[BITList] Offshore Safety Report
franka
franka at iinet.net.au
Thu Dec 9 12:24:11 GMT 2010
pretty scary reading, I decided that I didn't need Transocean 5 days
into my induction When I left JDC though we had managed 5 years with out
a lost time accident and that was without massaging the reports or
figures so it can be done
frank
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http://theghostlygalleon.com/?page_id=10
Check the link to the article I pasted below. Can't say we don't
know about what's going on these days. I see it all the time.
Question is, where does it stop!
Safety Cover-Ups Lead to Fatalities
<http://theghostlygalleon.com/?p=8>
Posted on November 30, 2010 <http://theghostlygalleon.com/?p=8> by
galleon1 <http://theghostlygalleon.com/?author=1>
<http://theghostlygalleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/wPICT0010.jpg>
Rob Carroll
During my six years of employment with Diamond Offshore, it didn?t
take me long to realize that there was something rotten in Denmark
(actually Houston) and it had to do with corrupt, tyrannical and
greed-based management. There were serious safety concerns and
intolerable working conditions that my co-workers and I were
habitually subjected to but in many cases some of us were afraid to
speak up about out of fear of being arbitrarily and capriciously
fired. It was a management by fear and intimidation taken to a level
that I had never seen before. It was a management system that
inundates its employees with NAZI type propaganda about how
committed the Company is to safety and then promotes its safety
record to potential customers with bogus safety statistics and
motivates corporate executives to skimp on safety by paying them
huge bonuses not to exceed their inadequate budgets.
After the Deepwater Horizon blowout, there has been a lot of
information and testimony coming to the surface showing how these
same management tactics used by Diamond Offshore that keeps their
employees in unrelenting fear of losing their jobs for questioning
working conditions and raising important safety issues was also used
by Transocean. According to some of the blowout survivors, it was
one of the major factors that led to the rig blowing up.
During the few weeks preceding the Deepwater Horizon Blowout,
Diamond Offshore began having a number of serious injuries on some
of their rigs in Brazil. The reason for many of these injuries was
because Diamond had a lot of rigs arriving in Brazil for the first
time and they were sending a lot of local Brazilian employees out to
the rigs that had never worked offshore before without giving them
enough new-hire training before hand.
Because so many of Diamond?s rigs were arriving in Brazil at one
time, the area manager, Mickey Welch, ordered supervisors on some of
his rigs to sign off on competency papers prematurely on new
employees so that they could be transferred to the arriving rigs.
Mickey, as some of you may recall, is the area manager that was
involved in a Diamond Offshore scandal in the US where some of his
associates went to federal prison before Diamond transferred him to
Brazil.
The supervisors of course were reluctant to simply sign off on the
new-hires? competency papers knowing that it was a serious safety
risk and against their better judgment but did so anyway because
they knew they would be fired if they didn?t. The new employees were
transferred to the arriving rigs and employees that had never worked
a day offshore in their lives were sent out to the rigs such as the
Ocean Whittington and Ocean Yorktown to replace them.
While investigating the numerous injuries that were occurring on the
rigs, the corporate managers in operations and safety did what they
have always done and began to look at their subordinates to find
scapegoats to blame for their mistake of sending so many new people
to the rigs at one time without giving them the proper training and
ordering supervisors to fraudulently sign competency papers.
One of these injuries happened just before I arrived on the Ocean
Yorktown in Brazil to start my 28 day hitch in April of this year.
An American driller was critically injured and had to be medevaced
off of the rig. The brief verbal report I received from my partner
concerning the incident when I arrived on the rig was that Houston
was handling the investigation because the driller had used the
wrong safety equipment and that Houston was blaming him for the
accident.
I thought something was extremely wrong that there was no written
report of the incident on the rig. A rig incident investigation team
is always required to investigate and write a report showing the
root cause of the injury and safety reps have to review the incident
with all crew members. I couldn?t understand why there was no
incident report and why nobody on the rig seemed to know any of the
details of the injury.
A few days into my hitch, I received a call from the safety manager
in the Houston office accusing the driller for causing his own
injury by using the wrong safety equipment and accusing the safety
reps for not doing their jobs by letting him do so. I realized later
that the incident report had been concealed from the rig and that he
was fishing for information to see how much I knew about the incident.
I immediately suspected another scapegoat/cover-up situation and I
correctly thought that the safety manager was looking for someone to
blame in order to cover up the failed company safety policies that I
had seen Diamond do so many times before. At that point, I couldn?t
argue with him about the details of the injury. I did complain to
him about the lack of training that the new employees were receiving
before coming to the rig and I advised him that this lack of
training was the cause for the high number of injuries that were
occurring on the rigs.
