Three recent incidents from across the Australian oil and gas industry share a common, uncomfortable thread. None resulted in serious injury, yet each was rated by investigators as having the potential to cause a fatality, or worse. In every case, the root cause traces back to the same failure: a hazard that had become normalised, or a deviation from procedure that was never properly risk-assessed.

During a well workover, a crew was pulling tubing out of hole “wet,” with crude oil still present, draining through a mud bucket into the cellar. After twelve joints, static electricity ignited the crude. The fire spread through the cellar before the Emergency Shutdown was activated and handheld extinguishers brought it under control. No one was harmed. No well containment was lost. But the investigation found the potential consequence was multiple fatalities.

The technical cause was electrostatic discharge: high-velocity, splashing crude built up static charge on ungrounded and insulating materials in low humidity until it arced to a grounded conductor. The organisational cause was more revealing. Tripping wet was a long-accepted practice on this well, the stuck sucker rod pump hadn’t triggered proper stuck-pump management, and the ignition hazard associated with tripping wet had never been specifically identified in any procedure or risk assessment. It had simply been done this way before, without incident.

The response addressed both layers: ceasing all wet trips outright, tightening stuck-pump management, auditing rig hoses for certified earth-bonded systems, and aligning static ignition controls with AS 1940 (Storage and Handling of Flammable and Combustible Liquids).

A scaffolding team completing final adjustments around a crane pedestal dropped a 2.4 kg kickboard from a platform 6.5 metres up. No barriers or exclusion zones had been established beneath the work area, because the erection and adjustment phase itself hadn’t been treated as “working at height” for risk assessment purposes. The drop zone happened to sit directly above a walkway regularly used by welding crews. DROPS calculations rated the potential outcome as fatal.

The gap wasn’t equipment or training. It was coordination. Scaffolders and welders working the same footprint hadn’t held a toolbox discussion before work began, and loose items at height weren’t tethered. The fix, aligned with Safe Work Australia’s scaffolding guidance and the IOGP Life-Saving Rules, was procedural: tether everything staged at height, barricade exclusion zones whenever work or materials are aloft, and bring all parties sharing a work area into the conversation before the first tool goes up.

The third incident occurred during sea-fastening on a carousel, where a turnbuckle needed adjusting to align with a padeye. When the bottom section wouldn’t rotate freely, the crew improvised, lowering the turnbuckle to a 60-degree resting position and rotating the top section instead of the centre, as the procedure required. A 38 kg pin dislodged and fell 3.4 metres, missing a worker by roughly 400 millimetres.

The turnbuckle’s maintenance had lapsed, forcing the improvisation. But the deeper failure was that the deviation itself went unassessed. No one paused to evaluate what changed when the method changed, even though permit and risk assessment procedures existed. The response now requires a functional check of turnbuckles and locking pins before fastening begins, and mandates that any deviation from a Safe Work Method Statement triggers a fresh risk assessment, echoing the IOGP Life-Saving Rule to obtain authorisation before deviating from procedure.

Taken together, these three events point to lessons that reach beyond their specific tasks.

Accepted practice is not assessed practice. Tripping tubing wet had been done before without incident, and that history was mistaken for proof it was safe. It had simply never been tested against the wrong conditions. Any task that has become “how we’ve always done it” deserves a fresh look at whether the hazard was ever actually identified, or just never triggered.

Deviations need the same rigour as the original plan. The turnbuckle crew adapted sensibly to equipment that wasn’t working as designed, but the moment the method changed, so did the risk, and no one re-assessed. A Safe Work Method Statement is only as good as the discipline to stop and reassess when the situation stops matching it.

Task boundaries are often drawn too narrowly. The dropped kickboard occurred during scaffold erection, a phase never treated as “working at height” in its own right, above a walkway shared with welding crews who were never part of the risk conversation. Where work overlaps with other crews in time or space, the risk assessment has to extend to that overlap.

Every one of these incidents was rated a potential fatality, and every one was avoided by a narrow margin. That margin is not a control. The real test for any operation is whether hazards are identified and managed before the event, not how fortunate the outcome was after it. For crews and supervisors, that means treating routine tasks, adapted methods, and shared work areas as the places most likely to hide an unassessed risk, and building the habit of pausing to ask: what’s changed, and has anyone actually looked at it?

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