‘Collaborating for Safety & Sustainability’ is an industry-wide initiative to enhance safety and environmental performance in Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore petroleum industry, facilitated by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). As part of the overall initiative, a workshop series was held with offshore contractors in 2021 and 2022 to find ways to enhance communications and collaboration. A recurring theme from those workshops: the need for an efficient means to share safety information.
While operators and contractors are already sharing safety information through various means, contractors felt an industry-wide ‘one stop shop’ to access key information would be useful.
“The more we share, the more likely we are to prevent similar safety incidents from occurring in the future. Obviously workforce safety is a top priority for our members so we were keen to do anything we could from the CAPP perspective to contribute to keeping our workforce safe,” said Paul Barnes, Director, Atlantic Canada & Arctic with CAPP.
Arising from the discussions with contractors is a new web-based page that lists safety alerts relevant to the Newfoundland and Labrador offshore industry. Sharing what happened and how a given situation was resolved – and any revisions to safety processes as a result – can easily be shared for the benefit of all.
The process is simple: operators and contractors send safety alerts to CAPP. Incident information is then placed into a common template and posted to a dedicated page on CAPP’s Atlantic Canada offshore website.
This site is meant to enhance safety sharing processes already in use in the industry, such as posting incident bulletins by regulators, direct sharing between operators, and between operators and contractors, for incidents requiring immediate attention. The site helps operators and contractors dig a bit deeper into lessons learned with a focus on corrective actions that have been put in place, typically after incident investigations have been completed.
Another aspect of the site is a series of safety moment videos that can be downloaded and used by operators and contractors to start meetings, share with employees, and to generally increase safety awareness. The videos feature workers who were involved in projects to enhance safety and/or from those who have been involved in safety incidents, speaking about their own personal experiences. To date, eight safety moment videos have been developed and are available on the site.
“Safety knows no boundaries – so what happens on one facility could happen on another and the more we can do to ensure that lessons learned are being shared broadly, the better,” said Barnes. “The operators and contractors operating in the offshore industry have shown leadership in collaborating to enhance safety and a willingness to come to the table with alerts and messages for our video series to promote safety. We hope this tool is useful for those companies and for the oil and gas workforce more broadly.”
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