Industry Solutions: Oil and Gas
Energy producers and their service providers know that worker and asset visibility is critical to the smooth and efficient running of their operations. Traditionally, the lack of visibility for lone workers (especially those in remote and hazardous conditions), has led to slow response times during emergency incidents—with the risk of minor injuries escalating into major emergencies.
As someone responsible for mobile workers, you are at risk whenever they work alone—especially in the hazardous environments common to the oil and gas sector. Without real-time visibility into these workers, you risk your credibility, your company’s safety reputation, and of course the worker’s wellbeing. How much risk is too much?
Case Study: Safety and Compliance
An oil and gas producer, with operations in Alaska, was concerned about the safety of its mobile workers. With an aging workforce, safety incidents were becoming more serious, and low visibility meant that initial low severity injuries risked becoming high severity if emergency response wasn’t dispatched quickly enough. It needed to reduce injuries by improving response times.
Problem
In one incident, a lone worker was knocked unconscious by combustible gas leaking from pipe. He risked being exposed to the elements—particularly, the freezing night temperatures. Lucky for him—and the company—some fellow workers happened to find him. The embarrassment for the company was that nobody in the field office knew about incident. The lack of visibility into worker safety risked escalating the incident from minor to severe.
“My supervisor would have stayed up all night waiting for me to call and my wife too, but nobody at the field office even knew I was hurt—or even where I was.”
Solution
The company found Webtech Wireless’ end-to-end solution the best choice for its needs. Webtech Wireless’ Professional Services Group worked with the company to build a custom solution scaled to its needs, and provided consulting services to integrate the new solution with the company’s existing monitoring center. The company chose WT7000 Locators equipped with WT1900 satellite modems. As part of the training solution, Webtech Wireless trained safety dispatchers and field workers to use the safety pendants—a key component of the man down solution.
Proof
In addition to providing safety, by monitoring driver behavior, the producer could verify employee overtime work, only pay for actual off-road fuel use, eliminate unnecessary or personal use of company vehicles, and eliminate HOS violations.
“Webtech Wireless lets us pro-actively manage more than $40M [worth] of construction equipment, ensuring that it is fully utilized, available for our customers, and billed appropriately as it is used while eliminating communication gaps. Webtech cares about their customers and Quadrant has changed the way we manage our equipment for the improvement of our entire operations.”
--Michael Ward,Equipment Manager,Strike Construction
How Man Down Works
In the event of an emergency, a lone worker in trouble presses the Worker Safety Pendant to send an alert (or, in the event the worker is incapacitated, an alert is sent automatically after a defined period of inactivity). The Worker Safety Pendant sends a message to the Locator installed in the worker’s vehicle. The Locator receives location information from GPS satellites (Webtech Wireless also uses Iridium® satellites as a failover or when the worker is out of cellular range), and transmits it along with worker and vehicle information to the Monitoring Center. When the Monitoring Center receives a distress alert, it consults with the worker’s supervisor before contacting emergency responders and supplying them with the nearest vehicle coordinates (such as a well site).
