I Wonder Why
HSE has become an important part of life in the oil exploration business but I have often wondered why it is that many of the HSE people seem to have things backward. Instead of looking at crews that get through without any HSE incidents the HSE people concern themselves with why accidents happen.
Seismic exploration is often carried out in harsh environments and long hours are put in by some crews on an extended basis. A lot of the activities routinely performed on a seismic crew are intrinsically hazardous but when you have been around the business as long as I have you will have seen crews back in “the bad old days” (before the concentration on HSE) that seemed to sail through without any problems.
Basically a crew getting through a survey without any HSE incidents is not the natural state of things. if you disagree you should take a look at the enormous lists of HSE incidents which occur worldwide to change your mind.
The difference seems to be in the attitude of the individuals rather than any designed safety precautions while a certain amount of sheer dumb luck is also involved in some cases. Any crew that manages to get through several years without any serious HSE issues, however, has more than dumb luck working for it. This is where some of the bright HSE people need to look to see what is going right and putting emphasis on achieving that on other crews.
Focusing on what went wrong after an accident occurs is necessary but only makes us wiser in hindsight. In addition I have seen many incident investigations where the HSE department will come up with a complete laundry list of problems rather than admitting that the accident was obviously caused by some idiot just plain doing something stupid. This sort of shifting blame to a system rather than an individual does not help anybody and often just annoys competent people with extra safety rules and regulations that only an idiot would need.
One example of this is a blanket rule which I have run into on many occasions. On one refinery job that I did everybody had to wear hard hats and safety glasses all the time to ensure that no idiot would be able to forget to use these items when they were actually necessary. I also recall working for an extremely HSE conscious client who insisted that all personnel outside of the accommodation area on a seismic vessel had to wear steel toed boots and a hard hat, even to the weekly crew barbecue on the forecastle deck.
One of the things that I have always said is that if you hire idiots you can’t expect any amount of training to make them safe. One thing that I wholeheartedly agree with is that safety starts with the individuals on the crew but when those individuals don’t measure up to a decent standard you need to question the focus of HSE. Nothing can be idiot proofed because whenever you think you have eliminated every possible hazard some idiot will come up with an ingenious way of hurting themselves.
Now if evolution was just allowed to take its course we might get rid of the stupid people by natural selection but the problem is that idiots don’t always just hurt themselves.
I realize that these sort of statements will offend a lot of the politically correct crowd (how something so wrong-headed can even contain the word “correct” in its name is completely beyond me, the other part of its name shows its origins and politics don’t belong in the work place, unless you are a politician) but it may also change somebody’s attitude and save an injury caused by an idiot.
And you have not thought about that in parallel to create another blog, for related subject? Do you have a good idea:).
I hadn’t really thought about going into specifics of HSE, not really my field. It would be nice to have a dedicated blog for this but I don’t even do enough on this blog to keep it up to date.
Perhaps we could start a forum category for more detailed discussions. What do you think?