Another Offshore Industry Wakeup Call!
Imagine going to sleep in your room in a 700 bed hotel, setting your alarm for 7:30 a.m. and drifting off to a good night’s rest. The next morning, you are not woken by your alarm clock, but a much louder evacuation alarm telling you to evacuate your hotel because it is sinking into 125 feet of water 50 miles offshore! This is not a dream, it happened just this month in the Gulf of Mexico. The 700 bed Jupiter Flotel (Offshore Oil Jargon for a floating hotel) operated by Mexico’s state owned oil company PEMEX, began taking on water after a reported valve problem. The evacuation alarm was sounded at 7:38 a.m. Jupiter is a lot like your land based hotel, rooms, showers, cafeteria and even maid service, only it’s in middle of the ocean, and there’s no place to park your car! You can only check-in if you arrive by helicopter or boat. Jupiter floats and stays stable because the legs are partially filled (they are called semi-submersible) with water and anchored to the seabed. One of Jupiter’s legs (they are called pontoons) reportedly filled with too much water due to the faulty valve. Just like a boat filling with water, it began to sink. By this morning, efforts to stop the leak had failed and the Jupiter flipped to one side and partially sank (check out the picture – it is amazing no one was hurt). Thankfully for the 713 workers onboard who use Jupiter as their temporary residence during their two week offshore shift, it sank slowly over 24 hours, giving PEMEX plenty of time to evacuate the workers to the adjacent platform and account for all of them. Their personnel belongings may be wet, but they are alive! Had Jupiter sank quickly imagine the ensuing chaos as management and rescue workers tried to account for 700 guests in a matter of minutes. Some workers would have ran across the bridge connecting the flotel to an adjacent platform, others would have mustered at their designated lifeboats. As in other offshore accidents, some might have even jumped overboard and swam to safety. First responders, arriving by boat and helicopter from 50 miles away, would be tasked with figuring out how many people evacuated and how many might still be on board. Difficult enough to account for 700 people in the daytime, imagine if this happened at night! Now the industry is very safety conscious and offshore workers train for emergencies like this constantly. There is a process they follow when evacuating. Unfortunately the manual personnel accounting processes used in a lot of these offshore operations is not adequate in major catastrophes, as proven many times. Thankfully that wasn’t the case on Jupiter, it was daylight and time was on their side. It’s time to change the manual process of accounting for offshore personnel. Revolutionary technology now exists that cost effectively automates offshore POB (persons on board) and mustering for evacuation counting in an emergency. These systems, like our WATCHEROffshore solution, should be installed on every offshore platform around the world. This is not science fantasy, thousands of offshore workers at major operators around the world are already safer using this technology. How does it work? It starts By registering all workers before they depart onshore and providing them with a small reusable beacon tag that they comfortably wear on their wrist (or as a name badge). This tag is certified for use offshore and is worn until your return onshore! The tag transmits a long range signal unique to each worker, every few seconds, to our WATCHER system installed on the platform. Their unique data is fed into a database on the platform and simultaneously to other platform databases and an onshore emergency response center. Since no one knows when an accident will happen, WATCHER is constantly and automatically updating how many workers are on the platform and where they are at all times. If you arrive from another platform, the system knows you are there without a manual check-in process. That’s important, because no one knows to look for you if they don’t know you are there. During an accident WATCHER monitors the movement and evacuation of everyone on the platform in real time. Monitors onboard and onshore along with handheld computers at the mustering stations report a continuous count by location of how many workers remain in the evacuation area and what workers by name evacuated already. WATCHER even knows where they left the platform. Wondering about privacy, don’t! We built in controls so the system is not misused by management in non-emergency situations. It’s only for safety. What’s the value? WATCHEROffshore gives first responders more time to focus on the people who still need help, while assuring management and family who is safe, and keeping themselves out of harm’s way! Now that’s a wakeup call everyone can use!
By Greg Clawson Sr. Vice President, Energy Market Sales, America