Listening To The Well, Listening To The Workers: A New Approach To Safety Communications Offshore

Listening To The Well, Listening To The Workers: A New Approach To Safety Communications Offshore

AT SEA - APRIL 28: Workers look out at wind turbines at the Alpha Ventus offshore windpark on ... [+] April 28, 2010 in the North Sea approximately 70km north of the German coast. Alpha Ventus, which is a pilot project between energy producers E. On, Vattenfall and EWE, officially began operation the day before and will deliver 60 Megawatts of power from its 12 turbines. It is also Germany's first offshore windpark. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Silence can be deadly. That's the key lesson from a new paper examining communications failures as a root cause of offshore drilling accidents. While the industry has gotten better about identifying root causes of accidents from an operating standpoint, too often investigations also cite "communications failures" as a blanket explanation that "implicitly assumes that accidents could be prevented if employees spoke up about safety," according to the paper "Listening to the Well, Listening to Each Other, and Listening to the Silence — New Safety Lessons from Deepwater Horizon" published late last year in the American Chemical Society's journal Chemical Health and Safety. But the paper found that in accidents such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster there are many instances in which concerned