These are short stories from the field, collected and told with the intent to help crews and teams prevent mistakes by sharing them with others.
Note: Client names have been omitted to protect confidentiality.
The Briefing Never Heard
Many high consequence teams were conducting shift briefs in areas so loud that crews didn’t even hear the risk. That resulted in many incidents and contributed to fatalities. So we convinced the teams to set aside a quiet area for shift briefs and also made sure crews understood the real risk they would face during that day’s operations. Further, we helped them organize their briefs into a standardized format that provides real value to all involved, not just unheard-of, useless time-wasting briefings.
Before Icarus: a million dollars a day
Before founding ICARUS Ops, Joe worked as an independent consultant on high-consequence operations, mostly aboard offshore drill ships, where a single day of downtime can cost about $1 million.
Tag: Founder story · Offshore drilling
The transfer procedure that could never happen
A procedure for when an automatic power transfer fails, with about 20 minutes of UPS battery time available. A technician had to put on an arc flash suit twice, at two geographically distant locations, and conduct live switching. Our team walked the distance and checked the clock. It was impossible. And attempting to do so was a significant risk for no possible return.
What EES did: walking the timing step by step showed it could not be completed within the battery time, so it was flagged and rewritten.
Tag: Switching · Data center
From 100+ feet of paperwork to 8 pages
A nuclear downhole tool procedure ran to more than 100 feet of printed paperwork. Crews had to work through it page by page, and finding the right step was a job in itself.
What EES did: condensed the procedure in EES to 8 pages, one step at a time, in the right order.
Tag: Procedures · Nuclear
The valve that wasn’t there
A crew had stopped reporting procedure errors because fixing them was too hard. Steps that could not be done got signed off anyway, including a fuel shutoff valve that wasn’t even installed.
What EES did: this is why EES has the in-step Suggest button. Tap it on any step, add a marked-up photo, and the fix goes to leadership.
Tag: Procedure quality · Critical facilities
Hands-free in the hot zone
Crews work in air-supplied pressure suits where holding a tablet is not practical. In that instance, they wanted us to make a dosimeter heads-up display on RealWear so they could see their real-time radiation exposure trend and be able to exit the hot zone before reaching their dose limit.
What our team did: We built a RealWear heads-up application to wear inside their air-supplied pressure suit to provide accurate dosage data and alerts.
Tag: Radiation protection · Nuclear