Offshore Safety Starts With The People Who Live The Risk
- Yachting International Radio
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
Offshore safety is too often reduced to the language of systems. Procedures, permits, PPE, risk assessments, checklists, standards, reporting lines, incident reviews and compliance frameworks all have their place, but none of them are the whole story. In the offshore world, safety is not simply something written into a process before the work begins. It is carried by the people doing the work, often far from shore, in conditions where judgement, leadership, fatigue, communication and confidence can change the outcome of a task long before an incident ever occurs.
The offshore environment is not an office with a view of the sea. It is a moving, working, high-risk space where people live where they work, depend on one another for long periods of time, and make decisions in places where hesitation, distraction or the wrong mindset can have very real consequences. Weather, vessel movement, heavy equipment, confined spaces, isolation, shift patterns and complex operations all create a working world that demands more than technical competence. It demands awareness.
For Gordon Foot, Merchant Navy Medal recipient, Fellow of The Nautical Institute and Offshore Client Representative, that understanding has been shaped over decades. His career has moved from Royal Navy submarines into offshore operations across oil and gas, subsea work, cable projects, renewables, offshore wind, marine construction and environmental projects. It is a broad maritime career by any measure, but the thread running through it is not machinery, vessels or even technology. It is people.
Offshore Safety Is Not One Conversation
To those outside the sector, offshore work is often reduced to a handful of familiar images. Oil platforms. Wind turbines. Cable ships. Large vessels. Helicopters. Hard hats. Heavy lifts. The reality is far more varied, and that variety matters because offshore safety cannot be treated as one generic discipline.
A subsea cable operation is not the same as a heavy lift. A wind farm construction project is not the same as an ROV intervention. A vessel working off West Africa with dozens of nationalities onboard brings a different human and operational picture from a smaller crew operating closer to shore. Research vessels, construction vessels, offshore support vessels, cable-lay operations, environmental projects and renewables all sit within the wider offshore world, but each brings its own risks, pressures and working culture.
What does remain constant is the need for people to understand the task in front of them, the environment around them, the limitations of the equipment, the capability of the team and the state of their own mind. Offshore work takes place in a physical environment that is unlike almost anything ashore. Weather doors, hatch coamings, moving decks, cranes, winches, machinery, confined spaces, noise, fatigue and exposure are part of the daily landscape. Risk is not theoretical. It is underfoot, overhead and built into the rhythm of the working day.
That is why offshore safety has to be lived. It cannot survive as a slogan.
Safety Is Not A Bolt-On
There is a dangerous comfort in treating safety as something added to work. A meeting before the task. A form to complete. A rule to follow. A box to tick before everyone gets on with the “real” operation.
Offshore, that thinking is not strong enough.
In high-risk maritime environments, safety is not separate from the work. It is the work. It shapes how people prepare for a shift, how they arrive at the job, how they listen, how they challenge, how they assess what is changing around them, and how they decide whether to proceed or step back.
PPE matters, but it is not where safety begins. In many cases, it is the last line of defence. By the time a person is relying entirely on protective equipment, several more important opportunities to manage risk may already have passed. The deeper issue is mindset. Are the people involved in the task in the right frame of mind? Do they understand the plan? Has the risk assessment become a real conversation, or is it just paperwork? Does the team feel able to stop, question, pause or admit that something does not feel right?
The old offshore attitude of “you have been given the job, get on with it” no longer belongs in serious safety culture. High-risk work demands leadership that understands the people interacting with the machinery, not just the machinery itself. It demands teams that trust one another enough to speak honestly before something goes wrong.
Lessons Written In Loss
Maritime and offshore safety have never evolved in a vacuum. Much of the progress has come after disasters that forced industries, governments, companies and crews to look again at how work was being done.
Titanic changed the way the world thought about passenger safety and survival equipment. Piper Alpha reshaped offshore oil and gas safety thinking in the North Sea and far beyond it. Deepwater Horizon brought the consequences of hydrocarbon risk, environmental damage, operational failure and corporate responsibility into global focus.
These events are not simply historical reference points. They are reminders that safety standards are often written in the aftermath of loss.
The important question is not whether offshore industries have improved. They have. Regulation is stronger. Equipment is better. Processes are more advanced. Corporate responsibility is more visible. Training has developed. Environmental expectations have changed. But none of that removes the human element.
People still make decisions. People still lead teams. People still work tired, distracted, worried, overconfident, under pressure or unsure whether they are allowed to say no. Safety culture becomes meaningful only when it reaches that level. It has to live in the space between procedure and behaviour.
Resilience Is Not About Putting Up With More
One of the most important shifts in the conversation around offshore work is the meaning of resilience.
For too long, resilience has been treated as endurance. Put up with it. Push harder. Take more. Cope better. Carry on.
That version of resilience is not strength. It is often the road to burnout, poor judgement and unsafe decision-making.
Real resilience begins with self-awareness. It means knowing who you are, what you are good at, where you are weaker, how much sleep you need, how pressure affects you and when your mind has become too crowded to operate well. Offshore, that matters because mental overload does not stay neatly inside someone’s head. It affects communication, reaction time, concentration, risk assessment and the wider team.
