Enhancing safety in drilling

TRIPOD is an approach to safety aimed at the underlying problems which lead to accidents. In order to identify areas for remedial measures a Failure State Profile instrument was developed using indicators for the 11 different General Failure Types identified in TRIPOD. This paper reports on an implementation in a desert drilling environment. Different checklists based upon indicator items gave reliable profiles which also allowed discrimination between rigs, respecting expected difference between those rigs. The process of collecting indicators and the use of the checklists was easy to perform and provided encouragement that a usable and useful diagnostic instrument could be developed for a wide range of exploration and production settings