Skip to content

IMCA publishes annual safety and environmental statistics

Published on 7 July 2015

The International Marine Contractors Association (IMCA) has published its annual safety and environmental statistics. Drawn from 264 IMCA contractor members and based upon 798 million man-hours of work overall (558 million man-hours relating to offshore work) the 2014 dataset shows that the overall ‘flat line’ tendency in lagging safety indicators has continued in the longer term.

“Direct causes of Lost Time Injuries (LTIs) continue to be the ‘usual candidates’ – with struck by moving/falling objects the highest accounting for 110 incidents (26%); falls on the same level (including slips and trips) in second place with 88 incidents 21%) and struck against, entrapment, and falls from height accounting for 37 (9%), 34 (8%) and 33 (8%) incidents respectively. In all there were 424 LTIs recorded by IMCA members,” reports IMCA’s Technical Director and Acting Chief Executive, Jane Bugler.

“We actively continue to urge members, and non-members alike to make good use of our extensive collection of safety posters, pocket cards and DVDs all designed to increase awareness and lower incident levels as we continue to strive for the ‘holy grail’ of zero incidents.

“There were fewer fatalities (six rather than nine the previous year). Causes were cardio/respiratory failure; crewman hit by a blind flange and died of injuries; vessel master swept overboard by a parting rope and drowned; crewman hit in neck and fatally injured by snapping taut wire; man overboard – drowning; and crewman killed when nearby crane boom struck by lightning.

“We continue to work closely with our members and other trade associations to ensure that all marine contracting industry work-place fatalities are properly recorded, our focus remains on lessons learnt and information sharing to ensure that these incidents never recur. To this end we publish brief and anonymous information on each of the fatality incidents reported each year.

Useful insight

“Safety and environment statistics remain a useful insight into the performance of a company and industry sector in the areas of health, safety and environment,” she adds.

“The purpose of these statistics is to record the safety and environment performance of IMCA contractor members each year and to enable IMCA members to benchmark their performance. Statistics were provided by 264 companies and organisations, representing around 60% of the contractor membership, excluding drilling contractors and contractors who report as part of a greater group with 62 contractors taking part for the first time. IMCA would like to thank all those who took part in this important annual benchmarking exercise.

“For the purposes of comparison, the safety statistics recorded by IMCA members are consistent with those of other main industry trade associations, International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) and International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC).”

Downloadable report in preparation

This year, IMCA will publish a short summary leaflet or downloadable report summarising the 2014 statistics, whilst continuing to publish a detailed statistical analysis of the safety data as a separate information note for members. As in previous years, data are separated into offshore and onshore activity to improve consistency in the data collected. The offshore statistics cover offshore work only, whereas the inclusion of onshore work covers such areas as fabrication yards and office work. For the purposes of these safety statistics,”inshore” work (for example in the renewables sector) is considered to be offshore rather than onshore.

Environmental data

The statistics also include environmental data of one form or another that was provided by 59% of members. This is the third year that IMCA has collected information from contractor members on their environmental performance. Listed or publically traded companies are in many cases required to provide annual information of this sort for their stockholders.

The information IMCA has sought to collect has been broadly based on IMCA SEL 010 -Guidelines for the use of environmental performance indicatorsand covers:

  • Number of oil spills per million man-hours worked;
  • Litres of oil spilt per million man-hours worked;
  • Bunkers used (either in tonnes or in cubic metres) per million offshore man-hours worked;
  • Megawatt-hours (not kilowatt-hours) electricity used per million onshore man-hours worked;
  • Tonnes (not kilogrammes) of non-hazardous waste per million overall (offshore and onshore) man-hours worked;
  • Tonnes (not kilogrammes) of hazardous waste per million overall (offshore and onshore) man-hours worked.