A person heading into a high-risk task with too many competing pressures in their mind is not operating at their best. That is not a moral failure. It is a human reality. The answer is not to pretend otherwise. The answer is to build a culture where people can recognise it, say it and adjust before the operation becomes unsafe.
In that sense, resilience is not about becoming harder. It is about becoming more honest, more prepared and more aware. Offshore safety depends on people knowing their limits before the environment exposes them.
Connectivity At Sea Has Changed The Human Picture
The modern seafarer and offshore worker lives in a very different world from previous generations. There was a time when going to sea meant cutting off almost completely from life ashore. For some, that separation brought focus. The pressures in front of the crew were the ship, the task, the mission and the people onboard.
Today, connectivity has changed that.
With better bandwidth and services such as Starlink, people at sea can remain connected to families, finances, relationships, news, responsibilities and problems ashore. That connection can be a lifeline. It can reduce isolation, support mental health and allow people to remain part of family life while away.
It can also bring the full weight of home into a cabin hundreds or thousands of miles from the people who might normally help carry it.
A divorce, a sick relative, a financial worry, a child in trouble, an argument, an overdue payment or a crisis at home does not stop being real because someone is offshore. Those pressures now arrive through the same connection that allows a goodnight call or a birthday message.
The answer is not to deny seafarers connectivity. People ashore have access to their lives in real time. Those at sea should not be treated as though they belong to another century. The challenge is to understand what connectivity brings with it. Digital access is not only a welfare benefit. It is part of the modern human factors picture. It changes how people experience isolation, pressure, teamwork and emotional load while onboard.
Welfare Must Reach The People Who Need It
Seafarer welfare cannot remain an abstract industry phrase. It has to reach people where they are, when they need it, and in a way that makes sense to the realities of working life at sea.
That means support cannot exist only in reports, campaigns or well-intentioned conversations ashore. It has to be practical. It has to be visible. It has to be trusted. It has to recognise that someone can be surrounded by colleagues and still feel alone. A vessel can be full of people, and still leave someone carrying private pressure behind a cabin door.
The best welfare work understands that contradiction. So does good leadership.
Offshore life is built around teams, but teams do not protect people automatically. They need time, trust, awareness and a culture where people are allowed to be honest about whether they are fit for the next task, the next shift, or the next demand being placed on them. In a high-risk environment, welfare is not separate from safety. It is one of the ways safety becomes real.
The Blue Economy Needs To Explain Itself Better
There is another side to the offshore conversation that deserves far more attention: opportunity.
Maritime is often poor at explaining itself to the outside world. The industry talks to itself, uses its own language, assumes young people understand what exists, and then wonders why recruitment becomes difficult.
The blue economy is far wider than many people realise. It is not only for deck officers and marine engineers, although both remain essential. It needs technicians, analysts, environmental specialists, surveyors, quality control professionals, logistics teams, caterers, welders, helicopter pilots, marine mammal observers, project managers, ROV specialists, cable experts, wind technicians and countless other disciplines.
Almost every skill has a maritime context somewhere.
That message matters at a time when many young people are trying to understand where meaningful, future-facing work might exist. Offshore wind, renewables, subsea infrastructure, environmental monitoring, marine construction and global logistics are not abstract sectors. They are built by people who had to find their way into the industry, often without fully knowing what was possible at the start.
Mentoring plays a critical role in that. People cannot choose careers they do not know exist. If maritime wants the next generation, it has to show them the door before asking why they have not walked through it.
Women In Maritime Need More Than Applause
Representation is not a side issue in maritime. It is part of whether the industry has access to the talent it needs.
Gordon speaks openly about championing women in maritime and mentoring those entering a world that remains, in many areas, predominantly male. The goal is not tokenism. It is competence being recognised without women having to do twice the work to prove they belong.
That point should not need repeating, but it does.
An industry facing skills shortages, technological change, ageing workforces and complex global demands cannot afford to make itself smaller through outdated assumptions. If maritime wants the best people, it has to be a place where the best people can enter, stay, lead and be taken seriously.
Safety culture, welfare, recruitment and diversity are often treated as separate conversations. They are not. They all come back to whether maritime understands people properly.
Offshore Safety Is Human Before It Is Technical
The offshore world will always involve technology. Bigger turbines. Better vessels. More advanced subsea equipment. Improved communications. Digital tools. Drones. ROVs. Data. Automation. New systems, new standards and new expectations will continue to shape the sector.
But the most important part of offshore safety remains stubbornly human.
People need to understand risk. People need to communicate. People need to rest. People need to be able to say they are not fit for a task. People need to trust their teams. People need leaders who see more than schedules and output. People need welfare that reaches them directly. People need careers that are visible, pathways that are open and mentors who help them believe there is a place for them.
Gordon Foot’s career may span submarines, offshore construction, cables, oil and gas, renewables and marine operations, but the message at the centre is clear.
The work matters. The technology matters. The vessel matters. The procedure matters.
The people matter most.
At sea, that is not sentiment. It is safety.
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SUPPORTED BY
CHIRP Maritime & The Seafarers’ Charity
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CHIRP Maritime and The Seafarers’ Charity support Sea Views and its commitment to meaningful maritime conversations that place safety, seafarer wellbeing, and industry responsibility at the centre of the discussion.
CHIRP Maritime: www.chirp.co.uk
The Seafarers’ Charity: www.theseafarerscharity.org
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