The costs of investing into a safer and more secure workplace pale in comparison to the cost of dealing with a safety threat. Check out what the industry’s leaders have to say about creating safer workplace
If you’re sounding the alarm, evacuating the facility and have fire fighters on the way, then something has clearly gone horribly wrong, unless you’re running a test, like you should.
Reaction is, after all, a failure in prevention. Routine checks can often detect a problem, but to err is human, especially on a massive and complex oil and gas installations.
Providing your employees with a safe working environment and ensuring that your facilities are managed properly requires the right training and equipment.
Operators need to take into account very particular considerations; site monitoring systems must be designed to meet specific requirements, technology must be certified to independent standards on quality and employees must be trained to use safety equipment in unexpected situations.
Fortunately, there is a general consensus throughout the industry that health and safety regulations and practices are improving.
“The Oil and Gas industry is continually evolving when it comes to HSE; the changes can be seen with technology advancement, process improvement, individual and collective behavioral harmonization and HSE culture alignment,” says Karim Pachiyannakis, corporate HSEQ manager of Al Mansoori Specialized Engineering.
After assessing a plant’s hazards and critical points, the arduous process of assembling a safety system begins with finding the right parts and components.
Those of you who were at INTERSEC this year might have noticed how enormous the safety industry is. With almost 1000 exhibitors, finding the right safety solutions in the giant industry is no small task.
With the high demand for skilled workers in the oil and gas industry worldwide, fast-track career development may leave gaps in the types of training which new employees receive.
This can compromise an employee’s competence in providing a safe working environment. “Therefore, we have to ensure that people are fully competent to undertake the job asked of them,” he says.
This high demand for workers has also led to increased turnover rates within the oil and gas industry, “Commitment to a company today is often not what it used to be a generation ago, when many employees would dedicate their working life to an organization and were well trained and committed to its standards and practices,” he says.
Movement between jobs can mean a person has to learn a whole new set of HSE rules and standards and there has to be a commitment from the employer and the employee to ensure those standards are understood and adhered to. Communication is also a challenge when it comes to sharing best practice and knowledge in creating safer work environments.
According to Pachiyannakis, HSE incident investigations clearly show that the two high-risk groups are the green hands and employees with more than 15 years’ experience who have become complacent with time. Naturally, this means that owners and operators must be equally diligent in ensuring that employees and assets are constantly developed and kept up-to-standard.
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The first four Cs can very easily compromise the final one, Compliance. With oil and gas facilities often being in the media spotlight, there is an ever-pressing need for companies to ensure that they are operating to internationally recognized standards.
Seeking certification for employee training programmes and safety equipment can not only help a company ensure that they are complying with internationally recognized standards, but it also increases asset value.
With so many operation risks in the oil and gas industry, it pays to have the best of the best, especially when it comes to safety solutions. Knowing which products to trust isn’t always easy, especially when there are so many competitors within the industry, that’s where certification can really help in purchasing decisions.
“One matter of great concern is the fire safety in the oil and gas industry, in response to this, we have developed a whole programme that examines the products used in the oil and gas industry or fire fighting,” says August Schaefer, VP and public safety officer, Underwriters Laboratories, an independent, not-for-profit product safety testing and certification organization.
“Whether it’s foam that is used to put down a fire, pumping systems that pump the fire, or other technologies, you have to make sure that your equipment meets a certain standard,” he says.
The Underwriters Laboratories ‘UL’ stamp of approval marks a product’s compliance with the company’s safety requirements.
According to V Jagdish, UL regional business development manager, the company covers everything from fire suppression systems such as pumps, sprinklers, foam fire fighting equipment and foam monitors; to fire resistance systems, panel bonds, fire stops and resistance coating; and fire alarm systems, including smoke heat, and gas detectors and alarms.
There is also a growing trend towards environmental responsibility within the oil and gas industry, and in response to this, the company has set up its ULE branch which certifies products on sustainability and environmental friendliness.
“With paints for example, we have to monitor emissions, because some chemicals may be carcinogenic, they contain heavy metals such as lead, so we test paints to encourage lower emissions,” says Jagdish.
Electrical safety is another critical area in oil and gas facilities. “If you were to look at all the types of electrical equipment that goes into an oil and gas area, you would see why there is such emphasis on safety.
