Q: There are lifesaving rules in lots of industries now, including rail and grid operators. Why do you think they are important? Isn’t this a matter of common sense, or a case of overreach by health and safety authorities?  
A: The purpose of the rules is as a communication tool to highlight the actions and measures against a fatal, or nearly fatal, outcome if something was to go wrong on any given day. The rules are very focused, and there are many safety measures to prevent any harm at all.  

Q: Is it because there is a competitive marketplace for information, in safety? 
A: We rely on our workers to adjust every single moment of their working day to dynamic conditions, often while doing very physically and cognitively demanding tasks. The more we can simplify so that their attention is on the most critical things to ensure they stay safe, then the better. That is the heart of what our lifesaving rules are attempting to do.

Q: What’s the benefit of focusing on life risks, when less severe injuries/incidents are likely to be far more common?  
A: The impact of fatalities and the most serious injuries is lifelong for the person affected and those around them. While no safety professional wants to see any harm, we would all say these are the incidents we must absolutely prevent. As the global body for health and safety of offshore wind, G+ collects data from our members. This gives us a greater collective ability to study the most serious incidents, which might not be present in the data of any individual company. That’s the value we bring. Therefore, to my mind, it’s our duty to focus on these incidents.  

G+ has collected data since its inception, with the first report published in 2015. Reporting is a condition of full membership in G+, and we currently have 12 full members with global operations, from Japan and Taiwan to the US. We collect hazard observations, near misses, injuries and fatalities, the first of which was reported last year. We have plans to expand the data fields and new leading and lagging indicators.

Q: Why does the offshore wind sector need lifesaving rules? 
Lifesaving rules have historically focused on incidents most likely to lead to fatalities. While one fatality has been reported to G+ since 2015, this is not to say there have not been incidents where a fatal outcome was just narrowly avoided, or incidents where the safety measures were in place to prevent that worst case scenario. That was a difficulty with the data analysis in our project – to identify the incidents and the pathways to very serious incidents. We needed extra analysis than in previous lifesaving rules projects.

I also think it’s important to publish lifesaving rules for offshore wind because the industry is expanding so fast into new geographical areas, including some areas that historically have not had a significant offshore industry. We have tailored our rules to this scenario as we see it as having the greatest potential benefit and impact.

Q: How can you be sure that the rules are applicable to the operating needs of offshore wind around the world, and not just particular well-established regions, such as the North Sea? 
A: They have to be, by design and intent. Lifesaving rules bring no new requirements. Nothing that shouldn’t already be covered by the procedures and management systems of organisations, and they have nothing that is North Sea-specific. If you can’t set up worksite conditions that enable the safety of the workforce, you shouldn’t be setting them up at all. Also, we are publishing translations into our core languages, Spanish, Mandarin, French and German.

Q: How important is stop work authority in lifesaving rules? 
A: A system of lifesaving rules won’t work without a ‘stop work authority’ programme in place. I said the rules are a communication tool, and mean that both ways.

The first might be management saying: ‘These are critical safety measures to keep you and your team alive through the task.’ But perhaps the most valuable way will be the front line, saying: ‘You’ve told us these are critical measures, but this isn’t in place/working properly/fit right,' or: 'This is difficult to do in this task because x, y, z.’

This is where we learn and improve our worksites to ensure that the conditions to follow the rules are present every day and work doesn’t go ahead without that being the case. It is vital for implementing organisations to recognise this and train their supervisors and leaders in how to respond to situations when they learn something isn’t quite right. Where, maybe, someone didn’t follow a rule, to improve that for the future and enable everyone to follow to rule. Respond wrong and the rules become about ‘control and fear of reprimands’, respond right and your organisation learns and improves, and gains the trust of your workforce, building your safety culture.

Beyond ‘stop work authority’, we list some other fundamentals in our implementation guide, – which if you just launch without having these in place, the rules just won’t work or won’t work as well. These are fundamental elements that enable the rules to function. Because the rules alone are like pictures on the wall if you don’t bring them to life.

Q: How were the G+ lifesaving rules developed? 
A: It started as a work programme initiated by the G+ Board. We started by pooling the different rules that organisations already deployed. And some of the people in the workstream were involved in launching their own organisational programmes. There were some data experts, some senior health and safety people, human performance experts. It was sponsored by the Board, and was one of the largest working groups in my time at G+, and had in excess of 20 individual contributors.

The 10 G+ lifesaving rules

Source: G+

Q: Are G+ members required to follow the rules? 
A: No, the G+ position is that if a company doesn’t have lifesaving rules, we encourage them to implement the G+ ones. For those organisations that already have a programme, the G+ rules might work as a bridge between clients and contractors’ rules. If contractors don’t have them, we would encourage the G+ member to direct the contractor towards adopting the G+ set.

