The Department encourages persons exploring and exploiting petroleum to maintain a prudent regime for achieving safety. In the context of the legislation, the Department oversees operators’ risk management with the goal of minimizing risk to persons engaged in offshore petroleum activities.
The Department expects operators to make all reasonable efforts to identify all the hazards associated with their proposed operations and to implement all appropriate measures to reduce the risk from these hazards to a level that is as low as reasonably practicable.
In short, the Board’s safety mandate is:
- To verify that operators have appropriate safety plans in place.
- To verify, through audits and inspections, that operators follow their safety plans and applicable statutory requirements.
- To verify, through compliance actions, that deviations from approved plans and applicable statutory requirements are corrected.
The specific activities of the Operations and Safety Department include:
Safety Assessment of Work Authorizations
- Declaration of Fitness
- Certificate of Fitness
- Letter of Compliance
Regulatory Equivalencies
- Regulatory Query Process
Monitoring
- Reporting and Investigation of Incidents
- Reporting of Injury Statistics
- Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committees
- Complaints
Compliance and Enforcement
- Chief Safety Officer and Safety Officers
- Audits and Inspections
- Orders
- Investigations
- Work Refusals