Many facilities are considered hazardous locations, because there could be gas leakage, there could be a gas cloud which could explode on ignition,” says RA Venkitachalam, Underwriter Laboratories’ vice president and managing director.
“Operational safety is absolutely crucial to oil and gas installations. There are very stringent requirements for operating in the oil and gas industry, so in addition to certifying products, we have training programmes that look to operation safety,” adds Venkitachalam.
When it comes to safety training, UL is not alone. With so many critical and potentially hazardous facets to the industry, it’s no surprise that there are so many different training institutes and facilities, among them.
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“Many businesses struggle with fundamental issues of compliance when it comes to health and safety.
The companies that only meet the minimum standards of compliance often find themselves grappling with workers who are hesitant to contribute pro-actively to the company’s continuous improvement efforts,” reveals Deedar Shah, Operations Manager for TWI-CW Middle East.
“Efforts to resolve issues of compliance and/or lack of contributions are often subject to additional training, policies and other measures,” he adds.
Providing the right health and safety environment also means doing your due diligence.
“When a client looks to set up a business in the oil and gas industry, they can determine what the medical facilities required are and what the health risks are which people working in this environment could face,” says Dr. Beau Dees, regional medical director of International SOS.
“It just means looking at what the most common diseases are, what the conditions are like and what the major health risks to employees could be.”
Among many things, International SOS is an end-to-end health consultancy which helps companies to identify the major risks and hazards that employees face, guides clients in deciding what equipment, training and knowledge will be needed to ensure that the employees can be protected and provides emergency response and treatment.
But the threats to health and safety may not always be as dramatic or obvious as one would assume.
“Food hygiene is one of the most common issues that we come across in the industry, by doing the food assessments with the clients we try to prevent any cases of enteric diseases occurring from ingestion of contaminated food,” says Dr. Dees.
Of course emergencies do happen that are unavoidable and common anywhere in the world, “the most common cause for transporting a patient off a site would be a cardiovascular or circulatory disease, so one should do pre-deployment checkups, which International SOS is also involved in,” he says.
However, the most dangerous aspect of the oil and gas process, according to Dr. Dees, is during plant construction. “You’re faced with a large number of people who are constructing a site, but once the plant’s actual operation starts, the number of health and safety incidents is reduced,” says Dr. Dees.
Other measures, such as the installation of the correct safety products, can also mean the difference between life and death. For HIMA Middle East, this has meant developing programmable logic controllers that can be installed at plants and on machines to protect persons, the environment and assets.
Over the past 40 years, over 30,000 HIMA systems have been installed on oil, gas and processing facilities in over 80 countries. The company also offers a portfolio of services which cover the performance of a safety system over its life cycle.
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The HIMA products come with an Emergency Shutdown System, which represents a layer of protection that mitigates and prevents a hazardous situation from occurring.
“Failure of a safety function could lead to a significant increase in the risk to the safety of persons and/or the environment.
Therefore, the customer always demands certified safety systems which should comply with international standards,” says Safyan Ali, HIMA sales support and marketing engineer.
Throughout the industry, customers are starting to look for safer systems that reduce investment and operating costs that guarantee maximum system availability, and increase plant productivity.
But more specifically, “the customers want high standards, policies procedures and practices, latent risk and hazard assessment techniques, compliance audits, high quality and competitive products and services, and after sales support and quick response,” says Ali.
Attention to health and safety is not just about being socially responsible. It also makes good business sense and you should regard it as just as important as the achievement of any other key business objective.
”Of course, working out what modern health and safety law means for your business can be quite a headache, and on the face of it there do seem to be a lot of regulations and complex decisions to be made, but the underlying principles are really quite straightforward,” concludes Shah.
Fortunately, the experts like Dr. Dees, believe that in the Middle East there is quite a significant change of focus as companies begin to work harder to comply with international standards.
“There’s a growing sense that the companies themselves are keen to comply, not only because through compliance, companies are in line with the regulatory bodies, but these companies are always bidding on projects, and one of the things that a project owner is looking at is health and safety standards and records,” he says.
“Ultimately, if your injury and incident rates are much higher than your competitors, but everything else is equal in terms of your price, equipment and technological support, then owners tend to choose the companies with the better health and safety records.”
