Major maintenance events, often referred to as shutdowns and turnarounds, are necessary for keeping oil gas facilities safe and operational — but the events themselves create new risks that can challenge even the most experienced workers and safety leaders.
These short-term, high-risk and high-cost occurrences can span a few days to several months and bring hundreds of contractors and specialized trades into already complex worksites.
This influx of new people, tasks, and temporary systems increases the chance of something going wrong.
According to TA Cook and Soloman Associates, “almost 50% of work-related accidents in plants occur during plant maintenance outages.”
Bob Wicker
These accidents can be mitigated through a proactive, data-driven approach, which starts with equipping your team with the tools they need for visibility, clear communication and hazard detection and monitoring.
This not only reduces the risk to human life during the events themselves, but provides the real-time data needed to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and make better decisions in the moment.
Oil and gas workers experience a wide range of hazards, but maintenance events introduce new and increased risks. Here are some of the common hazards that might be experienced during one of these events:
These are considered one of the most dangerous environments on a refinery due to restricted access and egress, possible presence of toxic and flammable gases and the need for blinding and isolation practices.
During these events, workers are often climbing inside vessels to do inspections and repairs and communication and visibility is paramount to ensure safety.
Unlike the day-to-day work at a refinery, when product is contained in process systems, shutdowns and turnarounds involve breaking integrity when blinding, opening manways and removing spools and valves.
During that breaking of integrity, the risk of gas exposure increases and gases can often be odorless, tasteless or undetectable by eye.
“Hot work” for repairs, like welding or grinding, around possible residual flammable gas creates the potential for fire or explosion.
Any work with an open flame or that produces sparks must be carefully planned, with proper gas detection for workers, the right PPE and emergency response at the ready.
While the term “lone worker” may suggest someone in a remote location, it’s possible to become a lone worker even when surrounded by thousands of people.
Anytime someone is out of line of sight, even for a minute, the risk to response time increases.
Bob Wicker
If met with an emergency, from a fire to a health-related event, lack of visibility means less chance of rescue.
During maintenance events, many people work at elevated heights, increasing the risk of falls.
These events often involve heavily-congested areas with suspended overhead loads, which increases worker risk. Awareness and mass communication play a key role in safety here.
Proactive safety on these sites is critical because there is a lot to lose.
The oil and gas industry faces what the CDC calls “historically elevated fatality rates.”
Of the fatalities reported in their study, with data ranging from 2014-2019, 10% were the result of exposures to harmful substances or environments and approximately 20% of worker fatalities involved those working alone at the time of the incident.
In addition to the risk to human life, the effects of failing to create a proactive safety protocol for shutdowns and turnarounds can have many consequences:
Bob Wicker
Per regulatory timeframe requirements, inspections and maintenance must be completed at certain intervals to maintain compliance.
Non-compliance could yield violations that result in fines, up to and including being shut down completely.
Aside from the associated cost of labor and materials, another major consideration is the lost revenue associated with downtime — sometimes tens of millions of dollars.
Another cost a business might incur isn’t a monetary one, but a cost to reputation with both the public and within the industry.
Losing public trust due to ongoing safety or environmental incidents can be devastating to your brand and it becomes harder to attract top talent when you’re known as an unsafe place to work.
Given the severity of the hazards in the oil and gas industry, data-driven, proactive safety can be crucial to success.
Connected safety, which provides real-time data, then becomes an all-important tool to help teams make better decisions, as well as identify safety risks before they happen.
Bob Wicker
Connected safety provides immediate hazard detection, from toxic gas exposure, to a fall, to gamma radiation.
This ongoing monitoring, as well as coordination between operations and emergency response teams, leads to faster incident response, made easier by real time location monitoring that saves precious seconds in the case of a critical incident.
Enhanced communication is another benefit of connected safety, from two-way emergency voice communication with a worker to mass alerts.
These monitoring systems close information gaps that easily arise in these temporary events, whether dealing with lone workers or high-traffic areas with many dangerous moving parts.
This continuous flow of real-time data also means users can engage in proactive risk management.
When automated analytics can turn field-level data into actionable insights, organizations can detect and mitigate risks before incidents occur.
This information enables teams to lessen downtime, while enhancing decision-making to create a safer, more efficient workplace.
Safety in the oil and gas industry is reliant on how well companies anticipate risks so that they don’t become emergencies.
Even for short-term projects like shutdowns and turnarounds, connected safety doesn’t have to mean long-term investment.
Bob Wicker
Many teams use short-term rentals of connected gas detection and monitoring devices to quickly scale up protection and visibility during these high-risk periods.
It’s a flexible, cost-effective way to extend connected safety to every worker — even temporarily — without compromising coverage.
Real-time monitoring is the solution that leads to enhanced safety, better compliance and the confidence that workers will get home safely each day.
