissions. We are working diligently to process 5800.1 reports in a timely manner as they are received."
  • In a March 21, 2023 email responding to a Data Liberation Project inquiry, PHMSA staff clarified the nature of the influx: "Improved incident reporting practices have resulted in an influx of reports – we received 10,000 more filings in 2022 than in prior years. The improved reporting stems from PHMSA’s encouragement of filers to transition from paper reports to using electronic systems, and a lower reporting threshold." When asked when the issue would be resolved, PHMSA staff wrote, "We are diligently working to process these reports and aim to have them complete by summer."
• Reports submitted with "inaccurate or incomplete data" undergo an "Information Resolution process" before the report is ready to release, according to an email from PHMSA staff.

Methodology

Please see the METHODOLOGY.md document for a description of how this repository fetches and processes the data.

Contributors

Many thanks to the volunteers who have contributed to this repository:

• @gcappaert
• @m-nolan
• @rjintu
• @medievalmadeline

Licensing

This repository's code is available under the MIT License terms. The raw data files (those in data/fetched) are public domain. All other data files are available under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license terms.

Questions?

File an issue in this repository or email Jeremy Singer-Vine at jsvine@gmail.com.