Oil patch insider: Glacier Oil scores 5-year zero RIR and award from lawmakers

Kay Cashman

Petroleum News

Glacier Oil & Gas Corp. recently received an award from the Alaska Legislature, honoring the independent for a five-year 0.0 recordable incident rate with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The citation was sponsored by Rep. Mel Gillis and co-sponsored by Rep. George Rauscher of the House Resources Committee and Rep. Sara Rasmussen of the House Labor & Commerce Committee.

The five-year period ended Dec. 31 and not only applied to Glacier’s employees but also to some of its long-term contractor’s employees, a total of about 155 individuals, including Glacier office staff in Anchorage and Houston and its oil and gas operations, which are all in Alaska.

Through its subsidiary Cook Inlet Energy, or CIE, Glacier runs the West McArthur River and Redoubt units on the west side of Cook Inlet and the North Fork unit on the southern Kenai Peninsula. Through its subsidiary Savant Alaska, Glacier operates the Badami unit on the North Slope.

Brian Webb, Glacier’s health, safety, security, training, emergency response manager, designed the compact employee-driven program six years ago when he first went to work for CIE. (Shortly thereafter CIE, Savant, Anchor Point Energy and Nutaaq Pipeline became Glacier subsidiaries.)

The company’s OSHA incident rate is particularly commendable because while it’s comparatively easy for a large producer to attain a 0.0 rate, it is much tougher for a small company because of the way OSHA calculates incident rates, which allow the big firms to absorb some incidents and still maintain a near perfect rate.

So, what’s Glacier’s secret?

“We’re not top heavy,” Webb said. “Our workers have direct access to me. I sleep with my cell phone. … They can call me 24/7 and I’ll cheerfully answer the phone.”

“Our guys actually have a say in the program. We’ve been able to fix things immediately without having to sit down with committees,” he said. “It’s easy, simple and it gets results. We’re the envy of the Alaska chapter of safety professionals.”

Webb manages the program, but Glacier’s workers “realize they run the system. They bought into it and made it theirs,” he said.

Also, Webb said management at Glacier “supports the system. That’s why I’ve been working here for six years.”

Perhaps that sentiment is best expressed by Lance Anderson, lead operator on Redoubt’s Osprey Platform, in a quote at the end of Webb’s emails: “Train your people so they can go anywhere but treat your people well enough so they never want to.”

- KAY CASHMAN