Evaluation of offshore emergency preparedness in view of rare accidents

Abstract

The offshore industry in the North Sea has gone from a very high risk level for employees some 30–40 years ago, to a low level. The paper reviews the statistics briefly and discusses the implications of the low level. There has from the beginning of the operations been strong focus on emergency prepared-ness, due to the remoteness of the operations mostly far from shore. But there will always have to be a balance between the focus on preventative safety efforts and the extent of emergency preparedness pro-visions. This is discussed in detail, based on an extensive evaluation of the adequacy of emergency pre-paredness provisions recently performed. The main findings are presented, and the robustness and validity of the approach is discussed, together with implications of the rare major accidents.