Offshore staff
NEW ORLEANS − The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) has implemented a new risk-based inspection program, which employs a systematic framework to identify facilities and operations that exhibit a high-risk profile.
Therisk-based inspections supplement BSEE’s existing National Safety Inspection Program. The OCS Lands Act authorizes BSEE to conduct annual scheduled inspections and periodic unannounced inspections of all oil and gas operations.
The newrisk-based inspection protocol looks beyond compliance and assesses the integrity of critical safety systems that have had multiple incidents of non-compliance or events and may need more attention.
“We developed this program to address areas where trends in compliance and incident data suggest the potential for imminent safety concerns,” said Jason Mathews, chief of BSEE’s Gulf of Mexico Region Safety Management Office.
Inspection findings and incident reports are used by the bureau to assign a risk factor score to each production facility in the Gulf of Mexico. The score is based on specific performance and risk-related information that falls into two types of risk-based inspections: “facility-based” and “performance-based.” Based on analysis of this information, the bureau prioritized the areas that require follow-up under the risk-based inspection protocols.
The first risk-based inspections will focus on crane operations and will begin this month.
03/13/2018
