Personnel Onboard Research Articles

The effect of alcohol and drug testing at the workplace on individual’s occupational accident risk

Programmes for testing Alcohol and Drugs (A&D) at the workplace, at random and by surprise, are believed to have a positive impact on safety and to reduce individual’s accident risk. Despite this perception, there is limited scientific evidence and poor statistical support of this assumption. This study aims at testing whether there is such a cause-effect relationship between A&D testing and post-accident reduction, and how to quantify it. The methodology applied data-mining techniques together with classical statistics hypothesis testing. It covers a wide range of data concerning accidents, alcohol and drug tests, biographical and occupational records of a large railway transportation company in Portugal, for a period of 5½ years. Results give sound statistical evidence of individual’s accident risk decrease after being tested, by quantifying the relations between A&D testing and post-testing accidents. Results also estimate the optimal testing frequency that balances testing costs and accident reduction. Optimum rates of tests per year per worker are in the ranges ]0.5–1.0] in white-collars and professions at large, and ]0.0–0.5] in operations/technical personnel. The fraction of accident victims that are prevented by the application of optimal frequencies are around 59% for workers onboard trains, 72% for those working near trains, and 85% for white-collars. Testing at the optimal frequency generates net savings of at least 15:1, in onboard personnel. In conclusion, testing for alcohol and drugs at workplace, at random and by surprise, has a statistically significant preventive effect in overall professions, but is stronger within white-collars.

Risk-Based Passive Fire-Protection Optimization

Summary Passive fire protection (PFP) has been used in the oil and gas industry for many years as a method to avoid/delay global collapse of offshore installations. However, location of PFP has normally been based on simplistic assumptions, standards, guidance, and methods that do not always consider the real response of the structure to fire. The resulting PFP schemes can be conservative, leading to unnecessary cost to the operator in terms of application and maintenance costs. More importantly, there is the potential for the PFP scheme to be insufficient for the actual fire hazards, which will increase the level of risk to the personnel onboard. Fire-induced progressive collapse is a function of the level of redundancy of a structure; it is for this reason that redundancy analyses have sometimes been used as a simplistic method to calculate the level of PFP required. However, this method does not take into account the size of the fire threat against which the PFP is designed and could lead to less-than-conservative results because it considers removing only one member of the structure at a time, without considering reduction in the strength of the surrounding members as they are also being heated by the fire. Performance-based fire-collapse analysis provides an understanding of the response of the individual members, as well as the entire structural system, to fire. Understanding the failure mechanisms, susceptibility to progressive collapse of the structure, and key members that must remain in place during an accident situation allows for the optimisation of the PFP scheme, protecting only the required members while allowing for local failure of redundant members. The present paper provides a comparison between the different methods, and provides case studies that have resulted in optimum PFP schemes linked to design fires on the basis of acceptable risk levels.

Condition Management of Marine Lube Oil and the Role of Intelligent Sensor Systems in Diagnostics

Failures in marine diesel engines can be costly and can cause extreme inconvenience when they result in ships becoming stranded. Lubricating oil is a crucial component in maintaining engine reliability and so monitoring its condition is essential. Furthermore the lubricating oil offers early indication of various other engine faults. Current approaches to oil-based condition monitoring involve samples being sent for land based testing which involves considerable delay during which the situation could deteriorate further. Furthermore there is a substantial risk of contamination. The POSSEIDON project aimed to address this by developing a system involving real-time condition monitoring sensors observing the properties of the lubricating oil. Novel sensors were developed which address the specific issues associated with the marine environment. Furthermore, to complement the sensor system outputs, specific monitoring and diagnosis software has been developed to support the operation of onboard personnel with specific advice. On-line management of engine and lubricant condition aboard the ship may thus be achieved. In this paper we will describe the progress achieved in this area by the recently completed POSSEIDON project, outline the opportunities for ongoing development in this area and describe the roadmap for future development. The Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) paradigm will be applied to identify critical aspects of oil condition and prioritize parameters for measurement. The critical issues for development of the prototype unit into a viable commercial unit will be discussed including hardware design constraints, sensor miniaturization and display optimization. Issues such onboard connectivity, ship to shore communications will also be addressed.

