The Real Costs of not Automating Offshore Workforce Personnel on Board (POB) and Mustering
There is an accident somewhere around the world on an offshore drilling platform almost every day. Many are not newsworthy, lacking serious injury, loss of life, or an environmental impact. Occasionally they are catastrophic, like the BP Deepwater Horizon accident in the US Gulf of Mexico that happened on April 20th, 2010. This accident, which resulted in 11 tragic deaths and 17 severe injuries brought the subject of offshore drilling safety to the front pages of newspapers around the world. In the ensuing studies of the accident, there was a common emerging theme: We can do more to prevent accidents and respond better to protect the workers and environment when they happen. From the official US Government report on the Deepwater Accident, they reported: “Since 2001, the Gulf of Mexico workforce—35,000 people, working on 90 big drilling rigs and 3,500 production platforms—had suffered 1,550 injuries, 60 deaths, and 948 fires and explosions.” Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the average payout to the families of the 11 workers who lost their life in the Deepwater Horizon accident was $9 Million dollars. Payments for injured workers will be less, but still substantial. While the value of a human life is priceless, the real cost to the Oil Industry in the payouts to the workers in all of these accidents can be estimated at well over $1 Billion dollars. Add in their legal fees, lost productivity, etc. costs are easily in the Billions. If that’s not bad enough, Just this week emerged the real threat from the US Attorney General to seek manslaughter charges against executives in charge during the BP Deepwater accident. Something has to be done.
There are many recommendations to increase safety in offshore drilling operations in the final reports on the Deepwater Horizon accident. Many deal with inspections, information sharing, process changes and better response to the incident. On improving incident response, an automated workforce POB and Mustering system like our WATCHEROFFSHORE Solution, is already proven to improve response dramatically, increasing the chance to save lives and treat injured workers faster. For a fraction of the $1 Billion in real costs, every offshore rig, drilling platform, and ocean going drill vessel in the US Gulf could have an automated system that reports the accurate POB count, location and status of each worker, including if they made it (mustered) to the life boats during a catastrophic accident like Deepwater. This data can be shared real time to both the offshore platform and the onshore incident command post, and finally to Coast Guard and other first responders during the incident rescue process.
Why is Automated POB and Mustering systems important? Consider this from the final report on Deepwater “Rig leaders tried to take a “muster,” a headcount. It would tell them: How many were present? How many were not? People screamed. “Put it in the water! Let’s go!’” Amid the chaos, men were ordered off one lifeboat so a more accurate headcount could be taken. “Man, we ain’t got time for this!” a voice shouted. Another explosion went off. From one survivors account: After a while, he found a spot to sit alone. “I couldn’t watch it knowing that we had left those 11 guys on that rig.” With an Automated System like WATCHEROFFSHORE, the valuable time used for manual headcounts and lack of knowledge on who was still on the rig could have been used to perhaps rescue one or more of the workers left behind, or help an injured worker out of further harm’s way. We will never know if it might have saved a life or prevented an injury, because this modern, state of the art drill rig did not have the system.
We know automated systems for POB and Mustering work. Consider the major offshore oil production operations in the North Sea. After a series of major accidents, the Governments in the region banded together to enforce a safety culture over the last 10 years. Today, 1000’s of workers who travel offshore in the North Sea wear one of our WATCHEROFFSHORE active beacon tags. Using this system, the operators know exactly how many people are on each platform, what section of the platform they are in, and in case of an accident, how many of them made it to the lifeboats. The system even helps to enforce the safety culture during mandatory training sessions, automatically collecting data on speed and accuracy of evacuation drills. Does it work? From the same report on the US Gulf Deepwater accident: “From 2004 to 2009, fatalities in the offshore oil and gas industry were more than four times higher per person hours worked in U.S. waters than in European waters, even though many of the same companies work in both venues.” The results speak for themselves! Automated POB and Mustering is part of a safety focused culture that should be adopted around the world. The life it saves is priceless to the family and a fraction of the real costs to the oil companies who will have another accident with or without the added value of knowing where their workers are and if they got off safely.
By Greg Clawson
Sr. Vice President, Energy Market Sales, Americas
