The North Sea oil and gas industry raised a toast to its champions of safety at an awards ceremony in Aberdeen yesterday.
Six awards were handed out at this year’s UK Oil and Gas Industry Safety Awards to people and companies who went the extra mile to keep employees out of harm’s way.
Vic Retalic, HSE and security manager of Premier Oil, was recognised for his creative approach to communicating health and safety messages, which includes the use of cartoons. He took the Safety Leadership Award home from the event at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre (AECC).
Rowan Drilling’s HR manager, Lesley Officer, was presented with the Occupational Health and Hygiene Award for her involvement in a programme that encourages participants to lose weight.
The Sharing and Learning Award was won by IHF boss Neil Clark for his commitment to raising awareness of human factors as a cause of offshore accidents.
The Innovation in Safety Award went to BG Group and Amec Foster Wheeler. They achieved notoriety on this occasion for developing a new method of removing the pillars that underpin many North Sea platforms.
BP’s Bruce Platform Team, which transformed its safety performance through an ambitious improvement programme, clinched the Workforce Engagement Award.
Karen McCombie of Sodexo won the Safety Representative of the Year Award for her tireless efforts to promote safety awareness on the Claymore platform.
Les Linklater, executive director of energy sector safety group Step Change, which organised the event alongside Oil and Gas UK (Oguk), said: “We have seen some tremendous efforts from individuals and companies who are doing all they can to continuously improve the safety of the North Sea.
“Everyone at the ceremony should feel encouraged and challenged to bolster their safety efforts and ensure that maintaining safe and effic-ient operations is kept a priority despite the challenges the industry is facing.”
Paralympian and adventurer Karen Darke delivered the keynote speech at the ceremony. Ms Darke, who was left paralysed from the waist down by a climbing accident, won a Paralympic silver medal at the London games in 2012 and is now training with the British cycling team for a place at the 2016 Paralympics in Rio.
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