The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) of Australia has published Safety Alert, regarding the quality assurance of diving system audits.
A number of NOPSEMA inspections have identified a trend in the standard of audits conducted on diving systems and equipment. Specifically, a number of operators of diving projects and diving contractors have failed to ensure diving system audits have been conducted to an appropriate standard. While reviewing the audits conducted by the diving project operators and the diving contractors, NOPSEMA’s inspectors identified the following deficiencies:
- Man-riding wire destructive test certification was not adequately assessed, resulting in the failure to identify that the percentage deterioration was greater than that permitted by the relevant International Marine Contractor’s Association (IMCA) code/guidelines and therefore should have been replaced;
- Inappropriate application of a management of change process to justify the deferral of man-riding wire destructive tests;
- Utilisation of a self-propelled hyperbaric lifeboat (SPHL) with the connections for the emergency services (e.g. breathing gas, cooling, etc.) located in a place on the SPHL that was not readily accessible, and therefore not as required by the relevant IMCA and International Marine Organisation (IMO) codes/guidelines;
- Failure to make an emergency services umbilical available for SPHL connection to its life support package;
- A high pressure (200 bar) flexible oxygen hose was found during a NOPSEMA inspection to be too long, made up with joins and was damaged, however it was marked as compliant during an earlier audit;
- Older diving systems built to class have not been upgraded, where practicable, to meet current class requirements, e.g. fire suppression systems within diving chambers unable to be externally actuated.
Each of the deficiencies outlined above should have been identified and rectified as a result of the third party or inhouse audits.
NOPSEMA underlines that failure to identify audit non-conformances associated with safety-critical elements of a diving system may result in an increased level of risk to the air and saturation divers. The non-conformance examples provided above have the potential to compromise the integrity of the system components and reduce functionality in an emergency. Any loss of integrity or system redundancy has the potential to result in serious injury or fatalities to divers and others involved in diving operations.
Key Lessons
Operators of diving projects and diving contractors should have measures in place to ensure:
- quality assurance checks are carried out on third party and in-house diving system audits
- audits are conducted by suitably trained and qualified personnel
- audits are reviewed by personnel who have the necessary experience and knowledge to be competent for
the task - auditor observation lists are reviewed to identify any potential non-conformance items
- non-conformance close out actions are documented and verified by a competent person
- safety-critical non-conformance items are verified closed prior to the commencement of diving operations.
For further information you may read the report herebelow:
Source: NOPSEMA
