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36 Hazardous Materials Transportation Incident Data for Root Cause Analysis
provide information that can be used to develop more effective regulations. Note that the data-
base was never designed to identify contributing and root causes of accidents.
4.1.8 Data Collection
Data collection for MCMIS is a complex process that begins with the police officer filling out
and filing a PAR. These reports are compiled and sent to the appropriate state agency, where a
determination is made of whether an accident involving a truck, light vehicle, or bus also met the
crash severity definition and should be reported to FMCSA. For it to be classified as serious--and
therefore reportable--the crash must either have resulted in a fatality, required that someone be
transported to a remote facility for emergency medical treatment, or required that one of the vehi-
cles involved in the crash had to be towed from the scene. Once it has been determined that the
accident should be reported to FMCSA, the information is transcribed from the PAR either into
an electronic file that is transmitted to FMCSA or manually entered through a Web interface.
FMCSA then performs certain checks and enters the data into the MCMIS Crash database.
Complexity arises not only from the process of going from the PAR to the MCMIS Crash form,
but also from the number of agencies and individuals involved in the reporting. A query of the indi-
viduals or organizations filling out the PARs in 2005 totaled over 60,000 entries for approximately
145,000 crash records entered (only about 2% of these are hazmat crashes). The exact number of
individuals filling out the form could not be determined because many of the entries were orga-
nization names, not the names of the individuals filling out the form. If any one of the thousands
of police officers filling out a PAR fails to record the value for a parameter or any of the state agency
staff fail to transcribe a parameter value or transcribe it incorrectly, the data submitted in the
MCMIS Crash file is incomplete or inaccurate.
4.1.9 Data Compilation
Over the years, efforts have been made to develop some standardization in the format used by
each state and territory for its PARs. Although there have been some successes, there are still vast
differences among the forms. Over time, there also has been an effort to keep the types of informa-
tion reported in the Crash file consistent. Although the MCMIS file has been segmented into sev-
eral tables from the one table used initially, the information requested has remained the same. This
has enabled the states and territories to develop a standard protocol for translating the data in their
PARs into the MCMIS format. Essentially, there remain 56 different translation protocols since
each state or territory has a slightly different PAR. Although the MCMIS report file prepared by the
state or territory is electronically transmitted to FMCSA, there appears to be little automation on
the front end of the process. In the majority of the states and territories, the PARs are prepared by
hand by the police officers and the translation of the PAR information into the MCMIS electronic
file structure is also a manual operation. If the police officer filling out the PAR uses an abbreviated
notation for the name of the carrier, unless the person transcribing the data into the MCMIS Crash
file format realizes it is a shortened carrier name, the spelling of the carrier name listed in the PAR
becomes the carrier name listed in the MCMIS Crash file.
4.1.10 Accuracy and Completeness of Data
Studies have shown that the complicated process of filling out PARs, identifying those truck
and bus accidents that meet the definition of serious accidents, and then entering the data from
the PARs into the MCMIS format is neither complete nor accurate. Over the last five years, the
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) has been under contract to
FMCSA to assess the accuracy and completeness of the MCMIS crash reporting system on a
