Improving safety one focus of presentations

Petroleum News Alaska

Dick Olver, group managing director of BP, and David Wight, president of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., have similar safety goals. And both told Meet Alaska that their companies have yet to meet those goals.

“We believe that somebody who gets up in the morning and is going to work for BP or with BP or on BP’s property, should have the right to expect to return home in the same state as they left. It’s as simple as that,” Olver said.

“My company and my part of the company, exploration and production, operating in six continents and a hundred countries, is not the world’s leader in safety performance.

“That I regard as unacceptable,” Olver said.

“And,” he said, “we are going to be more intolerant with ourselves, we are going to be more intolerant with each other and we are going to more intolerant with those people who come to work with us.”

Alyeska Pipeline Service’s Wight said he agreed with Olver on safety.

“There is no more important issue for Alyeska than the safety of our employees and the contractors that work with us from day to day and the communities in which we live and impact by virtue of our pipeline passing through them,” he said.

“Our goal is that everyone returns safely from work unharmed every day. And there is no other standard of success as far as measuring acceptable safety performance.”

Safety has improved, he said, but Alyeska and its contractors “do not rank and have the type of performance in safety that we need to have for all Alyeskans and for all Alaskans to be safe and proud of the system that they operate.”