A ‘Safer by Design‘ workshop was held in Oslo, Norway, last month on the subject of emergency escape from a turbine nacelle in the event of a fire.
The G9 Offshore Wind Health and Safety Association (G9) held the workshop, which was attended by a range of industry representatives with engineering and HSE backgrounds with presentations given from a number of experts within the industry on fire control and mitigation, equipment and PPE to facilitate escape from the nacelle, and escape training and competency requirements.
In addition to the presentations, there were separate breakout sessions where groups undertook a short design led review based before reporting back on key discussion points and conclusions in a final plenary session. The outputs of these breakout sessions will be formalised in a report and will be published by the Energy Institute (EI), who are working in partnership with the G9 in order to meet their objective of improving health and safety performance in the offshore wind industry. This report will shortly be available to the industry via the G9 website.
Frank Monaghan, Health and Safety Director, ScottishPower Renewables, and Leader of the G9 Safer by Design workshop programme, says, ‘The Safer by Design workshops are an important part of the offering given by the G9 to the offshore wind industry in order to demonstrate leadership on health and safety issues. By providing a forum with participation from developers, operators, OEMs and service providers to focus on offshore wind farm design phase issues, we can make real improvements to health and safety performance and also drive responsible cost reduction in the industry.’
