Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Lee Ellis. He’s an offshore maritime professional who’s going to share with us today a pretty exceptional story about an incident at sea and some of the learnings from it. Lee, welcome to the show. Excited to have you with me.

Thank you very much, Eric.

So, Lee, why don’t you start out with your story and what happened in, in that, that day in 2020?

Yeah. So, I was working on a service operations vessel on off of the east coast of the Uk supporting wind farm operations. We were doing service and maintenance and on this particular day, there’s nothing significantly different about it. It was quite a bright, sunny December day. It was quite pleasant. But we were involved as a, as a craft with the, an incident involved a fishing vessel by the name of Gal wadi Moore, which has had a catastrophic underwater explosion. So, it started as a regular day for our wind farm. The SOV was called the Sag Nord. So, we had part Norwegian crew, part Dutch crew, part Danish crew. Sorry. And then UK resident technicians and a nice mix of general different nationalities now on board, all working together. So, yeah, on this day, just gone past 11:00am, cool, bright sunny morning, as I said, December 15th and there was a very loud bang. I was in my office on the operations, in the operations management office on board the vessel.

Yep.

And yes, the air fell silent for a few seconds after this bang and then all of a sudden there was quite a lot of commotion in the changing room which was located right next door. A lot of the crew members were rushing into the, the rescue equipment locker. And then my desk phone started to ring. It was the vessel captain, and he was calling to let me know that they just received a mayday call from the fishing boat and it was located approximately three, three miles away from, from us from our current location at that point in time to the north of our position. So just a little bit out of the wind farm and that the SOV itself was going to deploy its fast rescue boat and its fast transfer vessel, which are Two small rib type craft with three, three crew on each, driver, navigator and an assistant person, rescue person, if you will. And they were going to go to the location to assist where possible with this news. I called all the, for all the work within the wind farm to be stopped immediately. And so, we did have a couple of teams out on locations already.

At that point they had to play deployed on two different turb. So, I gave them a shout on the radio and also to the control room, put a full stop work order on the whole wind farm, everybody to just stop what they’re doing, go to their nearest safe place within the wind farm or within their wind turbines and just take a break and wait for further news. We also deployed, we had a, a small service vessel, transfer vessel with us as well. Kind of moderate size, twin catamaran hull. She could carry up to 12 people. And I deployed her out to go sit with two teams between their turbines so they can provide support facilities if they want to go back on board, use the toilet facilities, stuff like that, or fresh water supply. They were there available for them.

Sure.

Until we knew, you know, if we needed any additional resource, we knew where to find them. But for the meantime, they’re in a safe place. So, once they must have in the safe areas and received the messages back, we started to receive more information from the fast boats that were seen at the scene of the vessel, the fishing vessel, where the explosion had taken place. And they’re in the process at that point of rescuing all seven of the fishing boat crew. Some of these crew members were in very serious condition. So, to put it into context, the skipper, he was in, he received in the wheelhouse at the time, he actually had three broken vertebrae.

Wow.

Broken cracked sternum and orbital bone and significant knee injuries. The first deckhand let’s find him. He, he was a fractured skull, fractured pelvis, arm, ribs and toes and a ruptured bladder.

Wow.

The second deckhand had a broken leg, damaged knees, damaged knees and elbow and a punctured lung. The third deck had the deck hand. My apologies. He had significant eye injuries, plate to cranium fracture. So, it’s skull fracture and loss of sight in one eye. The fourth deckhand, he had minor injuries to his shoulder, ankles, knees, neck and back where he’d been thrown around in the blast. The fifth deckhand just had minor cuts and bruises. He was the guy who was on deck of the vessel, fishing vessel at the time. He kind of got thrown in the air and landed back on his feet and then fell over. So, he had Minor injuries. And then there was the night watchman who was in below decks. He was being the night watchman. He was asleep in his bunk, and he got thrown clear of his bunk. So, he was in the prone position in the upper bunk. He had a broken leg, broken hip and a broken shoulder where he was thrown out of his bunk completely. So fairly substantial significant injuries there. And yeah, so it was quite a quite difficult time for dealing with those casualties as they were coming back to the vessel.

