AOS Orwell marks 2017 Safety Day

How to ensure safety of personnel and equipment in Nigeria’s oil sector topped discussion at this year’s edition of the annual Safety Day organised by leading indigenous oilfield services company, AOS Orwell Limited, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
The event with the theme, “Demonstrating Consistency and Visibility in Safety” was attended by Quality Health Safety and Environment (QHSE) stakeholders and other key players in the nation’s upstream oil and gas industry.
In his keynote address, Executive General Manager (Technical Services), Total Upstream, Mr. Kenneth Umudjoro, stressed the importance of making a choice to deliver the work safe all the time by first recognising hazards, changes in the context of the job and the capacity to inform the team abinitio such that the operators are empowered to stop the activity once an environment is considered unsafe to work.
“Most of the time, the task is perfectly designed with all the QHSE specification but more often than not, the inability to properly manage the changes in design where it occurs and lack of response plans are the major reasons accidents are recorded during operations,” he said.
Umudjoro said that an ideal safety culture is one in which there is constant cooperation of all stakeholders, requisite competence, knowledge and experience sharing and reporting of outcome.
Earlier in his opening remarks, Managing Director of AOS Orwell, Mr. Femi Omotayo, said, “we did not just arrive here, there has been a journey. To attain the level of visibility and consistency being celebrated today, we first had to submit ourselves to a comprehensive safety audit.
“We crafted a safety vision and invented the 5-S to be able to monitor housekeeping. We embarked on hazard hunts and ensured that we put a journey management initiative in place. The reward of this torturous journey was the major reason we recorded zero Road Traffic Accident (RTA) last year,” he said.
AOS, which operates across sub-Saharan Africa, is structured into three divisions and engages in the business of well construction and conductor casing, process management/automation, OCTG manufacturing and machining.