If you’ve never ridden a crane-hoisted rope basket from one place to another, you probably haven’t spent much time on offshore oil and gas equipment. It’s the offshore industry’s main way of moving people onto and off of installations where helicopters don’t do the job.
The procedure is straightforward: put one foot on the flotation ring, one on the deck, and clutch ropes; step fully aboard at lift-off; continue clutching ropes as the crane lifts basket and souls on board up and out over the water then down onto the target deck.
The adventure ends too soon for some, too late for others. Few riders need to be told twice about that rope-clutching business.
First ride
In some places, a first “Billy Pugh” ride is a rite of passage. Billy Pugh Co., Corpus Christi, Tex., makes most of the rope baskets used for crane personnel transfers and has 6,000-7,000 of them in use worldwide.
Recently, new transfer devices have appeared on platform and rig decks. The evolution comes as the industry takes a new look at the safety of worker transfers.
“Every year, Billy Pugh personnel nets are involved in millions (we roughly estimate 3-4 million) of offshore personnel transfers (all over the world) with VERY few mishaps or accidents,” says the Billy Pugh web site.
Yet hard numbers don’t exist. The reason may be that there are relatively few serious incidents to count. Still, a Billy Pugh competitor sees a data void.
Philip Strong, managing director of Reflex Marine Ltd., Aberdeen, considers crane transfers of offshore workers “relatively safe.” But he worries about varying standards and a lack of information on transfer activity and accidents.
The aviation business, he notes, operates by strict standards and collects data on helicopter transfers of offshore workers. No such systematic data exist for crane transfers.
From a record search, Reflex Marine assembled global information on about 60 crane-transfer incidents associated with 36 injuries and 4 deaths. Of those incidents, most of which occurred within the past 10 years, 21% involved lateral impact and falling, 25% falling, 13% trip and entanglement, 25% heavy landing, 12% the deck crew, and 4% immersion.
“Most of it is fairly intuitive-except the large number of incidents during pick up, which surprises a lot of people,” Strong says. The fatalities resulted from falls.
Strong thinks some transfer incidents escape industry notice because boat owners, rather than oil companies, report them as marine accidents. He advocates centralized collation of data, along with improved monitoring of marine operations, better understanding of risk, and uniform standards.
Reflex Marine has developed a transfer capsule called the Frog, of which nearly 300 units are in use worldwide. Instead of standing and holding onto a collapsible rope net, Frog riders strap into seats, three at a time, inside a rigid, triangular pyramid frame with open sides. Unlike that of the rope basket, the Frog’s bottom has springs for hard landings.
Paul Liberato, president of Billy Pugh since 1989, acknowledges the sparseness of numbers on crane-transfer incidents. He doubts, however, that the data ever will be as complete as those covering helicopter transfers, where accidents tend to be catastrophic.
In the last 3-4 years, Liberato says, industry interest in the safety of offshore personnel transfers has increased.
“It’s really becoming a priority,” he notes. “We need to be serious about it.”
Liberato thinks accidents may have increased along with interest because of a recent surge in the number of inexperienced offshore workers.
New basket
Billy Pugh has introduced a collapsible carrier that provides some of the protection of rigid frames such as the Frog. Called the X-904, the new device allows riders to stand and hold onto ropes. But it adds protection against falling objects with an overhead shield and against side impacts with outer cables that stiffen when tension is applied to a central pole. Riders attach themselves to the X-904 with quick-release safety clips. The bottom has springs.
Billy Pugh wanted its follow-on design to “look and perform much like a personnel net” because offshore workers “like the current personnel net and don’t want to change.” The web site points out, however, that many large oil companies are trying to reduce the human factor in safety management.
Without question, the human factor figures prominently in any system-whatever its safety record-whose defining feature is the need to hold on for dear life.