So, everyone who wasn’t directly involved in the running of the critical vessel operations, we assembled them out on the back of the rear deck where the fast boats are recovered back to the, the main service operations vessel. And we made it into a; the deck area became a triage basically for the administration of first aid and pain relief. So, on board the vessel as well as having the, the basic first aid training that we all have to do to go offshore, we also had a vessel medic. We had an independent medic on board as well for being in farm paramedic grade medic with us who had been doing additional training on days when we weren’t able to work. He would give us an additional first aid training lessons and progressed our first aid level skills up to an advanced level.

Sure.

To the point where we could administer a pain relief in the form of a drug called Pentorex, which is an oral, oral pain relief. It’s like a little cylinder capsule. You pop the capsule and you take it like an inhaler. But it’s quite a strong, potent pain relief which we would been trained to use. So, he was out there as well. So he was, he was organizing the triage. Basically, we set up accidental emergency on the back of an offshore vessel. So it was, it was quite an interesting, interesting morning at that point. So, as well as controlling things in the wind farm, I was also hands on with the. Administering first aid to both the fishing boat skipper and the second deckhand. I, I did the bandaging of the skipper’s legs. So, I actually saw his, his bone, his shin bones.

Wow.

Where he had been thrown in the wheelhouse. His shins and his knees had taken out the counter console of the wheelhouse itself, and it basically skinned his shins on both legs. So try to patch him back up as best we could just so that he was able to transit back to shore at that point. Right. The other guys had the other, more, more serious casualties out on deck on, on stretchers and spine boards and we’re administering additional pain relief to them as well. Obviously, the Paramedic and the, the ship second officer were far more highly trained. They could administer more different pain reliefs that they had available to them. So, they were going through those and putting IV drips and stuff in as well. So yeah, it was quite a significant time.

And do we know what happened that caused that explosion?

Yes, we do. So, there was after the event a few, a few months later, well, the vessel was towed back to shore and assessed. She didn’t sink. Surprisingly she did take on water, but she didn’t sink. There was significant, the significant damage throughout the vessel. The, the hole was rippled as well. The bulkheads had moved; the engine mountains had moved by six inches. It actually shifted the whole engine inside the vessel off of its engine mountains in, in the, in the depths of the. The hull.

Wow.

But yeah, she was actually token back to hull in, in Yorkshire to a maritime yard there and assessed by the maritime agency. And it was determined that it was a Second World War bomb that had been caught crabbing. That. Yeah, yeah. But it’s not as crazy as you might think and I’ll get onto that bit in a minute. This is, yeah, she, she dragged up. They reckon It’s a 250-kilo bomb damage that they assessed it to be and then they did send down a, a dive robot a few, a few months later and they found fragments. There were also fragments in one of the pots, the crabbing pots that remained on the seabed where it parted the line and they found pieces of that. So, it was significant physical evidence to say exactly what it was. And they reckon it was a, say a 250 kilo German Second World War bomb. But yeah, so due to the unfortunate events of that day and being a completely random nature, but it’s still estimated, you say about the bomb, about a hundred thousand tons of unexploded bombs in and around the UK waters.

So, 100,000.

100,000 tons. Yeah.

That makes it risky to do anything that touches the.

Whoa. Yeah.

Deep water surface.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a real big. 

It’s.

They, they still pull stuff up all the time. Occasionally the fishing boats will pull up an old sea mine or something like that and you hear of the lifeboat, or a naval vessel will go out, and minesweeper will go out and try and deal with it or they’ll locate it. Things get dragged up and then they get destroyed by the bomb disposal. Whether it be depends on where it sits as well on the shoreline. If it’s higher than the tide mark, then the army have to deal with it. If it’s lower than the tide mark, then the navy will drag it out to see him and make a big water splash. So. But yeah, there’s a lot of it out there still, especially around the east coast, obviously, because it was closest to mainland Europe. So, yeah, so there’s a lot of that out there.

