Oil and Gas land transport professionals came together last month to review a spate of rollover incidents.  They heard about about the responses taken by the companies involved and used the lessons learnt from these incidents to reflect on the IVMS Specification and to inform ongoing development of Light Vehicle Driver Training.

The rollover incidents potentially had catastrophic consequences for those involved in them. Given the significance of the incidents there was a need for those affected to take immediate and proportionate corrective action and the result was a reduction in operational speed limits, effectively decreasing the energy involved, which in the result of any future incidents would have the potential to reduce the incident severity.

At an industry level this had wider ramifications as this was a departure from the agreed speed limit as set out in the Safer Together IVMS Specification.  Now, no specification is cast in stone, but it was important for us to understand the causal factors of the incidents and therefore directly consider the impact on the IVMS Specification, or perhaps any other Safer Together specification, and subsequently take action to get back to an agreed common specification for industry.

On the day, in the true spirit of being safer together two operators openly shared their incidents with their industry peers.  Their presentations gave insight into the causal factors, the work they had already taken in their respective organisations and with their contract partners to prevent further accidents, and where they believed the identified lessons encountered the industry specifications. 

Given that this was the first time the industry had come together to review our specifications through the lens of spate of accidents there was much debate and dialogue, but a path to convergence was identified and agreed, with the effected parties going back to their respective organisations with a series of actions to consider and revert back to the Land Transport Working Group.

Moreover, it has in effect put the IVMS Specification into a full review process and given that it was first published some four years ago, this is timely.

What this means to us as an industry is that the specification will have to take into consideration much more than it did previously and be more proportionate to the risks found in different operation geographies (e.g. Bowen, Surat, Cooper).  It also means that we’ve taken a time out for safety to review the Light Vehicle (LV) Driver Training to ensure that we properly capture any lessons in this excellent piece of work before we “go live”.

Furthermore, it has identified the importance of the common industry road map being developed and this work is now regarded as critical path and we have a stretch target to deliver this before the end of this year.

In practice this means that by end of 2019 our industry should have a common road map, a revised IVMS Specification and a LV driver training process that takes into consideration the findings and lessons from these incidents.

Finally, it gives us a process on how we can work together, responding to individual incidents, at an industry level to ensure that our collective ambition and integrity is maintained.  While at the same time, we give those immediately impacted by such incidents the space and respect to deal with them appropriately so that we can all benefit from the lessons identified and be safer together. 

More about Common IVMS Specification here.

More about Light Vehicle Driver Training here.

Contact: [email protected].