Edward BRATHWAITE
Director and Principal Consultant
INCREDIBLE SAFETY SERVICES

Tech advances in safety consulting

Trinidad and Tobago

Edward Brathwaite, director and principal consultant at InCrEdible Safety Services, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s strategy for delivering diverse and efficient safety services in the Trinidadian environment. InCrEdible Safety Services is a Port of Spain-based safety consulting firm.

What level of activity is Incredible Safety Services seeing in Trinidad and Tobago?
The past year has been robust with opportunities for us, primarily as a result of the disruptions to activity caused during the pandemic. As most of the oil and gas projects became fully active again after being on hold or slowed down, companies were aiming to maximise their operations, which created strong demand for our services. We provided onsite personnel for different projects and logistics support for some of the less frequent types of operations such as geotechnical surveys.

How are you evolving your service portfolio?
We are aiming to diversify what we offer in order to build better business resilience. We have now included e-learning training as part of our service portfolio to offer a more affordable option for customers in the industry. The use of e-learning technology makes the provision of training sessions more scalable because it is less costly and requires less energy when compared to having to do all sessions in person.

What key challenges or concerns regarding safety in the industry need to be addressed?
One of the key challenges in the energy industry is that most operators wait until an incident occurs before making a significant investment in safety services.
Even then, the response may be inadequate. My speciality is incident investigation and analysis and I find there is generally a reluctance in the local sector to do a thorough analysis when something goes wrong because there is a fear that something may be unearthed which would reflect badly on either the organisation or its leadership. Unless you have leadership who are committed to learning from events, you will not get the proper resources and commitment to understand why things go wrong.
Within the past two years, there were two incidents which devolved to become public spectacles simply because the local industry is not accustomed to doing a thorough, patient, scientific analysis to determine what went wrong. Of course, all of them are preventable, but there is a component in the culture of the industry that needs to be resolved so that these dangers can be detected beforehand.
When incidents occur, we need to be open to learning from them to prevent them from happening again. Aside from the multinational energy companies, who put more emphasis on safety, our local operators need to also step up to the next level practically instead of just saying the right things.

What technologies are you looking to incorporate into your operations to advance your efficiency and effectiveness?
Augmented and virtual reality [VR] are technologies that help to amplify the effectiveness of training. Training programmes typically consist of a presentation, but the practical aspect is another component and requires a completely different environment. However, virtual reality provides the opportunity to experience the work environment without the potential harm. If we want our level of safety delivery to go to the next level, we have to get to a point where we can prepare a lot of people off-site but in a more immersive manner before they get to the real environment.
We are working in partnership with multinational training providers to incorporate this, along with a mixed VR e-learning training simulator space where we can provide that environment to train even more efficiently.
In terms of managing personnel, we are working on deploying devices our people can wear that allow us to track where they are on a site, telling us whether our workers are at a height, near an excavation, or underground so we can deploy safety resources more effectively. There are technologies out there that, if brought together, can enhance the safety in the field.

Which of your recent achievements has helped to lay a stepping stone to expand your business to international markets?
This year, we were the recipients of the Supply Vendor Award 2024 in the category of Vendor Partnership from Woodside Energy here in Trinidad. We have won in two categories for our commitment to our partnership with them, and for helping them to find solutions to their safety concerns. We ran a pilot programme for them in Houston which we hope can open up an opportunity to expand and roll out the programme to other locations internationally.
In terms of expanding our services, the Gulf of Mexico will be our first port of call. Once we can operate and create a client base there, we can look at other parts of the world. We are open to expanding our presence into other international markets in order to build a base from which we can do more business and generate income in USD.

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