Wow. So, in this example, how, how would you characterize leadership under pressure? Because you, you were in a routine day, or what appeared to be a routine day until about 11am and in, in a high-pressure environment, how do you prepare for this type of decision making? 

You have to rely on your training. And there’s no, there’s no specific training for that scenario, sure, no, and there probably never will, but you can always, you can always maybe surmise it may happen, but the risk factor is very minimal. But in the offshore renewables and in the offshore industry on a whole, it’s always about the training of what you, you prepare for the worst conditions is it particularly a high-risk environment. And so, there’s a lot of time, you know, it’s all about having good risk identification and mitigation factors. And it’s the same with a lot of land-based industries. You, you train to identify what is the potential risk to yourself, your team, your crew and also in the environment. And this, however, being at sea is purely complicated by that fact that you are isolated and well away from regular emergency services. You’ve got no fire, you’ve got no ambulance, you do have helicopters and we do have helicopter support from shore. The, the Coast Guard agency in the UK have interspersed helicopters around the UK coastline. But again, where you are in the North Sea, you could be an hour away from one of those.

We were, we were 45 minutes at the outset and that was a direct flight to us. And he was, he was hightailing as fast as he could in a large rescue helicopter and that was still 45 minutes away. So, you know, you are isolated, so you have to deal and you have to be prepared as best you can. Anybody who goes offshore has to be trained in the basics of emergency firefighting, first aid, management of control of certain situations as well. So, you do those as undertakings, but then you progress and you learn, you take as many more additional trainings as you can over periods of time. You, you basically, you increase and advance your portfolio, and you also add experiences into that. So, in this situation, although unprepared for it, having never faced an explosion before, it’s a case of, well, what Can I deal with and how can I deal with it? And it’s. So, it was a case of us. You’ve got to keep calm. It’s first, first and foremost in any situation, at any management level, you’ve got to keep calm and look at the facts and see what it is you’re actually dealing with.  

And what can you do to help and aid that situation or make things better or make improvements. You get the rescue parties moving as fast as you can. Which was dealt with in this situation by, by the vessel crew, by the captain on the bridge. He sent out his rescue teams on their fast boats. And from my side of things, for managing my personnel that I was directly responsible for, it was to make sure that the initial teams I had out, as I said before, they, I made sure they went to a safe place and they stopped work so they couldn’t come to any further harm of what they were doing. The turbine that they were working on was shut down. There was still power available. They still had, they had food and water, and they had a support vessel there for other needs that was necessary. You could ask why, why didn’t they just get on that support vessel and sit there all day? But actually, if it’s quite a bit, if there’s a little bit of lump or swell out there and you’re not that well-seasoned a maritime traveler, a wind turbine is actually a far more stable place to be than traveling around on a boat all day.

So, you know, some of the lads do have to deal with seasickness. They’re quite happy sitting on a big boat because that doesn’t move so much. But they don’t want to sit there all day, Bobb, if they don’t have to. So, they’d much rather be in a more comfortable situation on the turbine. So, so yes, there’s other things you have to deal with, but basically, it’s, it’s to keep a cool, calm and collective head about yourself and deal with each thing as you come across it.

So, so there’s an element of also being prepared for the unexpected. I think that that, that comes through from your story because I think in most trades, we tend to assume the best possible outcome. And as you said, there’s conditions. It’s a little bit like when you’re in the, when you’re in the air for pilot or if you’re at sea, you’ve got to be self-sufficient and find your way through whatever is happening in front of you because of that extended distance. I’ve been to many offshore wind onshore wind farms. But I can’t fathom to imagine the exponential difference in risk when you’re offshore and you’re dealing with the same wind farms.