Pushing the Boundaries of Concentric-Coiled-Tubing Technology To Resurrect Subhydrostatic Gas Wells on an Unmanned Offshore Installation

Summary Ravenspurn North is a mature gas field in the southern North Sea with 42 wells, drilled (and many hydraulically fractured) in the late 1980s. By 2006, more than half of the wells had ceased to flow, and many were flowing intermittently. With ailing wells and consequently falling production rates, the longer-term future for Ravenspurn North field was uncertain. A wireline campaign suggested a common failure mode for many wells: Large amounts of proppant had accumulated in the wellbore. Modeling of the potential range of static and dynamic pressure losses caused by this proppant supported a significant enhancement to the remaining gas potential. However, the depths of the wells combined with subhydrostatic pressure conditions and large-diameter lower completions made achieving cleanout challenging. Furthermore, the target wells were located on unmanned offshore installations with minimal facilities, deck space, and deck loading. This paper details how each of these obstacles was successfully tackled to reinstate a target set of wells. It describes the various cleanout options that were considered, and why concentric-coiled-tubing vacuum technology (CCTVT) was ultimately selected. Before this project, CCTVT had never been deployed in the North Sea, and nowhere in the world at these reservoir depths. The operation was delivered on the small unmanned installation by conducting the world's first boat-spooling operation of concentric coiled tubing (CCT); rigorously reassessing deck loadings; and running the operation completely self-sufficiently, with a maximum of 10 personnel onboard. Finally, this paper provides a detailed description of the successful CCTVT operations that recovered a total of 2,950 lbm of proppant from three wells to expose the perforations and unload the wells of liquid. Furthermore, CCT was used to mill out tubing-profile nipples and install a packer to hang off 1,200 ft of flush-joint tail pipe. Innovative thinking and close collaboration between operator and service companies were required, because the ability to perform multiple operations on CCT was in itself pioneering. Overall, this campaign has pushed the boundaries of intervention technology to deliver an extremely challenging project. This has resulted in a more-certain future for the Ravenspurn North field, as well as newly unlocked opportunities in deep depleted gas wells worldwide.

Hand in the snow

As reported by MSNBC, CNN, and in newspapers worldwide: On March 12, 1948, at 9:14 pm, Northwest Flight 4422 en route from Shanghai, China to La Guardia Airfield in New York, slammed into Mount Sanford, a 16,237-foot high peak located in a remote area of Alaska, 200 miles northeast of Anchorage. The 30 military personnel onboard, including six crew members and 24 merchant mariner passengers, were killed instantly. Nothing was done to recover the wreck. Because of its remote location, the crash site was abandoned, the debris digested within a few days by the active glacier into which it fell. It would take fifty years, and the efforts of two commercial airline pilots to reach the scene of the accident. It would take another ten years and a team of world class DNA experts, forensic genealogists, and fingerprint experts to identify the frozen human forearm and hand that was found by the pilots, well-preserved by the glacier for half a century. By September 2008, 28 of the 30 passengers had been eliminated by DNA analysis, fingerprint matching, or both. Only two more passengers remained on the list, the two most difficult to locate family members for who could serve as references for DNA analysis. Our search for the family of passenger No 29 was featured in newspapers around the world, including USA Today and the Washington Post. Francis J Van Zandt was born in 1911 in Vermont, the son of a father from upstate New York and a mother who was an obscure Irish immigrant named Margaret Conway. This lecture describes how we achieved the impossible and found a DNA match for the arm and hand in the snow, finally laying to rest the 30 victims of Northwest Flight 4422.

Characterization of the particle radiation environment at three potential landing sites on Mars using ESA’s MEREM models

The ‘Mars Energetic Radiation Environment Models’ (dMEREM and eMEREM) recently developed for the European Space Agency are herein used to estimate, for the first time, background Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) radiation and flare related solar energetic particle (SEP) events at three candidate martian landing sites under conditions where particle arrival occurred at solar minimum (December, 2006) and solar maximum (April, 2002) during Solar Cycle 23. The three landing sites were selected on the basis that they are characterized by significantly different hydrological conditions and soil compositions. Energetic particle data sets recorded on orbit at Mars at the relevant times were incomplete because of gaps in the measurements due to operational constraints. Thus, in the present study, comprehensive near-Earth particle measurements made aboard the GOES spacecraft were used as proxies to estimate the overall particle doses at each perspective landing site, assuming in each case that the fluxes fell off as 1/r2 (where r is the helio-radial distance) and that good magnetic connectivity always prevailed. The results indicate that the particle radiation environment on Mars can vary according to the epoch concerned and the landing site selected. Particle estimations obtained using MEREM are in reasonable agreement, given the inherent differences between the models, with the related NASA Heavy Ion–Nucleon Transport Code for Space Radiation/HZETRN. Both sets of results indicated that, for short (30days) stays, the atmosphere of Mars, in the cases of the SEPs studied and the then prevailing background galactic cosmic radiation, provided sufficient shielding at the planetary surface to maintain annual skin and blood forming organ/BFO dose levels below currently accepted ionizing radiation exposure limits. The threat of occurrence of a hard spectrum SEP during Cruise-Phase transfers to/from Mars over 400days, combined with the associated cumulative effect of prolonged GCR exposure, poses an as yet unsolved hazard to prospective onboard personnel.

