Tullow builds capacity on offshore disaster preparedness

Accra, Nov 13, GNA - Management of Tullow Ghana Limited (TGL), a multinational oil and gas exploration and production company, on Friday, organized a workshop for major players in the industry to build their capacity on offshore disaster preparedness.

The workshop was also to inform stakeholders on measures to adopt to rapidly respond to eventualities that may occur during the oil and gas exploration and production in Ghana as well as to learn from the Piper Alpha rig explosion that hit off the north-east coast of Scotland on July, 6 1988 so as to avert an occurrence.

Speaking to journalists in Accra, Mr Gordon Hanna, Environmental Health Safety Lead of TGL, said the workshop offered the company the opportunity to interact with experts in the industry in order to share experiences about mistakes and successes in the exploration and production of oil and gas in other countries and how to avert any disaster in the country. "What we are doing is to give them real scenarios in the gas and oil industry which Ghana has not seen before so that the experts in the industry will be able to assess the resources they need to prepare and to deploy," he said.

Mr Hanna said that historically there had been lots of tragedies that had claimed lives and properties in the oil and gas industry worldwide. He stressed that such disasters could have been avoided if there was efficient coordination and harmonization of duties and responsibilities of the agencies involved.

"Accidents are tragedies. But the biggest tragedy is when people do not learn from such tragedies to prevent such future occurrence," Mr Hanna said. He said that there was the need for Ghana to learn from such scenarios and to map out strategies to effectively manage and prevent an oil and gas disaster.

Mr Hanna called on the media to be circumspective in their reportage especially on tragedies in order to avoid situations where panic, civil unrest and chaos were created as a result of inaccurate and misinformation presented in the media.

He said it was important for people to be well informed so as to allay their fears and added that when properly managed, the oil rig could be the safest place to be. "Rather than speculating, the media would need to cross check facts. Everybody fears something they do not understand but once you understand, you feel safe. I will rather be at an oil rig than in a fishing boat," Mr Hanna said.

He gave the assurance that the company would continue to be transparent to the public in its exploration and production and would not shelve information from the media.

Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. An explosion and the resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men with only 59 survivors. To date it is the world's worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and impact to industry.