Q: What are the key risk factors to workers in offshore wind operations? For example, could we look to recent work by G+ to improve procedures for transfers or gangway operations? 
A: Working from height is a more common risk across industry and an obvious one for anyone looking at a wind turbine. But transfers are more unique to offshore wind and you’ll see that reflected in the G+ lifesaving rules. Lifting remains a focus for G+, frequently in the Top 5 of incidents reported. And yes, we’ve sadly seen an increase in serious incidents involving walk-to-work gangways, which led to a workshop held together with IMCA (International Marine Contractors Association). The report of that workshop has just been published, and we’re following up on those recommendations.  

But in the rules we also address work planning and permits to work. We have a rule around training and qualifications and making sure that you know what qualifications are needed.

If you spend a lot of time looking at industry health and safety data, you start to see incidents that come from the best intentions, where someone is trying to fix things on the fly. They notice an issue, go to fix it on instinct/best intentions, and something goes wrong.

I have seen incidents that have stayed with me vividly. There was an electrician working on an electrical cupboard, who did the job, had finished it, but then reached behind the cupboard next to the one he was working on, with a rag in his hand, and died as a result of being electrocuted. He was an electrician with all of the qualifications, and we can only guess as to why he did what he did, but there was some dust there and he was holding a rag, and I can imagine him having a reaction that I might have had in my own home when spotting something dusty, and his life was lost.

This was in upstream oil and gas. There’s nothing wrong with that instinct, but sometimes instincts and best intentions take us to unsafe situations. Our job as safety professionals and as organisations is to set up workplaces and conditions to prevent that, make reaching the unsafe place impossible.

Q: Is offshore wind less safe than offshore oil and gas? 
A: There have been articles comparing the injury rates of offshore wind to oil and gas, saying it is two to four times worse, depending on the year or the rates. I have worked in both, and in global organisations. I have seen the narratives of incidents and consequences. The rates are what they are, but the incidents behind them are not the same.

In offshore wind, if you read through the narratives, we have had those very serious walk-to-work incidents recently and that fatality reported last year, but the most severe injuries we tend to have are finger-tip loss, and muscle strains from manual handling injuries that can be quite severe and have life-long impacts. These are serious, but I do not see the frequency of crush/caught-in injuries, severe amputations, burns, or fatalities.

I suspect that once you compare permanent injuries and fatalities, offshore wind will compare favourably. I know IOGP (International Association of Oil and Gas Producers) has launched metrics on that and has started gathering data, G+ are starting that effort as well. And having this data will really help us when we revisit the rules.

Q: You worked at IOGP on its lifesaving rules. What was that like? 
A: That’s right, IOGP originally issued 18 lifesaving rules. I just saw that launch, but it was the next effort I was really a part of. When they were launched, companies started to adopt them in some configuration or another. But a few years later, there was a proliferation of rules everywhere. They had had some impact and companies had seen some results, but the question was: What’s next?

I was a Safety Manager at IOGP at a time when the industry was struggling. We had an uptick in fatalities. We were having persistent issues that we didn’t seem to be able to bring down. There was a real desire for standardisation and that was the crux of the effort then. To simplify and standardise the 18 rules into a set of rules that the entire upstream oil and gas industry could standardise on. It involved reviewing nearly 500 fatal incidents, which has stayed with me since.

Q: Is there a motivation to standardise safety rules in offshore wind?  
A: There is some desire for standardisation now, but it’s not to the same impetus. I’ve alluded to a revision of the G+ rules, that won’t happen tomorrow or next year. We want to track the data relating to the rules to understand how well they do protect people. We feel that’s important before we can push for standardisation.

That would be the end goal. If you work for a service company, a vessel operator, you’ll work for many different clients; if each have a different set of lifesaving rules, you are constantly having to adapt and be trained to meet those rules. And this devalues safety, no matter what the intention is. People start rolling their eyes by the third set of rules they are told is ‘the most important thing ever!’ That’s what standardising industry-wide can bring – the familiarity, knowing what to do, what is required, and that pushes up safety protection.

• Further reading: ‘Offshore wind safety performance mixed, while record 61.9 million hours worked’. Offshore wind activity amongst members of the G+ Global Offshore Wind Health and Safety Organisation, based at the Energy Institute, continued to surge in 2023, with a record 61.9 million hours worked, a 39% increase from 2022. However, total reported incidents have risen, with 1,679 reported incidents in 2023, a 94% increase from 2022, according to a new report.
• No longer in its infancy, the global offshore wind industry is nevertheless still in a dynamic growth phase and is perhaps the key future electricity generation option, says David Griffiths, Chair, G+.