Another oil spill disaster = Another missed Preventative Action By Mark Connolly

Shell is amidst a disaster as they try bringing under control a spill dubbed "the worst in the North Sea for a decade" at the Gannet Alpha Oil Rig, whose pipeline ruptured earlier this month.
However, in contrast, the spill is small compared to international incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (where up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day were leaked, by some estimates) and the oil spills in the Niger delta in Nigeria (14,000 tonnes in 2009 compared to 216 tons in this spill). But by North Sea oil standards, it's big!
The questions everyone seems to be asking are: how can this industry can prevent these incidents from happening? Is there a continual need for improvement in Oil and Gas organisations' processes to manage major incidents such as these, which are detrimental to the organisation itself but more importantly Earth?
To function effectively, all control systems need feedback loops; these are mechanisms that inform them whether they are achieving their objectives.
Quality and risk management systems in the Energy industry are no exception. All quality and health and safety management standard require organisations to effectively manage corrective and preventative actions. Yet it’s an area where some Energy organisations fall short – using laborious old technology and struggling to make genuine improvements.
Some common complaints are:
“When we get a problem, we fix it – but the root cause is rarely dealt with and the same problems recur time and again.”
“Employees and customers often suggest good ideas but without an effective means of logging them for future consideration and finding them again – they sometimes get forgotten.”
“We have numerous incident reports, non-conformance reports and similar records, but we cannot run a query on them, all at once, to find trends and problem areas.”
Issues may be actual or potential and they may occur in various forms: product or service failure, supplier failure, oil spill, explosion, employee suggestions, customer complaints, incidents, etc. One thing is certain, they will occur, and a smart Energy organisation needs an effective system for dealing with them and, more importantly, learning from them.
A possible solution would be to use an effective quality and incident reporting management system to adhere to major standards, such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. All require non-conformance management procedures to attain the highest quality and safety standards – something that may help in the way organisations would deal with incidents such as oil spills.
This management system would require everyone to be encouraged to log problems/incidents but only when this change happens can companies start to analyse all of their respective data and compile reports to investigate where improvements can be made.
What do you think can be done to prevent similar incidents happening offshore?