February’s ditching of a helicopter at the BP-operated ETAP fields complex has once again raised safety concerns in the UK North Sea, even though there were no casualties and injuries were relatively minor. It emphasises the vital need to keep on top of safety and to learn from the past where possible.
Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) last month also raised concerns about offshore safety, ramming home the point that “several incidents in 2008 alone could have been avoided if the industry had learned from their own and others’ mistakes”.
The PSA said a lack of experience transfer is one of several recurring themes among the underlying causes of accidents. This is directly linked with the Great Crew Change that has become a major issue for the offshore industries of the North West Europe Continental Shelf and US Gulf of Mexico.
Basically, the massive job cuts of the 1980s and 1990s, and the damage that inflicted on the industry’s reputation, led to a “missed” generation in the offshore workforce.
“The decline in knowledge about the big tragedies is a grave concern,” said PSA director-general Magne Ognedal.
He said it was vital that lessons learned must not be wasted in the safety quest going forward.
“Both the leak on Statfjord A in May and the cracker incident at the Mongstad refinery in August had major accident potential. And, in both cases, lessons learned from previous incidents could have stopped it happening,” said Ognedal.
He warned, too, about the importance of insight into the big tragedies in the North Sea, and finds it worrying that many of today’s players don’t know about the disasters of the 1980s, such as Alexander Kielland and Piper Alpha. Energy raised exactly this same point at the OTANS conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October last year.
The agency said that, in less than a year, there had been three incidents leading to oil spills offshore Norway: a loading hose rupturing on Statfjord A in December, 2007; a leakage during the loading of a tanker on Draugen one month later, and oil being pumped out in connection with another incident on Statfjord A in May, 2008.
These incidents – plus the Ekofisk blowout in 1997 and an oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979 – were reviewed by Norwegian research body, Sintef, in 2008 on behalf of the PSA.
That review identified a number of common features, mainly related to weaknesses in management systems, such as clear roles and responsibilities, management of competence, experience transfer, learning from previous incidents and risk assessment of methods and equipment. Deficient knowledge of, and respect for, management and employees’ own corporate procedures also turned out to be a common denominator.
“We see that the company management lacks knowledge of the realities, that the company managements’ own investigations rarely uncover the weaknesses, and that risk is being systematically underestimated,” Ognedal said.
Turning to deep-rooted issues as evidence of such deficiencies, Ognedal focused on offshore installation lifeboats and damage to hearing.
He pointed out that early-2009 saw all the free-fall lifeboats on Veslefrikk and Kristin (both operated by StatoilHydro) out of action because of a fault in the release mechanism. Moreover, the PSA had launched its own investigation.
The lifeboat issue has persisted over a number of years: in the summer of 2005, a number of problems were uncovered with regard to the free-fall lifeboats on facilities in the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea. The industry, represented by trade body OLF, has identified a number of weaknesses in design and use of materials.
Safety issues such as G-forces, seats, seatbelts and impacts against the hull have also been assessed. The objective is to arrive at a totally new industry standard for free-fall lifeboats during the first half of this year.
Noise in the petroleum industry is a continuing working environment risk. This was highlighted in Energy’s Healthcheck column in February, 2009.
Every year, about 350 instances of work-related hearing damage are reported to the PSA. If those figures are to be reduced, the industry must find a new approach to this challenge. We do not have a figure for the UK Continental Shelf.
“A continuing high number of hearing damage reports is an indication that personal protective equipment is an inefficient barrier and that the industry must work much more aggressively to reduce the actual noise from its source and give less weight to ear protectors,” said Ognedal, who describes the hearing issue as a “silent disaster”.