I was fully aware that raising this kind of an issue could cost me
my job by Dennis Bailey who incessantly accuses all of his
subordinates of not doing their jobs in order to cover up his own
failures or the failures of upper management?s policies and
procedures. Shortly after that phone call I was informed that he
was sending out a safety supervisor from the Houston office to the
rig, ostensibly to assess the safety situation on the rig but I
later learned that he was worried about what I knew about the
driller?s incident investigation.
Two weeks after that phone
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call, I was able to conduct my own investigation into the incident
when some of the people involved returned to the rig. I discovered
without question that the driller was working with a brand new crew
that had never set foot on the rig before. The driller was having to
do work in a riding belt in the derrick that none of his hands knew
how to do. When he completed the work in the derrick, he signaled to
one of the new men operating the airhoist to lower him down but
instead he raised him up causing his harness to snag which caused an
accident that nearly killed him. He had to be medevaced off of the
rig and it had absolutely nothing to do with the ?wrong safety
equipment?. This was the worst corporate lie, sham and cover-up I
had ever seen from any company I had ever worked for in my life.
After completing my 28 day hitch and arriving home from the Ocean
Yorktown in May of this year, I was still grieving over the eleven
people on the Deepwater Horizon that had lost their lives in the
Gulf of Mexico explosion when I received an email from a co-worker
telling me that two of Diamond?s American employees on the Ocean
Ambassador had just lost their lives in another offshore Brazil
accident. Two Brazilians were also critically injured in that incident.
Since the Ocean Ambassador was also being swamped with new-hires and
with workers whose competency papers had been fraudulently signed
under the orders of Mickey Welch, I wondered if this was going to be
another situation where management was going to blame the victims
and the crew instead of blaming themselves for not wanting to spend
money for the proper training of new-hires and to protect themselves
from the lawsuits that were certain to follow. Nothing would have
surprised me at that point since the safety Brazil manager had led
an investigative team that blamed the death of the Ocean Alliance?s
electrical supervisor in an electrocution fatality several years
earlier as being a ?suicide?.
That?s right, this is the kind of mentality we are dealing with
here. The only possible reason why the Company would keep such an
illiterate manager around, so cunning and devious and yet so devoid
of common sense, is because they have been using him for years like
a puppet on a string to falsely accuse his direct reports and others
in order to deflect blame away from the decision makers.
It was only a couple of days after I learned of the two fatalities
on the Ocean Ambassador when I realized just how far Diamond was
willing to go to cover up their culpability for the accidents that
were occurring. The director of Diamond?s Safety Department, who is
also over the Claims Department, called me at my house and was upset
about the handover notes that I had left for my partner when I left
the rig. The safety supervisor that was sent to the rig to spy on me
had sent him a copy of the handover notes that I had left for my
relief. In my handover notes, I had left detailed information about
what I had found out and who I had talked to concerning the
driller?s injury. The safety director, worried that I was about to
blow the lid off of the cover-up, let me know that he wasn?t happy
with my job performance and that my services were no longer needed
at Diamond Offshore .
How convenient to be able to reduce corporate liability for failure
to maintain a safe work environment by having the Director of Claims
also functioning as the Director of Safety. This puts him in a
position with the ability and strong motivation to cause the root
cause of incident investigations to be falsified to show that the
accidents were the victims fault in order to cover up negligent
management decisions. It puts the company in a more favorable light
with their customers who are paying Diamond multibillions of dollars
every year and it casts an unfavorable light on the victims seeking
justice in a courtroom. In addition, the director of safety has the
ability to falsely accuse and fire any safety rep for ?poor
<http://linkscontent-d1.com/getReturn.php?id=0&q=5808&check=ddefa8ef8162443bab2ffef854165f25>
job performance? that has the integrity to expose their fraudulent
schemes.
Covering up the real reason as to why an incident occurred, causes
incidents with the same root cause to have a high probability of
re-occurrence and can lead to even more serious injuries or to the
tragic, preventable fatalities of rig workers. In the driller?s case
on the Yorktown, there was an attempt to cover up the root cause of
inadequately training new-hires and overwhelming the rigs? abilities
to safely train them. Had the real root cause been revealed, then
management would have had to admit that they just didn?t want to
spend the money for properly training their workers out of the
greed-inspired concern that they would lose money
<http://linkscontent-d1.com/getReturn.php?id=0&q=4440&check=d4561b72902e5dff716ff5d6a34edffe>
in their annual bonuses for exceeding their budgets. So they entered
into an agreement with each other to blame the victim, OIM?s and the
safety reps in order to elude detection of their own culpability.
When the safety manager suspected a safety rep was about to expose
their conspiracy, he quickly sent one of his groveling worms out of
the Houston office to the rig to follow the safety rep around for a
week to determine if he was a threat to their scheme. When they
found out that not only was the safety rep investigating the
incident but had facts and statements that contradicted their lies
then they falsely accused him of poor job performance and fired him
over the telephone when he arrived back at his home.
