Safety Corner – March 2023

Greetings. We’ve a lot to get through this time around. First off, it is Safety Statistics season, that time of year when IMCA contractor members submit the previous year’s annual safety data through the IMCA web portal. We strongly encourage the submission of data by all contractor members. I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the window for doing so will close at the beginning of April. As is noted elsewhere, it is the clear responsibility of all IMCA contractor members to submit safety statistics to IMCA. As usual, we are looking for information on Offshore and total company hours worked, fatalities, Lost Time Injuries, Recordable Injuries and Safety Observations. We’ve collected Lost Time Injuries (LTIs) according to the following categories: Falls from height, Slips and trips, Dropped/falling objects, Muscle stress and repetitive movement, Line of fire/caught between/struck against, and Stored energy release. At present some members are suggesting that we should start to include LTIs caused by health issues – as  clearly distinct from injuries. We’re looking closely into this.

Secondly, in January I was privileged to travel in person to Equinor’s offices in Stavanger to present to their “Safety and Sustainability” seminar, a bi-annual single-day event for senior safety professionals from Equinor’s suppliers, many of whom are IMCA members.  I gave a talk entitled “IMCA – the bigger picture” looking at trends in IMCA Safety Flash submissions as seen through the lens of the IOGP Life-saving Rules. We find ourselves concentrating on two key areas: Line of fire, and bypassing safety controls. Line of fire? Somebody somewhere failed to establish barriers and exclusion zones, or they did not obey existing barriers and exclusion zones.  Bypassing Safety Controls? Within 17 incidents or events last year in this category, we’ve seen things like fire doors being wedged open, an oil tank sight glass being wired open, unnoticed sub-surface power cables being cut, poorly maintained seals on an emergency hatch, and improperly secured cargo shifting during heavy weather.

In one line of fire incident, a new hire with a positive learning attitude got his finger squeezed when loosening a bolt (pin) from the central part of a Kenter link. There was the problem: a lack of training & knowledge. He was new to the vessel and new to anchor handling operations. There was important knowledge he just did not have. There was insufficient supervision, there was a lack of effective risk assessment. ONBOARDING is an issue: how do we properly recruit, onboard and train new people, and then keep them safe? We’ll return to this theme later.

At Equinor, there were some excellent presentations. We heard about improving risk assessments, including the importance of catching the input of silent people who never say anything. We learned about the “ring of fire” rather than the “Line of fire” – how force could come from UNEXPECTED directions.  We heard about psychological safety and human organisational performance, a presentation on how the best performing teams do well because they feel safe enough to make mistakes. The best performing teams may be the ones who are free to make the most mistakes.  Another interesting presentation covered the context of human rights and transparency in the crew recruitment supply chain. How many companies outsource crewing to a third party agency and thus have no control at all over the human rights of those crew?

While all this was going on, there was a quarterly meeting of the Maritime Advisory Board of CHIRP, the Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting Programme. I sit on that board; on this occasion I could not be there as I was in Stavanger. We were able to prosper the professional development of our comms guy Matt Hawley by having him sit in on the meeting as an observer.

Finally, a steering committee of members of the HSSE Core Committee are going full steam ahead in planning a HSSE seminar, now scheduled for Tuesday 6 June in Amsterdam. Getting the right date and venue has proven tricky, but we’ve finally got it pinned down. The theme will be “Challenges & opportunities in safety: attracting and keeping the right people“. Key to that has been our members’ recent experience of tremendous difficulties in getting competent, experienced personnel who we can rely on to do a safe job, actually onto the vessel doing that safe job. Often such people are not easily found. How do we rise above the challenges of identifying, recruiting, training and retaining appropriately skilled and competent people to do a safe job? Managing “short service employees” and ensuring safe work with an ever-shrinking pool of experience, is now becoming an art form. The seminar hopes to stimulate debate and discussion in this area, and identify and share what members have done to address safety challenges in the post-pandemic world.

< Return to Making Waves - March 2023