Work demands and need for recovery from work in ageing seafarers

This study was conducted on a population of seafarers serving in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), the organisation providing support at sea to the Royal Navy. An investigation into work-related fatigue in RFA personnel onboard ships was carried out following changes to the regulations concerning maximum retirement age, to determine whether age was associated with recovery from work demands. A total of 322 personnel aged from 19 to 61 years were interviewed onboard seven RFA ships. The Need for Recovery scale was used to measure fatigue and work demands exposure was measured using the Baecke questionnaire and the NASA Task Load Index. It was found that older personnel did not have higher work-related fatigue than younger personnel. A measure of frustration at work was found to be most strongly related to work-related fatigue, even in seafarers who carried out physically demanding jobs. Work-related fatigue was found to accumulate over time in personnel who continued to be exposed to work demands onboard a ship. Finally, a relatively high level of work-related fatigue was found in the RFA sample as a whole, which may hold implications for management interventions. It was concluded that older personnel in the RFA can cope with the day-to-day demands of working life as well as younger personnel, possibly due to a ‘survivor effect’, whereby those personnel who do not cope as well with work demands leave and find a different job, leaving only those who successfully deal with the demands of working life at sea. Statement of Relevance: In order to manage work demands in seafarers, it is important to identify the most fatiguing demands. Age is of interest because of the demographic ageing of the workforce. Age was not associated with a higher need for recovery. Psychological work demands had a greater effect on need for recovery than physical work demands.

Implementation of a Drilling-and-Completions Advanced Collaborative Environment - Taking Advantage of Change

This article, written by Senior Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 123801, "The Implementation of a Drilling-and- Completions Advanced Collaborative Environment - Taking Advantage of Change," by S.J. Sawaryn, SPE, S. Goodwin, A. Deady, SPE, C. Critchley, and B. Swanson, SPE, BP plc, prepared for the 2009 SPE Offshore Europe Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition, Aberdeen, 8–11 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Advanced collaborative environments (ACEs) were planned as an integral part of the operator's new Aberdeen office. The move, in early 2008, coincided with a major business reorganization that prompted a critical reassessment of their scope and functionality. The selected approach is well suited to operations in a mature area. During the pilot project, three ACE implementation types were tested. By June 2008, seven rigs were being supported simultaneously, including monitoring the progress of a wired-pipe trial in Trinidad. Introduction The operator's North Sea activities involve both planning and day-to-day management of platform, mobile-rig, and land-rig operations. The assets on which the rigs operate are in various stages of maturity, with older assets characterized by aging infrastructure and infill-well drilling to reservoirs that are progressively smaller. For these assets, any new drilling activity must fit into the ongoing maintenance schedules, and managing the personnel on board (POB) is critically important. Moving traditional rigsite activities onshore and use of collaborative environments played an important role in the success on the Andrew platform. Drilling and completion activities are more data oriented than ever before, and the same information and understanding is needed at both ends of a conversation. Through collaboration, the life of older assets can be extended, and events can be used to learn and to influence development and operations on younger assets. ACEs, therefore, have a critical role. Project Mercury Project Mercury was established to manage all aspects of the operator's new building, including design and implementation of the operations and drilling ACEs. The Andrew onshore operations center (OOC) had demonstrated the value of collaborative environments for POB management, but had not attempted to address the additional needs and issues that might arise with the use of OOCs to improve drilling performance. An earlier comparison of OOC concepts in the North Sea categorized them according to the degree of technical and sociotechnical content involved in the change and the degree of integration across projects or disciplines. Given the wide range of choices, the Project Mercury team elected to pilot various configurations before selecting one for implementation in the new building.

