Decision making during critical incident among leaders offshore

• Main Author: Tjelle, Michael
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Høgskolen i Buskerud og Vestfold 2015
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2353190

Work on board offshore drilling installations are hazardous, the personnel need to be vigilant in every part of the work in order to keep the risk level at a minimum. To have a critical incident, multiple barriers need to be broken, and that is what drill crews prevent on a daily basis. Critical incidents on an offshore installation, like a semisubmersible rig, can have disastrous outcomes to personnel, equipment and environment. We only have to look at the Piper Alpha, 1988 (Northsea). Alexander L. Kielland, 1980 (Northsea). Ocean Ranger, 1982 (North Atlantic) and Deepwater Horizon, 2010 (Gulf of Mexico), incidents to confirm this. In these accident a total of 285 people lost their lives, all rigs got totally destroyed, enormous financial losses and the environment took heavy damage from oil pollution. So what can be done to help prevent this? This study aim to build upon the results of (Martinsen, 2013; Øvergård, Sorensen, Martinsen, & Nazir, 2014). The purpose of this study was to identify characteristics of critical incidents and the characteristics of decision-making in offshore drilling. The targeted group is offshore drilling personnel. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 persons that have a minimum of 10 years experience from drilling. The interviews provided 19 critical incident recollections and 9 incidents were dropped after the interviews. These were transcribed and thematically analyzed. Findings of this study include experienced adoption to operation characterized critical incidents in offshore drilling, routine complacency is a major contributor to incidents happening and some inconsistency to existing Endsley's three level SA model.