I had the joy of studying Latin in school, and a lot of what we studied revolved around the stories of Troy, the foundation of Rome, the various Gods, and their dealings with the mortals. One character that always stood out to me was Cassandra, sister of Paris, the Prince of Troy who steals Helen as his bride and brings about the 10 year war. Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by the God Apollo, but in one version of the story, she then could foresee the fall of Troy, and fell out with Apollo. He in turn was not allowed to take back the gift, but rather changed it so she would be still able to foretell the future, just that nobody would believe her.
"What has this to do with offshore safety?", you might ask. Well, we are now in a challenging, cost-focused environment (again). And there will be significant pressure to reduce workload offshore, (again). And there will be temptation to trim back to the bare minimum again.
The Chair of the HSE, Judith Hackitt, summarised it well in her guest editorial in "The Chemical Engineer", the journal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers of which she was president up to last year. The full text is available here.
She is pointing out that we've been here before. We got it wrong before. And it's entirely foreseeable that we will get it wrong again, if we focus ONLY on the cost, and not on the risk. And while most people will not actively cause harm, it's entirely foreseeable that poor decisions we take now, or even postpone for now, will cause delayed harm to our colleagues at the work-face.
If safety is a core value for our companies, like the words on the wall might say, we need to demonstrate that as much now as in the better times. The point of principles is that they should guide how we behave when it is not easy to stick to them. Let us not be like Cassandra, and see the needless loss of what we and others hold dear.
