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December 13, 2010

Emergency management - the human factor

The dynamic positioning operator’s (DPO) testimony to the enquiry committee of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster reveals the following: The operator had to deal with a large number of combustible gas alarms getting activated when the blow out occurred. The general alarm system was on “MANUAL” (in other words, even though a lot of combustible gas alarms were going on, the general alarm could get sounded only if the operator manually activated it). (Shades of Piper Alpha??) The operator was not trained on a situation where multiple gas alarms went off.

Reading the testimony of the DPO, the one thought that struck me was the chaotic situation she was dealing with. Every Human being reacts differently to emergency situations. When I was an asst. Shift in charge in an ammonia plant, we had a newly transferred shift in charge who had earlier worked most of his career in the utility plant. His way of dealing with any emergency situation in the ammonia plant was to run to the utility plant ( he was more comfortable there!). Are you training your operators for the worst case scenario? Here simulators play an important role and you should make the training scenario as realistic as possible.

Read the DPO’s enquiry transcript in this link.

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