The Work of One Association’s Safety, Environment Legislation (SEL) Committee: A Trade Association’s Approach to SEL Issues Affecting its Members

摘要

The International Marine Contractors Association (IMCA) is the international trade association for offshore, marine and underwater engineering companies representing over 1000 member companies worldwide. With its membership actively involved in offshore construction activities primarily for the oil and gas industry, IMCA and its members have been keen to develop appropriate tools to support the industry and drive improvements in safety worldwide. Safety, Environment & Legislation (SEL) is an IMCA core activity. The SEL committee’s primary purpose is to promote the sharing of experience and safety and environmental related information among members with the aim of reducing incidents by continuously reinforcing good practice. It also offers good practice guidance to the industry by way of documents, seminars and dialogue. Since 1997 IMCA has been publishing safety flashes from information provided by its members on incidents and potential hazards and lessons learnt from them. This could be faulty equipment, gaps in procedures, reminders of the need for basic safety awareness, and near misses. All safety flashes are available from the IMCA website and the information provided is analyzed to identify trends and whether there is need for industry guidance on topics. The paper will review specific safety flashes and discuss how IMCA has used the information to develop new or review and update its existing guidance. IMCA also collects safety statistics for its contractor members, enabling marine contractors to benchmark their safety performance against other similar sized companies and other stakeholders such as drilling contractors and E&P companies. The paper will highlight some of the trends identified over the last 17 years of data collection, how the data collected has been extended and refined and the recent addition of the collection of environmental information. The paper will explain IMCA’s 5 year plan for 2014 to 2019 how the SEL committee has reviewed its work to better define its aims and deliverables to the industry. The paper will discuss how the committee has been restructured to broaden participation from members and drive forward deliverables for the industry.