MONITORING VERSUS TRUST

Arjan Gossije, Project Manager Marine Contracting: “In our sector, we work together with a lot off different people doing other jobs. An incident during the Baltic 2 project got me thinking about our responsibilities in such cases. What happened was that our customer had hired a crane company to do some of the lifting work
and they supplied both men and equipment, including a crawler crane with a driver. At a given moment, this crane was being operated by an engineer and it was during this time that the crane toppled over. Luckily, there were no personal injuries, but it was certainly frightening. It turned out that this same company would also be supplying the telescopic crane and the driver who would put our guy on top of the jacket (steel foundation structure) every day. As soon as we heard, we informed our customer that we no longer trusted this company and wanted to check the certificates for both the crane and the driver. Fortunately, everything was in order.

From a NINA point of view, you could say that the engineer’s behavior caused this incident. He should have never been operating the crane. Cause identified. But what now? My point is this: how far do we have to go in monitoring companies we (have to) work with? Can we trust in the competence of the companies brought in by our (sometimes famous) customers who are managed under their own SHE-Q systems? Or do we have to check everything ourselves?”

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