Order to North Atlantic - West Phoenix - Emergency preparedness, logistics and maintenance

From 9 to 11 January 2018, we conducted an audit of North Atlantic Drilling (NAD) and the West Phoenix mobile drilling facility. The audit focused on the domains of emergency preparedness, logistics, maintenance and the working environment.

Objective and background 

West Phoenix is a semi-submersible drilling facility of the Moss Maritim CS50 type, built at the Samsung shipyard in South Korea. It is operated by NAD and received Acknowledgement of Compliance (AoC) from the PSA in 2008.

West Phoenix has operated for a long time in the UK sector and has a contract with Wintershall Norge AS to undertake drilling activities in production licence 894 in the Norwegian Sea.

The objective of the audit was to verify that the regulatory requirements within emergency preparedness, logistics, maintenance management, employee participation and the working environment were being complied with.

Result

The audit detected a series of non-conformities and improvement points in various areas within NAD’s management of HSE for West Phoenix.

Based on the findings made by the audit, we have now issued North Atlantic Drilling with the following order:

Pursuant to the Framework Regulations, Section 69 concerning administrative decisions, with reference to the Management Regulations, Section 6 concerning the management of health, safety and the environment, the Management Regulations, Section 21 concerning follow-up, the Framework Regulations, Section 7 concerning responsibilities pursuant to these regulations, with reference to the Framework Regulations, Section 25 concerning application for Acknowledgement of Compliance for certain offshore mobile facilities and guidelines, NAD is ordered to implement the following measures:

1.    Review the company’s management system and associated work processes for ensuring monitoring and rectification of technical, operational and organisational faults and deficiencies. The work shall include an analysis of why deficiencies relating to the management system, organisational factors and technical requirements in the regulations were not identified and rectified on West Phoenix.

2.    Review measures to ensure that outcomes and lessons learned from item 1 of the order also include all facilities with AoCs under NAD’s area of responsibility in Norway.

A time-delimited schedule for complying with the order shall be sent to the PSA by 2 March 2018. The schedule shall describe how this work is to be performed and followed up and when the order will have been complied with.