ABSTRACT
The regulatory beginnings of the modern offshore Safety Case (SC) are demonstrated by the release of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, where it set up two new organisations to oversee its implementation: The Health and Safety Commission (HSC) (which was dissolved in 2008) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Following the public inquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster, the responsibilities for offshore safety regulations were transferred from the Department of Energy to the HSC through the HSE as the singular regulatory body for safety in the offshore industry (Wang, 2002) (Department of Energy, 1990). In response to this the HSE launched a review of all safety legislation and subsequently implemented changes. The propositions sought to replace the legislations that were seen as prescriptive to a more “goal setting” approach. Since these events the SC regulations of 1992 have seen several amendments in both 2005 and 2015, as well as the release of further regulations, such as: The Offshore Installations Prevention of Fire and Explosion, and Emergency Response (PFEER) in 1995 and the Safety Zones around Oil & Gas Installations in Waters around the UK in 2008. However, while Safety Cases are subject to review and updating as often as is required to keep them up to date, the process of change to the Safety Case may be slow and gives a monolithic appearance to the document. Subsequently, there have been several papers suggesting that a dynamic risk assessment method should be utilised to assist with SC regulation enforcement. This has led to the investigation presented in this report where 508 vessel to platform collision incidents between 1971 and 2015 have been analysed and compared with the release of key offshore SC regulations. The incidents have been sourced from the HSE, World Offshore Accident Databank (WOAD) and the MAIB. This analysis has identified a key trend between the reporting of offshore collision incidents and the release and enforcement of offshore SC regulations.
