[BITList] more Offshore Safety Report

Thu Dec 9 15:21:05 GMT 2010

frank

I have serious doubts about the the writer’s views on safety in the offshore oil industry [is he a commie, disgruntled employee – they’re everywhere?]. 
why?
because he starts off by saying, “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”

look, let’s be reasonable – this is the land of the free, home of the brave [and reality TV], such things as “intolerable working conditions, afraid to speak up, arbitrary and capricious firings” do not exist and are not even considered in our friendly working environments. all company management are reasonable people; they are nice people who would not even give thought to the nasty things that are suggested her!

however, sic transit gloria mundi

colin

From: franka 
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 6:24 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: [BITList] Offshore Safety Report

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
              Posted on November 30, 2010 by galleon1 

              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 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 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 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 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.  

              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 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> wrote:

                      From: QUEST_BARGESUPT <quest_bargesupt at dodi.com>
                      Subject: FW: Offshore Safety Report
                      To: "shawn degeer" <degeer2121 at yahoo.com>
                      Date: Saturday, December 4, 2010, 3:41 AM

                      Shawn DeGeer

                      God Bless 
                      Barge Supervisor 
                      Brasdril 
                      O. Quest 
                      E-mail: quest_bargesupt at dodi.com 

----------------------------------------------------------

                      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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