Yeah. I mean between being on the actual wind turbine, the risk is exactly the same. That part it’s all, it’s all about the getting to and from. It’s, it’s about that element of working at sea and in, in high-risk environments like the offshore renewable industry, you have to build, you have to build your culture daily risk awareness and it’s all about the good safety culture. So, the development along with the training, you develop a good safety culture. It’s something that every company wind farm site strives to achieve and maintain, and it takes the involvement of all parties. So right from every new visitor that starts on site, they have to start with a thorough site induction as well as the site induction. You do a safety induction, you go through all the relevant toolboxes talk talks, incidents that have happened, recent historical facts with the safety related within the wind farm. Along with that initial induction. The team, if they’re going out, will have pre-sale briefings. So again, you’re looking at the reef risk factors again and the toolbox talk as well. You’ve got to have a toolbox talk every day before you do anything.

Regardless of what industry are onshore, offshore.

Yeah.

In America, maritime, aviation. All the same, everybody has a toolbox talk periodically as well to make that safety culture long standing and get the buy in of everybody you’re looking for. We do safety focused stand down days and stuff like that and team building days designed to make sure that everybody you know is, is both fully engaged and comfortable and confident in identifying the, and discussing and reporting on positive and negative safety issues and risk jobs used in this way that creates a very productive safety culture which should you know, part the way for everybody having a safe and productive but everybody coming home safely at the end of the day. And that’s the number one most important thing.

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and there’s also, I hear in your story a lot of elements of recurring recurrent training as well. Right. So, what you were talking about in terms of the medic it’s not okay I’m qualified with first aid, it’s how do I continue to upskill while we’ve got some downtime so that my skills are prepared for an unexpected event like what happened that day.

Yeah, absolutely. With, with any training it’s always about keeping it fresh as well and doing. You have, as I mentioned, the basic periodical trainings that everybody has to go offshore. They call them the GWOs, the global wind Industry Organization trainings which covers your fire awareness and those, all the basics, that’s fine, you repeat them every couple of years at a training college but in the meantime it’s expanding on those skills and making yourself a better training portfolio for yourself and making your skills sets fresh. And as you mentioned, the paramedic on board, he was an ex British army paramedic. Absolutely lovely guy. But he was, he was adamant that if we had days when we weren’t doing a lot because the weather was too bad, we were training with him. He, he didn’t, you know, you couldn’t go down to the games room and play computer games. No, no. Today we’ve got a training session and we would do two or three hours of advanced first aid to the point where he pushed it and to his credit, absolute credit and on this occasion he, he pushed us through to doing our advanced first aid certificates and we were under him to do advanced first aid which is, it’s maybe a two, one or two steps below UK paramedic level.

Certainly, it’s like an ambulance technician level where you’re able to do the splinting, a lot of the traction stuff, putting into baskets, putting, preparing for spine boarding. We also went to the level where we could give minimal pain relief in the form of the Penford, which is, it’s like an oral inhaled pain relief which is what we’re permitted to do. So. Yeah, so you know, you can never stop learning and the training is, is valid and significant but it’s, it’s very well and good doing it in the two-year cycle. But if, if you don’t keep up those periods of training more often and keep it fresh in your mind and things become stale and stagnant and you forget.  

So yeah, it also takes a mindset around training to maximize the value to, from a growth mindset to also say how do I get to the best version of myself from a safety standpoint because I can pay attention to training, soak it up or assume it will never happen to me.

Yes, definitely. And with these sort of things it’s Very easy to, to say, oh yeah, you do that when you speak to the new guys I mentioned before, you have to the new, a new visitor or a new technician comes to the site and you say well what advice would I give them? And my advice would be quiet, quiet, quite short and simple to them really. It’s never stop learning and sharing that knowledge. If you, if you’ve had experience with things, these industries from people, you go further through life. You meet different people who come from different walks of life. They’ve done different things. They may have ex-military backgrounds, they may have done, worked around the world. Me personally, I came to this industry from a brief spin stint in oil and gas. Before that I was working in factories. So, I’ve seen things and done things and been involved in general life. You know, people, people experience things in their lives different to everybody else. And the best thing you can do is share that experience. If you’ve seen something done better or you’ve experienced that some somewhere else, share it with a guy who hasn’t.

