Safety Corner – December 2022

I’ve just returned from a trip to Singapore for the first in-person IMCA Asia Pacific Regional meeting in some years – since 2019 in fact. It was a very worthwhile trip which went well. IMCA secretariat team members attending were kept busy, combining the Regional meeting with attendance at OSEA and DP Asia amongst other things. It was interesting to observe, during my travels, several things which seem to me to be of note in the safety space. The first is, we all want to get out and meet other people. Whilst the change to hybrid working, with some work from home, is pretty much permanent, we need to remain aware that we – whether individual workers, contractors, suppliers, clients, industries – humans in general – thrive on personal contact. The “conversation in the corridor,” as a former member of the HSSE committee put it, remains a vital part of seminars, meetings and events.

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Secondly, I saw that on Singapore’s metro – the “MRT” – everyone is still masked up. The risks of COVID-19 are no different in Singapore than they are in London, Amsterdam, or Houston. But few if any people are wearing masks today on the London underground. The learning here is not about COVID-19: it’s about how our response to the same threat, differs from place to place, from person to person. Response to risk and hazard can be easier, smarter, and more efficient if it is a common, concerted, and mutually agreed response. A concerted industry-wide response can be more difficult than it looks – particularly when we see cases where responses to the same risks and hazards differing even within the same company. But this is something that we can work towards.

Thirdly, I noted that there seemed to be fewer cabin crew and ground staff around than before the pandemic. Whilst of course striving for efficiency and “doing more with less” remains important, there’s an absolute limit to how far an organisation can take this before the quality of the goods or services delivered, starts to suffer. In the last two or three years we’ve seen a tremendous change in the demographics of the energy industries, both in the office and offshore, as more experienced people leave the workplace, and (perhaps fewer) younger, less experienced people come in to replace them. Across the sector we are seeing concern that “short service employees” are just not getting the training, the induction, the practice they need, to do a safe job.

We live and work in challenging times, in terms of both economic and geopolitical conditions, and this is having a tremendous impact on our industry. Providing the highest standards of quality assurance for operations has become increasingly challenging when there are difficulties in identifying, recruiting, training, and retaining appropriately skilled and competent people to do a safe job. How do we identify and select people who will do a safe job? How do we “onboard” new people to embrace best safety practices? How do we ensure effective supervision of short service personnel? The HSSE Core Committee hopes to address some of these concerns in a seminar to be held in 2023.

I have started to see some odd specifics in the trends and rates in incidents. The conclusion we might draw, is that the collective and cumulative level of experience offshore crews are bringing to the job, is falling. I’ve an incident to publish in which an unmarked plastic drinking water bottle was left with thinners in. That’s an old, old mistake that oughtn’t be happening in 2022. We’re reading about really basic, trivial, banal slips and trips causing injuries. Matters that ought to be covered in vessel induction, are in places causing incidents and injuries. The expression “rookie error” springs to mind.

Browsing a list of titles for the Safety Flash incidents you will see in the next few months, we see, amongst other things, a crane operator lifting a load without proper notice. We see a finger injury during a davit test. A single point failure resulted in a dropped object. Emergency hatches were found poorly maintained. A gangway was incorrectly rigged. Uncertified lifting gear was found in use onboard. We see not one, but two cases (as mentioned above) of chemicals in plastic bottles with no hazard labels.

In 2023 Safety Flashes will start to focus more on incidents and events supplied by IMCA members, though when it’s appropriate and of interest to members, I’ll continue to bring to your attention some events published by other organisations. 

All IMCA members are strongly encouraged to submit safety events and incidents. Everything is handled anonymously. Please feel free to get in touch with me directly if you wash to discuss this further.

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