Assessing Risk

Every company relies on their employees to make good decisions, so encouraging them to do risk assessments is crucial.

By John Fowler, CSP, CMSP

We are accustomed to working around hazards in the water well industry.

The hazards can come from a variety of sources including the equipment, the jobsite, or from the task that is being completed. Your first day on the job, whether it was on a drilling rig or a pump rig, likely had you feeling like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

But after working for a few months, we all usually find ourselves taking shortcuts with routine tasks and perhaps not doing our inspections as carefully as when they were all fresh and new. No matter how hard we try, we can become too comfortable with the everyday hazards around us. This is called complacency and can lead to accidents and injuries.

To stay safe, we need to avoid complacency and get in the habit of stepping back and thinking through our tasks before we begin them. This process is called a “risk assessment,” and in our industry, it has many names:

• FLRA (Field Level Risk Assessment)
• TRACK (Think Through the task, Recognize the hazards, Assess the risks, Control the hazards, Keep safety No. 1)
• Take 5.

Regardless of the name, they all have the same goal: to get us to stop and think through what we are doing before we do it.

How many times have you been around an injury and just can’t believe that someone would put themselves or a part of their body in harm’s way like that? I distinctly remember being part of a hand injury review many years ago where, after much discussion about different controls that could be put in place and procedures that could be changed, the person leading it just asked the room in frustration: “Why did he stick his hand in there in the first place?” It’s because he didn’t think.

Bad things usually happen when we just react to a change in a task or situation without thinking it all through. This is why a culture of employees conducting risk assessments will result in a safer workplace.

There are two kinds of risk assessments that exist:

• The type done in the field
• The type done back at the office.

Risk Assessments Done by Employees in the Field

At its most basic level, a risk assessment is just thinking about potential hazards, identifying the ones that have the most risk for you, and then coming up with a plan of how to keep yourself safe. They don’t have to be written down; they can just be done in your head.

The first step in any risk assessment is to stop and think about the task that you are about to do. It can be as minor as lifting a bag of gel or something as complicated as running in well casing. Once you know the task, the next step is to identify the potential hazards.

There are a couple different ways of identifying these hazards:

• The most obvious is using your experience, but this is only effective if you have enough experience to recognize all the hazards. If you are new to the industry or just new to the task, you may miss a hazard that a more experienced person would catch.
• This leads to the second way of identifying hazards, which is by reviewing a written job procedure. A well-written job procedure should not only have the step-by-step instructions to complete the task but should also include any known hazards.

Many people say that common sense is not so common anymore, which is why a well-written procedure is invaluable when you have someone who is new or inexperienced.

Once all the hazards are identified, the next step is assessing the risk. The risk can be determined by looking at likelihood and severity, meaning how likely something bad is to happen, and if it happens, how bad the outcome is going to be.

An example of a risk assessment matrix is shown above.

An actual matrix is not needed when assessing risk in the field, but it is important to understand the basics of how it works. When assessing the hazards, focus on the ones that you have learned from your experience and the hazards included in the written procedure. Don’t forget to think through hazards that can change during the task, like weather.

Once you have identified which of the hazards are ones you need to be most concerned about, the last step is to put controls in place to keep yourself or the crew safe. They can range from where you put your hands to using specialized PPE. Really, think things through and try to eliminate as much of the hazard as you can.

For example, if you are mixing mud and the pallet of gel is on the other side of the site and you are concerned about the weight of the bags, instead of just using good body positioning when you are lifting and carrying the bags, move the pallet closer to the mixer! Continuously doing these risk assessments throughout your workday will help you stay focused on your tasks and not allow complacency to set in.

Risk Assessments Done Back at the Office

Usually completed by safety professionals, these are risk assessments that focus on the most hazardous tasks. We all know that in our industry there are certain tasks that have the potential risk to lead to a minor injury and tasks that have the potential risk to lead to a serious injury or worse. Those that have the potential risk to lead to a serious injury or worse are usually called “fatal risks” or “critical risks” and should be identified and treated differently than normal everyday risks.

The first step in managing these critical risks is identifying them. Often, your managers and supervisors in the field will know from their experience the most hazardous tasks their crews are doing. Gather these tasks into a list and use the risk assessment matrix to rank them by severity.

Once this is complete, there are two steps that should be done. The first is to incorporate these critical risks into your safety system and the second is to work on implementing controls to reduce the risk to your employees.

Incorporating critical risks into an existing safety system starts with education. The most common way of doing this is by adding critical risk icons that represent the different critical risks that might be present on your jobsite.

Educate your employees so that if they see these icons they understand that a step in the task they are doing has a higher than normal risk and to use extra caution. These icons can have different graphics and wording, but the ones below are relatively common and are the most applicable to our industry.

I would recommend incorporating these icons into your safety paperwork, and I have even seen companies use magnets to attach them to equipment.

But here you need to be careful. If you saturate your paperwork and jobsite with these icons, they will quickly lose their impact. If seemingly everything is a critical risk, they will all quickly fade into the background.

When it is time to start implementing controls to lower the risk, start with the tasks you have identified as having the highest risk. Next, use the hierarchy of controls below to reduce that risk.

As you can see, the most effective control is to eliminate the hazard, and the weakest control is to use PPE. Personal protective equipment is important in our industry, but all too often it is the only control that is used because it is the least expensive. The most effective controls are when you eliminate or substitute a less hazardous way of completing the task.

However, in our industry there are tasks where the hazards cannot be eliminated or substituted; for example, tripping drill pipe. We know there are hazards, but we can’t just leave the pipe in the ground. This is why a lot of companies focus on engineering controls. For example, if we can’t eliminate or substitute tripping drill rods, we can engineer a rod handler to reduce the hazards of handling the pipe by hand.

This can certainly become expensive, but keep in mind how negatively an injury can impact not just your injured employee, but the entire company from the financial impact to the reputational impact.

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At the end of the day, every company must rely on their employees to make good decisions. Obviously, almost all companies want their employees to be safe and invest money in PPE, training, equipment and tools, but in the end, it all comes down to the decisions that are being made at the jobsite.

This is what makes encouraging your employees to do risk assessments so important. Build a safety culture where those doing the work are constantly thinking and asking themselves: What are the hazards, and of those hazards, which of them do I need to be the most concerned about?

Once they do this, then they can come up with an effective plan to keep themselves safe. If you are managing employees, encourage them to complete these risk assessments, but also work on identifying your critical risks, educating your employees about what they mean, and then eliminating or reducing the risk.

Employees who are assessing risk and a management team who has a system to manage critical risks will make for a safer jobsite and eliminate complacency so that everyone can go home safe at the end of the day.

John Fowler, CSP, CMSP, has been in the drilling industry for more than 20 years, working on projects ranging from the Prudhoe Bay oilfield in Alaska to ice drilling in Greenland and at the U.S. South Pole Station in Antarctica. Fowler is safety manager for National Exploration, Wells & Pumps. He is a regular safety workshop presenter at Groundwater Week and can be reached at jfowler@nationalewp.com.