Human-Factors Implications of Remote Drilling Operations: A Case Study From the North Sea

SummaryImproved capabilities for real-time data transfer have given rise to remote monitoring and support for drilling operations, providing faster access to information onshore and reducing personnel on board (POB) and cost. The challenge lies not so much with the technical feasibility but with the impact on work processes, which is still poorly understood. This paper presents a case study of the human-factors implications of onshore operation centers (OOCs) in the North Sea. The authors first investigated work conducted in the Norwegian sector and then followed the implementation of a pilot OOC for the Andrew low-cost-drilling project in Aberdeen. All delivered wells successfully but addressed different strategic aims.For the case study of the Andrew project, the sample comprised 13 semistructured interviews conducted over 3 months and a longitudinal-attitude study with 33 participants from the onshore drilling team, OOC staff, and drilling representatives from offshore. Results were content analyzed by a team of industrial psychologists. The findings show that remote operations in drilling produce effects similar to those of virtual teams and computer-mediated process control in other industries; the monitoring work in the OOC was deprived of some of the physical activity, sensory information, and informal interaction. Potentially, some of these tasks could be automated further, while more cross-trained staff would be required offshore. Different user groups responded differently to the OOC implementation. Onshore teams generally approved of the concept because the OOC helped to create more situation awareness and presented an ideal environment for collaborative decision making and learning. The offshore response was mixed, with strong support for its innovative potential, but also critical voices about system reliability, contractual concerns, and the impact on work/life balance.OOCs can add value to drilling operations by enabling better-informed decisions, but the findings show that success depends on how well the introduction of organizational change is managed. The study provides evidence on how prospective users can be involved in the change process in this dispersed and fluctuating industry and which social and cognitive skills are important for effective collaboration in e-operations.

Demarcation of inland vessels’ limit off Mormugao port region, India: a pilot study for the safety of inland vessels using wave modelling

The Ministry of Shipping desires to revise the inland vessels’ limit (IVL) notification based on scientific rationale to improve the safety of vessels and onboard personnel. The Mormugao port region extending up to the Panaji was considered for this pilot study. Measured winds and wave parameters (AWS and moored buoy) as well as NCEP re-analysis and NCMRWF winds were used for the analysis and input to regional and local models. The results of wave model were validated with measured significant wave heights (SWHs) and the comparison shows a good match. The analysis indicates that SWHs do not exceed 2.0 m during non-monsoon months, and in monsoon months exceed 5.0 m, and even 7.0 m, especially during extreme events. In order to draw IVL contours for Goa coastal region, local model was set up and nearshore waves were simulated for the period May 2004–May 2005. Based on the nearshore SWH distribution, IVL contours have been fixed for the Mormugao port and Panaji coastal regions.

Blast simulation of explosives buried in saturated sand

Shallow buried explosives pose a significant threat to lightweight vehicles and their onboard personnel. To date, designers of lightweight vehicles are limited in their knowledge of what occurs during the blast. The high intensity, short term loading imparted by the explosion is enormously complex and can be significantly affected by a number of parameters including the size, shape, type, detonation point and depth of burial (DOB) of the explosive and the type, density and water content of the soil. Recent advancements in numerical simulations have enabled the complex blast event to be accurately modelled by coupling Eulerian and Lagrangian analyses: the former is well suited to modelling the blast and while the latter, the structural response. Further validation of the modelling technique is considered in the current paper, which details simulations performed utilising the coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian analysis to study the blast output of explosives buried in saturated sand. These experiments varied explo...

Floating Installation Marine System Vulnerability: Global Alert

The owners and operators of FPSO’s and FSU’s need to be advised of the risks posed by the uncontrolled flooding of machinery spaces, with regard to the safety of on-board personnel and the vessel itself. The UK Health and Safety Executive has drawn these concerns to the attention of the Classification Societies and the International Association of Classification Societies. A Safety Notice detailing the marine flooding hazards and recommended actions to be taken was issued in December 2003. The global potential for these incidents is highlighted because the methods of operating floating installations differ significantly from those of trading ships and flooding incidents are more frequent than major process accident scenarios.

”Tip of the Spear” Physical Therapy during a 6-Month Deployment to the Persian Gulf: A Preliminary Report

When a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier battle group deploys overseas, the ship's medical department is responsible for more than 10,000 personnel and their numerous musculoskeletal injuries. This paper reviews the effectiveness of having a U.S. Navy physical therapist and physical therapy technician onboard the USS Carl Vinson during its most recent deployment to the Persian Gulf. Physical therapy had 3,373 patient visits during the ship's 1998-1999 Western Pacific deployment. Having physical therapy personnel onboard resulted in fewer patient visits to sick call for musculoskeletal problems and fewer evacuations compared with other similar carrier deployments. Providing physical therapy at the "tip of the spear" is an effective, beneficial, and cost-saving landmark improvement in providing quality medical care to the fleet. The lessons learned from this experience will assist in clarifying the role of physical therapy in future military support operations and sustained deployments.

