Back to Qatar

Once my job onboard Sanko Angel completed, I received an email offering a job at Qatar. The job again involves Diving Operation.

The beauty of middle east country is most of them can be entered with VOA (Visa On Arrival) applicable to Malaysian but not so sure about other countries.

This time around in Qatar, I joined the Diving Support Vessel (DSV) Seamec Princess as per photo

The job I'm involved is series of pipe spool installation around Qatar Petroleum offshore platform. The diving operation totally only engage Saturation Diving and no air diving involved. Basically on board the diving support vessel there are systems of equipment that support the saturation diving operation. In saturation diving, the divers live in a pressurized environment, which can be a saturation system or "saturation spread", a hyperbaric environment on the surface, or an ambient pressure underwater habitat. This may be maintained for up to several weeks, and they are decompressed to surface pressure only once, at the end of their tour of duty. By limiting the number of decompressions in this way, the risk of decompression sickness is significantly reduced. Some photos of chamber system attached herewith;

As the HSE in this kind of operation,  brief understanding on the diving procedure is required. HSE will assist the diving operation in term of the health and safety aspect of the diver. Most important actually the diving support operation i.e the rigging up and lowering down equipment and tools to the diver and job sequence.

During the entire job, I faced one incident whereby the diver not releasing one sling from the pipe spool (sample as per photo).

This causing the spool twisted when the crane lift up its block to surface not knowing that that single sling is still attached to the very pipe spool. Even the vessel also jerking due to the momentum of the stuck crane lifting movement. Luckily  no injuries suffered but we experienced downtime due to the damaged spool which need to be sent to shore for repair and rework.

HSE with other team onboard come out with the investigation and carry out the corrective and preventive action to avoid recurrent of such event.

Its is always proper coordination that can prevent untoward incident in any kind of operation, and to achieve that requires all parties involves ultimate cooperation and mutual understanding.