Health Safety Environment; Quality

HSE has become an increasingly important aspect of the hydrographic surveyors professional working and everyday life offshore. This is no more so than with the surveyors working in the offshore resources industry, in particular that of oil and gas.

Over a relatively short period of time, the risks associated with working offshore in this industry have been identified and elevated to the point where they are either mitigated, or eliminated. The extent of modern documentation used to define and control risks is often daunting to the industry newcomer, as procedures with various HSE instruments can vary from company to company and region to region. However, there are generally several broad HSE strategies associated with oil & gas offshore hydrographic surveys. Most documentation falls within the jurisdiction of at least one or more of the following:

International standards and treaties such as Opito, ISO, ILO, IMO, SMS, SOLAS etc.
National standards laws regulations, AMSA, NOPSA, PSLA, Navigation Act
State law, Safe Work
Company Policy, Procedures, Contract
Vessel, barge platform Policy, SMS, Procedures

Unfortunately common sense has not always secured the safety of workers on a particular offshore site, be that vessel, barge or platform. The consequences of error, more particularly a combination of errors (the so called Swiss cheese effect) can be devastating.

While offshore survey and hydrographic work may not seem critical to many phases of offshore work planning, there are always aspects of the work that involve risk. Therefore putting associated survey personnel and plant in danger.When survey operations are integrated with offshore operations such as drilling campaigns or platform pipelines installation, site and shore project management rely on those personnel to be: