Offshore Incident Statistics

Effective July 17, 2006, the regulations for incident reporting incidents other than fatalities, injuries, losses of well control, fires/explosions, collisions, and spills were revised. Currently the following other incidents must be reported:

• All incidents involving structural damage to an OCS facility. 'Structural damage' means damage severe enough so that operations on the facility cannot continue until repairs are made.
• All incidents involving crane or personnel/material handling operations.
• All incidents that damage or disable safety systems or equipment (including firefighting systems).
• All gas releases that initiate equipment or process shutdown.
• All incidents that require operations personnel on the facility to muster for evacuation for reasons not related to weather or drills.
• All other incidents, not listed above that result in property or equipment damage greater than $25,000.

NOTE: Incidents may be counted in more than one category. For example, an H₂S Release might also involve a Muster for Evacuation and would be counted in both categories.

*** Effective July 17, 2006, BOEMRE revised the regulations for Incident Reporting. Previous to that date, most incidents in this 'Other' category were not specifically required to be reported.

¹ Only unignited gas releases are included; ignited gas releases are included under Fires/Explosions. Gas releases related to losses of well control are also not included and are listed under Loss of Well Control Incidents.

² Some H2S Releases counted here may be below the reporting threshold.

³ Effective July 17, 2006, BOEMRE required that incidents resulting in > $25,000 property/equipment damage be reported. The incidents in this category shown on this chart include only those incidents that do not fall into another reportable category.

⁴ The incident reporting regulations do not specifically require reporting of pipeline incidents. However, most of them are reported because they are associated with another reportable incident type, such as a spill.

⁵ These are incidents that are reported to BOEMRE, that do not fall into any specific reportable category.

Incident Information

• OCS Lifting Incidents 2007-2008(146 KB PDF)

With the release of the incident reporting rule in 2006, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) received more reliable incident information for events occurring on the Outer Continental Shelf. An MMS workgroup recently performed some analysis and completed a report on all lifting incidents reported to the MMS in 2007 and 2008. Within the report, recent trends on types of lifting devices and what was being lifted are presented for review to possibly prevent the reoccurrence of such incidents. In continuation of analysis and efforts completed to date, the MMS will work with industry to identify the leading causes of lifting incidents to reduce future undesirable incidents.

Incident Summaries