Challenge

The 2019 OGUK Health and Safety report stated that the safety critical maintenance backlog is 59% lower than the peak in 2015, but is beginning to show an upward trend. Offshore platforms normally run with some maintenance backlog, but, when some of it is safety critical and there are a collection of other minor issues on site, it can be unclear as to whether the risk is being managed to be as low as reasonably possible (ALARP). The Operator approached DNV to seek reassurance that the risk from these issues was being suitably managed.

DNV solution

The key to the DNV solution was to identify if, amongst the large number of small risk contributors, there were any that could cumulatively link together to give a higher risk that would not be acceptable. To do this, DNV:

• Defined an assessment approach consistent with industry accepted OGUK guidelines on cumulative risk
• Gathered information on adverse, or degraded conditions on the platform
• Removed from further study the very low risk issues that were judged to not be capable of contributing to an overall cumulative risk.
• Assessed the remaining issues in groups according to safety critical element, discussed the criticality of the anomalies with the technical authority and determined whether there were any links with other categories of anomaly
• Judged the acceptability of the risk within these groups.

Outcome and benefits

The assessment gave the Operator a good understanding of where risk existed on site and an action plan was developed to prioritize repairs, or maintenance. A platform-wide issue with hoses was identified which would have had a significant impact had cumulative affects of the risk factors not been identified. The issues were efficiently identified, prioritised and resolved.