Big Orange looking blue after contact with the Ekofisk platform
With 26 collisions in 10 years between offshore facilities and visiting vessels on the Norwegian shelf, six with very large hazard potentials, Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority, has said enough is enough. The Petroleum Safety Authority Norway (PSA) believes training and organisational factors should receive more attention, while at the same time, the technical failure rate must be reduced. Continue reading »
Big Orange, big Crunch
Big Orange XVIII hit the water injection facility Ekofisk 2/4-W on 8 June 2009 with six times more energy than the facility was designed for, says a report from Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority, PSA. The incident occurred because the autopilot on Big Orange had not been cancelled before it entered a 500 metre exclusion zone and so did not respond to course alterations input by the officer of the watch and Ekofisk Radar operators did not adequately monitor the vessel’s movements inside the exclusion zone and passed no warning to the vessel.