Total Ship Training for Future Aircraft Carriers

ABSTRACT The use of technology to assist in the missions of the Navy has changed. The twenty-first century will see a Navy with fewer but more technical ships, smaller yet more innovative shipboard crews, and the need for rapid responses to changing world battle and peacetime scenarios. A recent study (Defense Science Board 1997) has noted the Navy is compelled to build ships that will operate with smaller crews at the same time operational environments require increased capabilities. The Defense Science Board study (1997) further states that, “Training is a force multiplier that allows manning reductions through better use of personnel onboard.” The purpose of this paper is to describe a total ship training philosophy for the CVNX class of future aircraft carriers. The Navy has developed an affordable plan to evolve the baseline design of CVNX over multiple hulls for the new construction of aircraft carriers (NAVSEA 1999). Each of these platforms will employ successively more advanced training methods and systems, culminating in a final design that incorporates the most capable shipboard total ship training program ever fielded aboard an aircraft carrier.

Systems integration and organisational choice

The purpose of the paper is to describe an integrated systems approach to computer aided planning of duties and rosters for onboard personnel in railways. An integrated approach means a client server system with a common database covering a functional domain including: 1. Long-term planning of duties and rosters for onboard personnel (drivers and guards)

Risk perception and attitudes to safety by personnel in the offshore oil and gas industry: a review

Abstract In the aftermath of the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 and the subsequent inquiry and recommendations made by Lord Cullen in 1990, there have been legislative changes and a renewed committment to safety by oil companies operating on the UK continental shelf (UKCS). Part of this new regime involves the preparation of a ‘safety case’ for each installation operating on the UKCS. Details vary according to installation type and function, but, as a minimum, the safety case has to demonstrate that (i) the management systems comply with health and safety law; (ii) a regular independent audit of the management system has been provided for; (iii) potential hazards that can cause major accidents have been identified; and (iv) risks of major accidents have been evaluated and measures taken to reduce risks to personnel as far as is reasonably practicable. Much of the safety case depends on quantitative risk assessment to assess the effects of potential hazards to the installation and the personnel onboard; however, there is another side to risk estimates, namely the ‘qualitative’ or subjective risk perceptions of the people who work and live offshore and are actually involved in hazardous offshore operations. These subjective perceptions of risk form the basis for risk acceptance, regardless of the objective or quantified risk, and, as such, they are important for understanding feelings of safety, attitudes to safety, risk-taking behaviour and accident involvement amongst the workforce. The present review considers psychological studies of offshore workers on UK and Norwegian installations and discusses how working environment and socio-organizational factors can affect risk perception and attitudes to safety, and ultimately risk-taking behaviour and accident involvement, within this unique and specialized work group.

Telescience and advanced technologies

Space Station and its associated laboratories, coupled with the availability of new computing and communications technologies, have the potential of significantly enhancing scientific research. Telescience involves the interaction of scientific researchers and equipment on earth with on-board personnel and equipment as well as with other researchers, remote ground-based resources, mission control personnel, and space station developers. To assure that this potential is met, scientists and managers associated with the Space Station project must gain significant experience with the use of these technologies for scientific research, and this experience must be fed into the development process for Space Station. In this talk, a pilot program is described that is attempting to address this problem. University researchers are conducting rapid prototyping testbeds employing new telescience technologies and ideas. These testbeds are specific research experiments within the scientific discipline areas that will use Space Station laboratories. The experiments are being carried out in a coordinated manner to allow the critical questions to be answered by groups of scientists working with technologists in a rapid prototyping testbed environment. The rapid prototyping testbeds are not like a typical testbed. Rather than being used to evaluate and integrate systems on the way to deployment, the rapid prototyping testbeds constitute a Technology Evaluation Environment (TEE), allowing users to interact with advanced technologies in the conduct of scientific research in order to develop the required base of experience to permit development and evaluation of requirements and specifications.

Applications of Microprocessors in Upgrading of Accelerator Controls

Experience at SLAC demonstrates that the criteria, for selection and use of microprocessors in modifying an existing control system may differ from the criteria that apply during installation of the control system of a new accelerator. Considerations such as cost of individual projects, progressive installation without disruption of operations and training of on-board personnel can outweigh "obvious" goals such as standardization of hardware, uniformity of software, or even a rigid specification of link protocols with the main computer system.