The offshore industry invests considerable amounts in safety; these investments have resulted in a steady improvement in safety performance. Despite this – accidents still happen. Why is this, and what can we do to improve even further?
The purpose of risk management is to take the right actions to handle the right risks. Do we know all the safety risks involved in offshore fields? In broad terms, yes of course we do. All the operator organisations have in-depth knowledge of risks and make great efforts to ensure the risk picture is kept up to date.
However, there is still room for improvement. Two areas in particular can be mentioned: the first is risks due to the extrapolation of design principles. The second group of difficult safety risks is those due to the dynamics of change. An example is the handling of safety during complex operations, where safety barriers change during the operations. A major contributor to several large accidents has been ongoing repairs or unrepaired system failures, i.e. systems which were temporarily changed to be outside their intended design conditions.
Do we manage the safety risks we know in the right manner and, above all, do we deal with the right risks?
A well known challenge in risk management is structuring risk governance to ensure good risk reporting, the escalation and allocation of important risks in the organisational hierarchy, and good routines for the transfer of risks between different organisational units. We also experience that some decision makers have problems prioritising issues in order to handle the risk of rare accidents with major consequences. These risks tend to be undervalued due to their complexity. From a safety risk management point of view, this may not be optimal.
Looking beyond the immediate causes of accidents – what can we learn? The development of new technology and new organisational practices has provided useful tools for optimisation. The effects are highly valuable improvements in technology and operations. This has, however, also changed the conditions for successfully practising safety risk management. In design and fabrication, there is much less room than before for failures and deviations from technical tolerances, i.e. a small deviation that was once harmless could now cause a serious failure. The requirements of accuracy in decision-making and work execution are higher than before.
We think there is a need to upgrade safety risk management. The most important improvement areas are:
Bring higher quality into risk management leadership, including governance structure.
Dealing with the dynamics of handling the risk of changing conditions during operations.
Improve the accuracy of risk assessments.
DNV is working to contribute to these improvements through joint industry projects and internally funded developments.
For the sake of good order – this is a general discussion and not based on any specific information from the Deepwater Horizon accident, and the experiences referred to are from a range of companies, including operators and suppliers to the offshore industry.
Text: Magne Tørhaug
Date: 14 October 2010