Safety Awareness Dispatch
SA 26-06 Water-Related Training Fatalities
Among the many high-risk training activities performed by the Navy and Marine Corps, one might overlook water training as a high-hazard event. That would be a mistake. Of the 159 on-duty fatal mishap events over the past ten years, seven were water-training events. That number may seem low, but when you consider the limited amount of water training conducted compared to live-fire training, vehicle operations or flight time, that number starts to look a lot bigger. Regardless of how you look at the numbers, one thing that must be accepted is water training is inherently high-risk and proper risk mitigations must be planned out. The following are some cases where planning was not effective, and service members paid the price.
| Published: | June 2, 2026 |
The Safety Awareness team creates concise, readable (and sometimes funny) safety lessons to help Sailors, Marines and civilian employees (and their families) avoid repeating a mishap. Our goal is to make people think! We do our best to tell a story that people will remember – that they’ll recall when going through their normal day – that empowers them to identify hazards, accept “ownership” and responsibility for those hazards (in their community, command, and home), and take action.
