Oil Search plans to improve focus on safety

OIL Search Ltd is planning to improve its focus on safety in its operations which dropped by 2.5 incidents per million person hours in the first half of this year, managing director Peter Botten says.
Botten said the first half result was not acceptable and they were undertaking a range of significant programmes to refresh right from the top-down into the organisation.
“Obviously safety is the core to any business operation and certainly Oil Search is the same and there are more to come in safety which will certainly be a big focus for us in the second half of the year,” he said.
“It is not acceptable for anybody to come to work and go home in any way harmed in any way, for our staff and also our contractors.
“In the first half of this year, we had a disappointing safety performance as measured by total recordable incident frequency rate that rose to 2.5 incidents per million person hours.
“Many of our safety incidents were actually on seismic programmes because we are doing, an unprecedented large seismic programme across parts of the Highlands and the Gulf of PNG.
“That’s a very dangerous place to go and although we can work, the incidents that are coming out of that are obviously concerning and that is very challenging place to work.
“Recently, we had a summit in PNG which was designed to focus on safety, not just for us, but for all our contractors, our landowner companies and really reset the bar in terms of our focus on safety performance.
“In the space of process safety, we have had one tier-one and two tier-two process safety events.
“In focusing on older plant and the maturity of our facilities, we are reporting well and actually learning a lot after the earthquake.
“We are still fighting the battle to restore some of our facilities to a sustainable and reliable state of operation.”