J Ray McDermott’s philosophy and commitment to high safety standards has paved the way to yet another world-class safety milestone, as the company recently completed two years without a Lost Time Incident (LTI) at its Jebel Ali fabrication yard.

“We are extremely proud of our fabrication team for their unabated efforts to achieve our goal of safety excellence,” said Hafez Aghili, president of J Ray McDermott Middle East, Inc. “By establishing an organisational responsibility to embrace our corporate Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) principles, and by communicating and implementing these principles at all operational levels, we have achieved safety excellence.”
Between August 2003 - 2005, J Ray successfully completed over 10.5 million man-hours fabricating offshore structures for field development projects in Qatar, India, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf of Mexico. One of the most challenging projects performed during this time was the fabrication of a 12,785-tonne, 179 m, truss Spar hull for Murphy Oil Inc’s Front Runner project. The fast-track project was completed within 14 months and involved provision and management of a safe working environment for a workforce numbering over 1,300 within a totally confined structure.
“Conducting business in full compliance of our management system, codes and standards is one of the core elements of our HSE policy,” commented Bob Boyd, general manager, Middle East Fabrication. “We always strive to maintain our leadership in the industry by deploying the best safety practices to enforce safe working behavior; safety is the highest priority during all stages of project execution,” he added sincerely.
Committed to continuous improvement, J Ray’s Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) at the Jebel Ali facility has decreased by approximately 84 per cent from the end of 2003 to August 2005, to just 0.15 injury occurrences per 200,000 hours worked.
J Ray’s dedication to evolving a management system based on the concept of ‘safety first’ led to the refinement of many conventional operational methods leading the way to global information exchange, incentives programmes, behavior-based safety management, and robust training and evaluation programmes.
“We instill a strong discipline of zero tolerance among our employees; everyone in the team has the power to stop any work he deems to be unsafe,” said Boyd. “Our excellent HSE performance has been recognised by our clients worldwide, and just recently we won the ExxonMobil Development Company’s prestigious Contractor of the Year award for 2004, in recognition of the company’s excellent safety performance working on the RasGas Offshore Expansion Projects, and Qatargas Projects, for which ExxonMobil is one of the major shareholders.”
McDermott is a leading worldwide energy services company. McDermott’s subsidiaries provide engineering, fabrication, installation, procurement, research, manufacturing, environmental systems, project management and facilities management services to a variety of customers in the energy and power industry, including the US Department of Energy. Its subsidiary, J Ray McDermott SA is a leading provider of solutions for the offshore field development worldwide.