Development of natural resources in harsh environments presents significant technical and logistical challenges. An industrial workshop on "safety and integrity management of operations in harsh environments" was organized by the safety and risk engineering group at Memorial University of Newfoundland to bring together industrial practitioners, regulatory authorities, and research and development institutions to identify the safety and integrity challenges in harsh environments, share experience, and develop a roadmap for desired solutions. This article summarizes the lessons learned from the workshop on safety issues in harsh environments. The workshop identified that there are safety challenges regarding construction and operation including a lack of detailed standards, optimization with respect to winterization, and data scarcity. The remoteness of operations in harsh environments is an additional challenge. Finally, human factors add another set of challenges that arise from the physical and psychological behavior of personnel in harsh and remote environments.

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Ice accretion on vessels and offshore structures is a serious operational hazard. Heavy ice accumulation on vessel's deck can influence the stability and potentially capsize smaller vessels. It also creates unsafe operational conditions on vessel and offshore platform decks. Accurate estimation of loads due to ice accretion is thus necessary. This paper presents a state-of- the-art review of existing literature related to ice accretion on vessels and offshore structures. Existing reports for field measurements of icing are reviewed. Model scale experiments to simulate the ice accretion are also reviewed. Various numerical methods and approaches for ice accretion prediction are critically reviewed. The review covers some key factors of the icing process such as spray flux and heat transfer models. There are few international codes and standards available that require the ice-going ships to have adequate intact stability, taking into consideration a prescribed level of icing on exposed weather decks, gangways, and projected lateral areas of the superstructure. The codes were developed based on the limited population of ships and ship types and were focused on specific geographic regions. In fact, there is little agreement among the codes. Moreover, the formulae rely mostly on data collected for smaller vessels, and extrapolation to the larger vessels used in oil and gas operations are questionable. The paper gives a brief review of the international codes and critiques the inadequate standard for ice accretion calculation for various types and sizes of vessels. The paper concludes by discussing some aspects of improved ice accretion prediction models that may be particularly relevant for larger vessels and offshore structures.