What made matters worse was that the false reporting and acting on
the root cause for the spike in injuries that were occurring in
Brazil did not actually start on the Ocean Yorktown. They started on
the Ocean Whittington a few weeks earlier when a new man had his leg
amputated by the auger in the shale shaker. Had the root cause of
the injury been honestly reported and acted upon that the rig was
being overwhelmed with insufficiently trained new-hires, then the
driller would not have been injured on the Ocean Yorktown a few
weeks later. Furthermore, had the true root cause of the driller?s
injury on the Ocean Yorktown been honestly reported and acted upon
and the cover-up not taken place then it might had prevented the
tragic fatalities of two Americans and the critical injuries of two
Brazilians involved in a lifeboat accident on the Ocean Ambassador a
few weeks after that.
I do not know all of the details of the Ocean Ambassador accident.
However, if it can be shown that sending insufficiently screened and
trained new workers to the Ambassador was a factor in the fatalities
and the injuries that occurred, then anyone in the Company who had
the knowledge and responsibility to act on the true root causes of
the Whittington and Yorktown injuries and failed to take corrective
action or participated in any way in the root cause cover-ups then
they should be criminally prosecuted on two counts of manslaughter
in both the United States and Brazil. If anyone off of the
Ambassador has relevant information concerning the recent fatalities
then please contact me and if the information reveals that
violations of the Seafarers Manslaughter Act did occur, then I will
file reports with the US Attorney General?s Office, the Brazilian
authorities, the International Labor Organization and the
International Maritime Organization (see Title 18 Section 1115 of
the U.S. Criminal Code).
I have to say that I am disappointed, as many of you are, that
Diamond has sunk to these depths of greed and depravity. I was used
to it condoning and encouraging really bad management practices such
as allowing rig manager Quickdraw McGraw to habitually call the rig,
slobbering drunk at times, cursing out the OIM and threatening to
run off everybody on the rig just to make his pathetic self feel
important. Bad management will be dealt with more closely in the
next Galleon post entitled /A Time For Unions. /But even Jimbo?s
behavior doesn?t begin to compare to the potentially
blood-stained-hands of everyone that was involved in the root cause
cover-up on the Ocean Yorktown. It is a shame that some of the
managers in Diamond Offshore?s Sanhedrin have sold their birthrights
for a bowl of soup and their wormy minions will falsely accuse
anyone for thirty pieces of silver
<http://linkscontent-d1.com/getReturn.php?id=0&q=5715&check=ecacb5bf7e9c5ce6db31bd14447ee940>
and a chance to be the boss one day.
Having said that and having set the record straight from the lies
and propaganda that the company always generates after they have
fired someone under a pretext, I feel privileged that I have had a
chance to work with so many hardworking and dedicated people that I
have made friends with over the years that make their living working
offshore. This website will be a catalyst that will turn their
working conditions around for the better and will be a freight train
that CEO Humpty Dumpty can?t stop.
<http://theghostlygalleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/wDSC02544.jpg>
Ocean Whittington
Christmas Day 2007: Diamond Offshore rig managers unable
to find company electricians to work on the Ocean
Whittington due to intolerable working conditions. Safety
is thrown out the window and an unscreened and
inadequately trained third-party electrician is brought
onboard the rig to fill in. While working in the Ballast
Control room
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the electrician nearly capsized the rig which could have
killed everyone onboard. Safety Manager Dennis Bailey
immediately went into operation cover-up and scapegoat and
falsely accused two safety reps for not doing their jobs-
just as he had done to scores of his other subordinates in
the past.
John favaloro
Its about to hit the fan boys,,,,,,go to the website and read
both articles
Shawn DeGeer
God Bless
Phil 4:13
Barge Capt
O. Quest
--- On *Sat, 12/4/10, QUEST_BARGESUPT /<quest_bargesupt at dodi.com
<mailto:quest_bargesupt at dodi.com>>/* wrote:
From: QUEST_BARGESUPT <quest_bargesupt at dodi.com
<mailto:quest_bargesupt at dodi.com>>
Subject: FW: Offshore Safety Report
To: "shawn degeer" <degeer2121 at yahoo.com
<mailto:degeer2121 at yahoo.com>>
Date
<http://linkscontent-d1.com/getReturn.php?id=0&q=484&check=75f08fa915d7cb14fa69dc8a7cb0f32d>:
Saturday, December 4, 2010, 3:41 AM
Shawn DeGeer
*God Bless*
Barge Supervisor
Brasdril
O. Quest
E-mail: quest_bargesupt at dodi.com
<http://us.mc1301.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=quest_bargesupt@dodi.com>
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Please visit the below Website and forward the link to as many
of your offshore contacts as you have. The information is vital
in order to prevent further injuries and fatalities from
occurring on offshore drilling rigs. Thank you for your response.
Rob Carroll
Safety Rep
theGhostlyGalleon.com
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