BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 11
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
Azerbaijan’s Caspian Drilling Company (CDC) has worked out Business Continuation Plan (BCP) amid COVID-19, CDC told Trend.
“After the first signs of COVID-19 in Azerbaijan, our team started to work on a Business Continuation Plan (BCP) in order to start company procedures that should help to mitigate the risk of infection. Our specialists worked around the clock and on weekends to develop plans and procedures to enable business continuity. For the head office, we limited number of the personnel who attend the office daily to absolutely necessary, all the others worked from home and were coming to the office when necessary. We purchased and distributed among our personnel personal protective supplies, such as facemasks, shoe covers, hand sanitizers and etc. No visitors were allowed to come to CDC office, no face-to-face meetings. All contacts and meetings were conducted by video conference calls including internal company meetings,” said the company.
During video conferences with onshore staff and the rigs the company always explained that such measures are implemented to make sure CDC staff and their families are taking all necessary actions to prevent the virus spread in accordance with BCP and based on recommendations of the World Health Organization.
“These all helped to avoid person-to-person contacts. Strict rules were imposed on the entrance to the company, all personnel were supposed to go through infrared camera for the temperature check and record the temperature and absence of possible COVID symptoms into the logbook. BCP regulated clearly how all personnel shall behave to exclude the risk of infection spread. What is highly important is that CDC managed to enforce our BCP among our client and service providers working for us and for our client. Sometimes it was not easy to get their understanding of the importance of taken measures and we had to push them to comply. We were first in our industry for this strict implementation of the preventive measures and we are proud that some other companies adopted our Business Continuation Plan. We followed the message delivered by President Ilham Aliyev, when he addressed to the nation and explained seriousness of situation and importance of prevention of the COVID-19 spread,” the CDC said.
The company said that implementation of protective measures offshore was a much more challenging task.
“We had to increase the crew change period from 14 days to 28, so people can have some two weeks rest at home after their 28 days offshore and then to go for two weeks quarantine before traveling back offshore. For this purpose, the company rented hotel in one of the Absheron suburbs, next to the seashore. The criteria for hotel were to have full control on the hotel territory and premises as well as to have outdoor space where people can walk. Special restrictions has been implemented to create so called, clean zone on the hotel premises. Unlike in other quarantine facilities, we created a plan for the personnel to walk outside of the hotel building strictly keeping social distance. We are still following the BCP all that time and from time to time, we may make some additions or changes to the BCP accounting our “lessons learned”.
“We are doing all possible and impossible to keep our operations uninterrupted and effective, we started to apply some new technologies considering that our experts can travel offshore only after two weeks quarantine, but sometimes they might be required to support the rig maintenance or repairs urgently.”
“We have purchased remote Wi-Fi explosion proved head mounted video cameras, upgraded Wi-Fi network on our rigs and have implemented remote control of the maintenance and repair works carried out on our rigs, which helps a lot to avoid unnecessary travel of our experts to the rigs and minimize potential virus exposure by the rig crews. After testing this new technology we also proposed to use the same to our client and subcontractors, so they can provide continuous support to the rigs.”
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