You know, you may have done a training course, but the knowledge more often comes from, from that experience. And so, it’s always best to try and learn from that as well. Whether that comes from, you know, an experienced colleague sharing a story on something or from something that you’ve actually witnessed yourself. You know, maybe you, you were first to witness a car accident or something like that. You’ve had to do first aid. I mean it’s, they’re not nice situations and you never really learn from a nice situation. That’s the unfortunate thing about life in general, you know, so, you know, but don’t ever be afraid to share that knowledge and, and that experience or ask for that knowledge and experience if you know, somebody’s got a little bit of a history in that. So, know what, how have you dealt with this situation? What have you seen before? What’s your backstory? You know, get to know your colleagues on a boat, it’s a lot easier because you sit around in the evening watching telly and chat, just chatting the day away. Some of the guys that we used to share the boat with, they were xref for, for a start.  

So, they’d been to some of them in both the Iraq campaigns and stuff like that. One guy was ex-army, he’d been in Bosnia, things like this, you know, significant military background and you can learn a lot from them. But some of it’s really scary but the experience is still valid. So yeah, it’s a shared knowledge that helps you build your experience. Not your personal experience, but it can help you with how you would deal with a situation.

And I think one thing that struck me when we first talked about your story is also the element of mental health, but also the debrief that occurred the day after. So rather than run back to work, when all was said and done and everybody was back on the sov, you didn’t jump right back into work. Tell me a little bit about how you handle mental health, but also the debrief that’s so important after an event like this.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the debrief started pretty much after the last helicopter had taken the last significant casualty off of the. Off the boat, and we were starting to return back to actually go and pick up ours. Our stranded team members who were back in the wind farm where we’d sailed away to do the helicopter operations. At that point, it was about an hour and a half sail back to the wind farm, and we kind of all just sat around in a bit. A little bit of a state of shock, if you will, just trying to process. Yeah, everybody’s trying to process. Nobody really said a lot. Everything was just trying to process personally, what on earth just happened. You know, there’s that big question mark you might go, did we do the right thing? Didn’t we do the right thing? Have we. Have we done what we best we could have? We could. We’ve done it better. And it’s like, okay, that’s fine. Everybody will ask those questions. And that. That is your own mental health to his tea. Sure. But what we did when we got everybody back on board, because we debriefed the guys when they came back on board as well.

And we got everybody up. We went to the anchor ground, and we got everybody up from the crew and everybody who was involved up on. In. In the bridge. It’s a large bridge area. There was about 50 of us in total, all stood up there in the end. And we had a general chat session, and it was led by the captain, and he was. He was talking about, you know, what happened, how. How we go about dealing with the situation. What do we think? Palm reflection? How do we think we were. Things went. And it was. It was kind of. It’s a bit of a strange one. So, the captain, when we all stood up there initially, we all gathered up there and the captain broke the silence and he gave a brief recount of the whole event, which he’d taken from his ship’s log directly. And then he personally praised every one of us for professionalism and the collaboration with the rescue effort, you know, with the guys who went out on fast boats. We helped them get the, the casualties off. Everybody mucked in with the helicopter, helicopter operations. And then we started to open up conversations and, and just talking about the things, how we were involved, what we did, where we were, what we were doing.

And just kind of a little bit of a breakdown analysis. Not too in depth but just kind of post incident. And then in the following days after that there were individual and group counseling sessions that were offered to everybody. We didn’t go back to work the following day. Certainly not. There was a couple of days actually we didn’t get back to work. It was just best just we were in a good position with the wind farm anyway. But that wouldn’t have mattered.

Sure.

