Grounded in Safety

BRAZIL OPERATIONS
GALLERY: Transocean Driller in the shipyard

RESPONSIBILITY
GALLERY: 2009 Beach Cleanup in Galveston

AROUND RIG
GALLERY: Celebrating a Year of “Making a Difference”

Brazil. The Sky's the Limit (page 6)

GroundedInSafety

MarvinMullins Marvin Mullins, OIM on the Sedco 710

“Back then, if you smashed a finger, you’d just stitch it up and go back to work – it was considered part of the job,” Hugh said. “Now we are fanatical about making sure that people get not so much as a scratch. That’s how far we’ve come.”

Employees in Brazil have a lot of opinions about achieving and maintaining a strong safety performance.

“It’s all about the details,” says Charles Pereira, RSTC on the Sedco 710. In a recent safety meeting, crew members were asked to perform a quick exercise to emphasize this point. Asked to draw a beach, attendees came up with about 50 different versions. But as they were given more specific information by Charles, “draw a towel on the beach, draw a sun, draw a palm tree, draw a radio sitting on the towel, draw an umbrella,” the images became more and more alike.

“The same information can lead to very different results without details,” underscored OIM Marvin Mullins, who, in fluent Portuguese, encouraged crews to be vigilant about completing detailed START cards and THINK plans.

It’s also about accountability, says Jesus Carrillo, Driller on the Sedco 707.

“Anybody can be right here in my position, but you have to be willing to take on the responsibility that goes with it,” he said. “If somebody gets hurt, that’s on you.”

For Adriano Pereira, it’s about safety leadership each day on the rig, which has helped the Sedco 710 team achieve more than three years without a recordable incident, and knowing that an providing an incident-free workplace, all the time, everywhere, can be a reality.

“I believe our safety vision is achievable,” he said. “The 710 has completed three years free of recordable incidents and we work to finish every day as an incident-free day.”

And for Phillip De Rousselle, RSTC on the semisubmersible Sedco 706, it’s about continuous development and the enthusiasm of the crews to get it right.

“I’ve been on rigs where guys don’t take advantage of their training,” he explained. “Here, the guys want to be trained. I’ll be in my office until midnight checking on classes for guys that come in and request it, but I don’t care – they want to do their jobs, do them right, and I want to help them.”

Sedco 706 OIM Andy Ostrowski says that attitudes have remained positive, contributing to engagement in safety processes and policies, even as the 706 went through the growing pains of a start-up following a major construction project in Singapore.

“We’ve broken out of the mold and we’re building as we go,” he said. “One thing we know is that our guys want to learn.”

Raising Awareness with Communications

Transmissao The Brazil region in August 2003 launched Transmissão, a publication in Portuguese for Brazil co-workers. The brainchild of David Richardson, SAM Marketing Manager, and Alberto Garcia, then Marketing Engineer, who wanted to have a local communication channel, Transmissão provides employees with a regular look at operations in Brazil, in addition to recognizing achievements of employees in the region. Begun as a 6-page, quarterly piece, the newsletter has grown in its six years of life – now running 12 pages every other month. Well known among Brazilians and admired by visitors (who forget the language barrier when browsing its pages), Transmissão content is reliant on both management and employee contributions. Journalist Bianca Gomes, an outside contractor, manages the publication along with designer Rodrigo Secati and writer Joelma Celestrini. To contact them, e-mail Transmissao@mail.deepwater.com. The publication can also be located in the “Publications” section of Transocean’s Employee Communications Web site, FIRST Online (http://first.rigemployees.com).