Extreme values for local ice pressure are a primary consideration in the design of local structure for ships and offshore structures in arctic environments. ISO 19906 (2010) includes guidelines for a probabilistic approach in determining the local design pressure for Arctic offshore structures. However, the standard is vague in how it should be used. The probabilistic method employed in the standard is the event maximum method developed by Jordaan et al. (1993). It accounts for the expected exposure of the local structure to ice pressure and includes a constant, a, used to describe the relationship between local pressure and area. The constant a is derived in Jordaan et al. (1993) and extended in Jordaan et al. (1997) and reported in Taylor et al. (2010). The a-area relationship is based on the local pressure values from the very aggressive multi-year ridge rams of the CANMAR Kigoriak trial (1982). This leads to a very conservative a-area relationship and may be excessive for some ice conditions. This paper includes an explaination of the use of the event maximum method in ISO 19906. Local pressure data obtained through shear strain gauge systems from Polar Sea (1983) and Oden (1991) have been reanalyzed using the event maximum method (Jordaan et al. 1993, 1997). The data has been sorted by both ice thickness and ice concentration to investigate the existence of a trend between ice thickness and local pressure.