Feature Story
Safety often gets reduced to numbers. Really, it’s about people—about getting every worker home safely every night. But numbers measure progress and zero is the only success. Zero incidents, zero injuries and, most especially, zero fatalities. Any other number is a step, forward or back, on the road to zero. The numbers tell a certain story. For example, from 2009 to 2013, hours worked in the Canadian oil and gas industry increased a remarkable 49 per cent, mostly as a result of large numbers of major expansion projects, each involving hundreds or thousands of workers. Many of those projects were conducted within or adjacent to operating facilities, introducing a multitude of outside people and heavy equipment to already complex worksites handling hazardous hydrocarbons. And, of course, industry growth meant hiring new workers; in many cases inexperienced recruits who must be trained and placed into existing work teams. Yet, despite the dramatic increase in risk exposure and the rise in operational complexity, oil companies have achieved a 11-per-cent improvement in total recordable injury frequency (TRIF) over the five years ending Dec. 31, 2013, says Claudette Fedoruk, Health and Safety Analyst with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). “It’s something of an accomplishment to bring down TRIF while introducing new, often green workers to the sites. It’s a testament to the attention companies have placed in their occupational safety training and management systems,” says Fedoruk. At the same time, Fedoruk notes industry leaders are dissatisfied. “We’ve plateaued,” she says. “That’s not a lot of change over five years,” at least, not in the eyes of member companies, many of whom have declared zero injuries as the ultimate goal of their safety management programs. What’s more, Canada’s safety performance lags capp.ca/context
behind a number of international peers. For example, Canada ranks below the international average in both fatalities and recordable injuries (see table: International Performance Comparison). “We’re at a crossroads and we need a step-change in safety performance. That’s how they see it.”
International performance comparison Performance
Canada*
International**
Fatality rate per 5,000 workers
2.61
2.12
Total recordable rate per 500 workers
2.63
1.6
* 12 companies reporting; ** 80 countries considered
We’re at a crossroads and we need a step-change in safety performance. And, while company safety programs are successfully pushing down on the overall rate of injury, she says, the severity of safety incidents is somehow moving in the opposite direction. After recording four fatalities in 2012, the industry saw eight workers lose their lives on the job in 2013. In 2014, there have already been eight work-related deaths, as of the end of September. Understanding these fatalities, and doing what can be done to prevent future occurrences, is an urgent priority for industry and CAPP.
Using Big Data to Spot the Trends “CAPP’s role is to help facilitate or enable zero to be possible,” says Brad Herald, Vice President Western Canada and Natural Gas Markets, “Ultimately achieving zero is in the hands of individual member companies, but CAPP hopes to assist by providing some key tools and guidance.” One initiative CAPP has begun in cooperation with Enform is the compiling of individual workers’ compensation board (WCB) claims records for all the companies within the oil and gas
producing sector, as well as the seismic, drilling, pipeline and services sectors in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. “We want to see if the data from across the industry will identify common causes that aren’t apparent from individual companies’ data and, therefore, can’t be seen and addressed at the company level,” he says. Data Scientist for CAPP, Dr. Troy Jones, has worked closely on the project, which reconciles more than 80,000 individual injury reports from the three provincial WCBs into a single data set, accessible by a program that’s user-friendly for the health and safety professionals of the industry. The result is that the industry will have access to a single, comprehensive data set on every type of injury and the
TRIF: Total Recordable Injury Frequency is the total rate of all injuries requiring medical aid and/or resulting in lost time or restriction of activities at work, and/or resulting in fatality. It’s calculated as the number of incidents per 200,000 worker hours. context . volume 2 . issue 3 . November 2014
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