Safety Flashes – a review of 2024

All the published safety events or incidents are available on the IMCA website as individual web pages at https://www.imca-int.com/resources/safety/safety-flashes/. 

IMCA members can sign up to receive Safety Flash emails. These comprise links to a number of events or incidents (usually 5) and a link to all the events collected together as a PDF.

The 24 Flashes covered 88 individual incidents or events shared by IMCA members. A further 33 incidents or events from information already in the public domain, from different trade bodies and/or regulators, were shared as being of interest. It should be noted that Safety Flashes are intended to be read by our members’ offshore crews, and by office-based safety professionals.

IMCA Safety Flashes are aligned with the IOGP Life-saving Rules. In 2024, 31% of our members’ reported incidents or events involved the “Line of Fire” rule. 24% were “By-passing Safety Controls”. For completeness it should be noted that an incident or event might fall under more than one IOGP Life-saving Rule – or under none at all.

• Line of Fire: Of the 27 events or incidents reported by members that were categorised under “Line of Fire”, three were LTIs. There were ten hand, arm or finger injuries – all the LTIs under Line of Fire were finger injuries. Hand and fingers injuries remains a concern, and looking closely at safety promotional material in this area will be a priority.
  
  
• By-passing Safety Controls: In the 21 events or incidents reported by members, we see occurrences such as an unauthorised entry into confined space, misuse of tools, watertight doors left open, carriage of Dangerous Goods by vessel without proper certification, and approved safety devices being tampered with.
  
  
• Safe Mechanical Lifting: Seven events – some of which will also be line of fire issues and/or equipment failure issues – were reported. There were two cases of crew being caught on lines during lifting operations, one snagged by a tag line, the other, pulled to deck by a crane whip line catching on fall arrest equipment.
  
  
• Working at Height: Six events broke the Working at height rule. Two of these involved unauthorised working at height in a confined space, and one of these was a case where someone was prevented from working at height doing hot work in a confined space! The importance of crew being able and willing to exercise STOP WORK AUTHORITY cannot be understated.
  
  
•  Other issues
  • Failure of equipment: There were six incidents where failure of equipment was an immediate cause. A trend worth highlighting, possibly, is that two of these involved significant structural failure of small boats – fortunately with no persons actually in them at the time.
  • Dropped or falling objects were reported on 13 occasions, including a Pipeline End Manifold yoke dropped, a lifting beam fell when a strop parted, cargo was dropped during lifting operations, and equipment dropped or fell over on several occasions.

A deeper dive into the safety events reported by our members may be worth taking at a later stage. In the interests of members getting a shorter summary, we will stop here and simply provide members with a useful list of the incidents published during the year.