Approximately 35 Guyanese Pritchard-Gordon Tankers (PGT) workers were educated on safety practices as Shell partnered with the company to host a one-day workshop yesterday.
The workshop was hosted at the Pegasus Hotel, where the workers were taken through the rounds by PGT’s Nick Griffith.
“My main focus for this seminar is to improve safety on board of our ships; not that we have a poor safety record but there are always ways of improving safety on board and it has been proven that little incidents, little triggers can show that there’s underperformance and if we have a lot of small and minor incidents then it’s possible that they can result in larger accidents which we definitely want to avoid,” Griffith told Stabroek News.
He stressed that they have not had any serious incidents in a long time but there have been recurrences of minor ones.
According to the company’s website, PGT “specialises in ocean transportation of crude oil and refined petroleum products in environmentally sensitive areas, using purpose built, shallow draft, double hull tankers.”
Griffith said that he hopes that the workers will be even more equipped than they already are to take the necessary safety precautions when they are working and to ensure that they spread the word to the other workers for a more holistic improvement.
He explained that the main topic of yesterday’s seminar was mooring, which he said is a quite dangerous operation.
“You’re using a lot of ropes under pressure and strain and those ropes, if used incorrectly, can break and the rope will snap and it will whiplash and if that rope hits a person’s leg they could lose it. If it hits them around a vital organ they can ultimately die or fall over and bang their head and it has been seen in the past that mooring is a very dangerous operation,” he said.
