Offshore Safety

As you might have read below, I attended an offshore safety course last week. This was in a nice area of Stavanger called Hinna down one of the fjords from downtown Stavanger (Sentrum). It is located just near the new and impressive Viking FC stadium where the Stavanger Vikings (football team in the premier league in Norway) play. Subsea7 sponsors the Vikings so there is a good chance I will get to see a few of the games this year although they almost got relegated last year due to poor performance. I hope they don't take after the Tigers back home!!!

Anyway because of the harsh conditions in the North Sea and the emphasis on safety in the offshore indutry in Norway, they have these "Survival Suits" that we are required to wear when we go offshore in a helicopter. The suits are quite amazing and keep you completely dry except for your face (but then there is a face shield) and provide amazing flotation - so much so that you actually can't submerge yourself (unless you jump into the water from a height which is what we did). They also have these rebreathing sets on them as well which enable you to breath underwater for over a minute (for example if the helicopter ditches in the sea and then capsizes upside down you can continue breathing whilst you punch out the windows upside down and escape). In Australia this is called HUET (Helicopter Underwater Escape Training) and is quite good fun as you can see by the video of Ryan being submerged and capsized - he is the one in the front of the chopper with the orange head!!!




Here is some photos of me in my survival suit.

We also had to practice evacuating platforms by mustering into lifeboats and liferafts. Some people are bloody hopeless and so slow that it would make it pretty dificult to survive in an actual emergency but you have to ensure everyone gets aboard in order to escape safely. The pic below is a good shot of the escape boats (the one hanging high up on an angle is called a ski-sled boat and is actually launched from that position and then lands in the water bow first becoming fully submerged and then shooting up well clear of the platform). The photo also gives you a good impression of how cold it was with the snow on the hills in the background - click on it for a close up view.

We also did firefighting training which involved putting out different fires.

Anyway it was a pretty exciting course, good fun, and we learnt a lot about practical safety.

Blog ya later!

JIr