BSEE adds equipment failures to reporting

The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement is adding the reporting of equipment failures to its SafeOCS program for gathering safety data from offshore oil and gas operations, the agency said Oct. 26.

SafeOCS is a safety program that BSEE introduced in 2013 to encourage industry to voluntarily report near miss incidents in the offshore, as a means of assessing unsafe situations and thus identify ways of preventing future accidents. The reports that are filed are assessed by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics and are kept confidential - without confidentiality companies would likely be reticent about reporting problem events.

The expansion to SafeOCS adds the voluntary reporting of equipment failures to the reporting of near miss incidents. However, the reporting of blow out preventer equipment failures is mandatory and, from Nov. 7, industry will be required to report any failures in pollution prevention equipment.

“We are encouraging industry to quickly begin taking advantage of the SafeOCS expansion,” said BSEE Director Brian Salerno. “Shared awareness of safety trends better equips us all to quickly focus on emerging issues and thereby drive down the risk of serious incidents.”

- ALAN BAILEY