In the oil and gas industry while working at the drilling rigs, dangers at workplaces are very high. As they say, in the battle of iron and flesh, Iron always win. Needless to say, working with steel is not easy and we have to prevent ourselves from being its victims. People should always be in defensive mode when it comes to working with steel and should stay ahead of the plan knowing the behavior of it. People working on the off-shore and on-shore drilling rigs are familiar with the dangers at work place and several tools are developed to enhance the understanding of individuals about identifying such hazards and hunting them down to prevent themselves and their fellow workers from being injured.
Recently, one of our drilling units in the fleet found to have issues of not reporting incidents officially. This became serious when one such incident somehow got reported through a different channel (unofficially) where an involved crew member had fractured his ankle but no such thing was reported from the drilling unit. This raised a concern to find out why incidents are not being reported. It became a question of utter importance because many rigs state that they have worked 3 years without lost time injury, five years, some say ten years without any lost time injury. Now, to us, we think that this number may have been achieved by hiding small injuries, however, this could not be suddenly concluded unless/otherwise proved. So, conducted sessions on different drilling units one by one and tested the level of conformance of the implemented incident management process. Several sessions were held with the crews where they were asked about the barriers they see in reporting incidents.
Below is a summary recorded from discussions with almost 115 employees of the drilling crew in eight different sessions on hiding and reporting injuries at work place.
The later part covers another approach of highlighting incidents which were reported during 2014 and 2015 within the company. All those incidents reported in 2014 had several recommendations which were carried over to the next year and implemented slowly. This brought the introduction of new tools, modified procedures, changes in layouts etc. were implemented. The comparison of the incidents in 2014 with 2015 shows reduction in the incidents, which clearly tells that incident reporting has prevented many people from being injured, property from being damaged, environment from being harmed and reputation from being destroyed.
