Presentation IMAREST Houston, May 2011 Human Engineering Lloyd’s Register.

Meeting the obligations of the new offshore safety regulations with your people

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Please find the video transcript below:

Hi, my name is Ian Hamilton, I am the Technical Director of Human Engineering Services within the Lloyd’s Register Group, and I am here at OTC this week. Last night I was privileged to be given the opportunity to speak to the IMarEST group on the topic of preparing to meet the requirements of the new Offshore Safety Regulations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Operators tend to place their faith in managing safety on technical safety measures and equipment. They invest large sums of money on managing the quality and integrity of those equipment elements, but they often ignore or overlook the organisational integrity. They fail to think about the role of human error in safety critical tasks, the identification of the processes that are more complex and therefore more likely to be susceptible to failure due to human error, and also addressing the assurance of competence amongst their personnel to perform their safety critical roles.

Yes, it was interesting after the presentation last night I got a huge number of questions from the audience. Those questions covered a range of subjects, but two things came out very strongly. First of all, there was concern about what is included in the BOEMRE regulations, the answer is that pretty much everything that operates on the outer continental shelf will be included. Operators who were present had questions such as, I have an installation out in the continental shelf at the minute it isn’t currently producing, do I have to have a safety and environmental management system plan for that installation? The answer from BOEMRE is yes you do, you have to have a safety and environmental management plan for any installation you currently have for these to operate in the outer continental shelf.

The other theme that emerged in the questioning was around the deadline of 15th November. People were concerned about the work that had to be done in order to prepare their safety and environmental plan submissions by that date and the question was whether or not BOEMRE was likely to grant any extensions to operators who couldn’t meet that deadline. Again the answer very clearly from BOEMRE is that there will be no extensions to those deadlines, and so operators will have to get on with the work of preparing their SEMS plans.