Do your Operating Procedures meet the offshore SEMS rules? Are they easy to understand and use? Do they make your operations safer? Poor operating procedures were identified as a cause of more than half of serious offshore accidents in one study and have been one of the top areas of noncompliance in SEMS audits.
Lifeline Strategies is launching a one-day class with teach people in the oil and gas industry how to create SEMS-compliant procedures, use best practices to write procedures that make sense and can become an important tool to identify and control hazards.
The first class will be held in Houston on March 28th. For this class, we are offering a special introductory offer of $50 per student!
The class will teach you how to:
- Write procedures that comply with the Safety and Environmental Management Systems (SEMS) rules.
- Follow best practices to create procedures that are easy to understand and use on location.
- Use procedures as a powerful safety tool to identify and control hazards.
- Manage procedures as a system.
COME TO A PRESENTATION
In addition to the class, I will be also presenting talks on using operating procedures to enhance safety twice in the next month.
Thibodeaux, LA, Tuesday, March 21: ASSE Bayou Chapter lunch meeting, 11:30 at Nicholls State in Thibodeaux. The charge is $25 to help fund the chapter. Register by emailing the ASSE Bayou Chapter here.
Houston, TX, Thursday, April 13: ASSE Energy Corridor Section, Spring Creek BBQ, 2100 Katy Fwy, Katy, TX. You do not have to be an ASSE member to attend.
The Administration’s released its budget plan this morning. It is called a blueprint and gives an overview rather than a detailed view. The full budget request will come out in the next month or so, then it is up to Congress to decide on the actual numbers.
The short message is no surprise – Increases for defense and border security with cuts in domestic programs to offset the increases. Some of those domestic programs are closely tied to agencies that have a strong safety mission. While the blueprint does not say exactly what will happen for most programs, it gives some picture of what may be coming when the full budget request is released. Here’s what it looks like: Continue reading “Safety Agencies May See Big Cuts In New Budget”
Companies that have been through the brutal downturn in oil are coming to realize that what we thought would be a boom is sounding more like a pop. Even though we are clearly in a recovery, prices have been stuck in a narrow range (low-to-mid $50’s for West Texas Intermediate) for more than three months. The slogan has become Lower for Longer and industry needs to think through what that means, including safety departments.
Continue reading “Oil Prices: What Lower For Longer Means”
In the last post, I looked at OSHA’s apparent about face on its policy of publicly calling out companies that violate safety regulations. Under the Obama Administration, OSHA sent out a news release whenever it hit a company with a large fine, but that stopped abruptly when Donald Trump was sworn-in.
Continue reading “OSHA Under The Budget Ax”
The famous actress Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” Maybe so, but news from Australia indicates that putting too much emphasis on reducing lost time injury statistics is producing some less-than-wonderful unintended consequences. Continue reading “Gaming The Injury System: Australian Postal Services Gets Called Out”
I have had several requests for HazMat and HazCom training recently and have found a lot of confusion in what companies were actually looking for. In talking to some colleagues, I realized that this is a fairly common problem. Companies all need to provide OSHA HazCom training and ones that ship transport or receive hazardous materials need to provide DOT HazMat, but they may not know where one stops and the other starts. It is understandable because they overlap and a lot of classes are hybrids of the two. Continue reading “HazMat Prep and Response Training”
Operating procedures are a key part of the offshore oil and gas Safety and Environmental Management Systems (SEMS) Rules. If you think of SEMS as a true system, with interlocking parts, operating procedures are the glue that holds the parts together. It is where:
- Hazards analysis is applied to the actual scope of work,
- Specific skills, knowledge, training and safe work practices can be identified and applied, and
- Mechanical integrity has real world meaning (is the equipment or tool fit for purpose, when used?).
Continue reading “High Cost of Operating Procedure Problems Offshore”
New doctors take an oath to “Do no harm.” In safety and occupational medicine, the challenge is to not implement new rules that wind up creating new and potentially worse problems. We’ve seen time and time again that the Law of Unintended Consequences can be unforgiving. Continue reading “NFL Lessons on Occupational Medicine: Law of Unintended Consequences”
I am a strong believer that safety departments do a much better job on the prevention side than in reducing the extent of injuries after they happen. What many don’t fully understand is that there is a cost to injuries, but a failure to address the injury properly after it happens can make that cost skyrocket. Continue reading “5 Steps to Effective Injury Management – Blog Post From ASSE”