"Shadows", A Dynamic Safety Initiative

Abstract

In 2005, it was evident for Total E&P UK that the battle for incident free drilling and well maintenance operations would become more difficult, with activity booming, lack of experienced workforce and the arrival of a younger generation of recruits. In the mature operating environment of the North Sea, a new Safety initiative needed to alert offshore teams to hazards around them and without adding procedures on top of existing ones. The vision was to enhance risk awareness of newcomers who were not familiar with the hazards of the oil and gas industry and to refresh memory of the more experienced personnel through a paper and procedure less program. The drilling team's initial inspiration was the power of the black silhouettes displayed on roadsides where traffic accidents had occurred. The idea was to build our own silhouettes to display them on the drilling rigs, at locations where real or potential incidents had happened. Newcomers would immediately recognise hazards from the silhouettes and would learn details of the incident from an associated Safety Alert displayed on the provided "Shadows Board". The silhouettes stay in a given place for not more than three weeks for each Safety Alert, before being re-positioned. This is the dynamic aspect of the process. Contractors, as well as Operators, had collections of Safety Alerts which were gathered to construct a Safety Alert data bank which now contains around 1000 alerts, all laminated and part of the "Shadows Kit". Total E&P UK drilling and well maintenance team also produce its own Safety Alerts. After a Shadows pilot test of six months on 4 drilling units, early positive results indicated a significant reduction of high potential incidents. From these encouraging results, Exploration and Production branch's Drilling Division of Total extended the initiative to fifty rigs worldwide. The paper will detail how the project was handled with Contractors' participation and will present the outcome of the project in terms of Safety culture, learning organisation and performance achievements, as well as future perspectives. Introduction In drilling and well maintenance operations, as in other industrial processes, "full achievement" of complex and challenging projects is not possible, if the people are exposed to risks or hazards and subsequently are severely or fatally injured! In such instances, at the end of the project, there would be no cause for celebration and the project itself would lose all the attraction and challenges it had. This is "the very idea" that we have tried to embed in the minds of everyone working in Total E&P UK's drilling and well maintenance activities (i.e. Drilling Contractors and Service Companies). Despite previous efforts to address this issue, success had been quite limited. The "wall" that we needed to construct and reinforce "brick by brick" to protect our teams, has revealed itself to be a long and never ending process. In this huge task, everyone involved is invited to take responsibility to consolidate the "wall" where every single "brick" counts.