Salvors answered 43% more calls last year. Their data hasn't caught up.
Fewer ships are being lost, but the casualties that do happen are bigger, more complex and more expensive. The first hours are still run on phone calls and PDFs.
Shipping is getting safer, and salvage is getting busier. Both things are true.
Allianz's 2026 Safety & Shipping Review recorded 43 total losses in 2025, part of a 37% fall in the five-year average compared with the previous five years. Reported incidents dropped by about 16%, to 2,818, and fires and explosions fell to 218 from 255.
Yet members of the International Salvage Union carried out 231 services in 2025, up from 162 the year before. That is a 43% increase. Between them, they prevented around 3 million tonnes of potential pollutants from reaching the sea, 25% more than in 2024.
Why both numbers rise together?
The casualties that do happen are harder. Ships are bigger, cargoes more complex and fires harder to fight.
Machinery damage was the leading cause of incidents in 2025, at 1,505 cases, or 53% of the total, according to Allianz.
Containerised cargo saved by ISU members rose 69%, to more than 1 million tonnes. Services covered 69,256 TEU, up from 40,974.
Allianz warns that general average contributions can reach 50% of cargo value, which puts every delay in front of cargo interests and their insurers.
There is a contractual shift too. Only 13 ISU services in 2025 used Lloyd's Open Form, the lowest number on record. More work is being done on day rates and bespoke terms, which makes clear, shared records of what happened, and when, even more valuable.
The first hours still run on email.
Anyone who has worked a casualty knows the pattern. The owner, the salvor, the P&I club, class, the coastal state and cargo interests all need the same facts at once: stowage plan, dangerous goods manifest, stability condition, crew status, weather and the vessel's position. Those facts usually arrive as emailed PDFs, phone calls and photos in group chats.
Every hour spent assembling the picture is an hour the fire spreads, the hull stresses or the weather closes in. ISU president Leendert Muller described salvors as "the only resource available to prevent a marine casualty from becoming an environmental disaster." That resource deserves better tools.
What better looks like
A casualty data room that opens within minutes, with permissions for each party and one source of truth.
Cargo and dangerous-goods data pulled straight from booking systems, not retyped from manifests.
Live feeds from drones, thermal cameras and onboard sensors, time-stamped for the record.
A shared operations log that doubles as the evidence file for the salvage award or general average adjustment.
Simple mobile apps for teams on deck, built to work on poor connections.
The takeaway
Salvage has always been about speed and judgement under pressure. Software will not replace the judgement. It can buy back the hours lost to chasing information, and give everyone on the casualty the same picture.
This is personal for vi-tech. A member of our board is a Master Mariner and former Salvage Master, and our teams have deployed on and offshore during live operations, building tools in days when the job could not wait.