You know, we didn’t have anything significantly broken. We were ahead of service, so it was like fine. But if that hadn’t been the case, that would have just waited. And management were really good about that. They turned around and said, you guys need to, you need to decompress, you need to take your time. We need to make sure everybody’s okay. And the mental health accent on that was really significant. And I was quite impressed with the, the company that managed that we work for on how they dealt with that. So much so that they had especially psychologists and counseling sessions. You could either do group ones; we all did group ones anyway to start with. And then they offered an extended that to individual sessions if you want to schedule them yourself, if you want to have a chat. We also, we were also having little breakout areas around the boat and just having little group chats and stuff and would go and have a coffee with one of our colleagues from the canteen or someone from the engine room. And because everybody ended up interspersed throughout the whole vessel during the incident. So, everybody was working with people they never really worked with on a day-to-day basis.

Some of the guys did have sleepless nights and it did affect them. Certainly, some of the younger lads, those who hadn’t had significant military backgrounds and things like that, maybe they weren’t. So, it’s, it’s a nasty phrase. But battle hardened, if you will, hadn’t had the experiences of traumatic experience so much so some of them were fresh out of college. So literally they’ve only ever seen was school.

Right.

So, you know, they’ve done an apprenticeship, become an engineer and thrown onto a wind turbine and that’s where they were, you know, and no face with this in their first year out from college. So yeah, absolutely. Yikes. And some of Those guys did need a little bit more support as well and that was given to them as well as best we could on the vessel. And again, with the onshore support and we actually made port on the third day. We went back and dropped a few guys off and made sure they got home. Some, some weren’t, some lived a few hundred miles away as well and they weren’t, they weren’t allowed to drive home. They were driven home and their vehicles were taken home for them. So that was quite a really nice supporting touch I thought. Or they were put onto trains, and their vehicles were arranged to be picked up or whatever means when it made necessary for them. But the ongoing from that was the long term on the mental support. It kept going. It wasn’t just when they went back to work.

Right.

That was at the end of did carry on. If you needed to talk to someone there would be a program put in place for you. And it was as you wanted it. It was a really good supporting feature of the company.

Yeah. Well Lee, tell me, thank you so much for sharing your story. I think there’s some really good learnings as well in terms of preparing for the unexpected in terms of professional orientation that happens in the, in that environment. But also, how you debrief and how all the practices to make sure that people return to work in good shape after a traumatic event like this. It’s a really, really good. Because it’s one thing to have a one-time intervention like you said, versus ongoing support recognizing that it’s a pretty traumatic event that happened.

Yeah, it certainly was. There is a, a bitter note to the end of that story unfortunately.

Okay.

So, when I presented my initial talk it was a two-day event for the company I now work for. And one of the participants in the audience, he was actually, he’s a vessel skipper, he’s a captain on one of the smaller vessels and he was actually that day he was the lifeboat skipper who came out and rescued some of the, the, the medium and minor injured personnel. The ones that weren’t helicoptered off.

Sure.

And that day I learned that even though with all our company orientated all our mental health support and everything, the captain of the fishing boat himself 18 months after the event succumbed to amount mental health insurance. So, he left behind a wife and two children. And it was because he has. Because they’re essentially, they work for themselves. So, they work for a very small, not big. The fishing industry is, is not huge, not big companies that they don’t have that kind of support or that, that and yeah, he unfortunately in the end, 18 months later, he didn’t make it.

And the others, the other six.

The others, the others certainly I’m aware that the ones with the significant life changing injuries, two of them never went back offshore again, but they are moving on with their lives. And the other three who didn’t have such significant injuries, I think they went back to fishing again. Sure.

So, thank you for sharing that. Unfortunately, that final note and it is true because there isn’t the support mechanism that exist in larger companies for industries like phishing that are highly decentralized small companies for the most part.

Yeah.

So, thank you. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Lee, what’s the best way to do that?

Probably best to contact me through Proud to be Safe through P2Bs through the UK and they will. They will message through from this.

Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.