In the oil and gas industry, driving poses the highest potential risk for accidents. It is the leading cause of death in the industry. At Schlumberger, employees and contractors drive more than 25 million miles each month over every type of terrain and in every imaginable condition. To understand and mitigate driving risks, the company established a systematic approach to identify and address the factors that contribute to road accidents—driver proficiency, vehicle conditions, and weather and road conditions. Road safety affects everyone in a community, and sharing driving safety knowledge helps raise awareness and reduce the number of accidents.
Road safety is addressed through ongoing training and education and through initiatives that reach out to people wherever Schlumberger does business. The focus is on reducing the number and severity of crashes by sharing road safety knowledge with families of employees and with the community—especially young people.
DriveSMARRT*, a Schlumberger program that promotes safe driving practices, was developed to encourage employees to incorporate the knowledge and skills they acquire into their driving—both on and off the job. However, DriveSMARRT is not limited exclusively to employees. The program is also shared with families and members of local communities around the world.
Some of the groups that have received DriveSMARRT training over the past year include teachers and staff members at the Luanda International School in Angola; more than 100 taxi drivers at the National Transport Company in Abu Dhabi; and 150 spouses and children of Schlumberger employees in Egypt. The objective of these training sessions is to minimize the risk of injury or death from traffic-related incidents.
The WHO reports that every 40 seconds, a child dies from a car crash. To counter this, programs such as HSE for Youth and Schlumberger Excellence in Education (SEED) offer road safety workshops to school children, their teachers and their parents using road safety SEEDkits. The goal is to enable young people to make responsible and safe decisions—both as drivers or passengers in motor vehicles and as pedestrians.
Additional road safety SEEDkits are designed to teach students about safety as a passenger, a pedestrian and a cyclist. They are complemented by videos on topics such as the importance of wearing a bicycle helmet, how seatbelts protect and how light-colored and reflective clothing increase visibility and protect pedestrians.
HSE for Youth organized road safety workshops in Qatar in late 2009 for children of employees and customers. The workshop for younger children focused on how to cross a road safely and the importance of wearing seatbelts. The workshop for teenagers stressed the importance of being a safe passenger as well as a safe driver and how to handle peer pressure.
In May, 150 students at a SEED-connected school in Tyumen, Russia, participated in workshops where facilitators taught the children about the importance of road safety and encouraged them to share what they learned with their families.
Schlumberger is an acknowledged leader in managing driving safety risks through quality training programs, technology and proactive participation within the industry. Its global driving standard has been adopted by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers as the foundation for their recommended land transportation practices and the company operates dedicated driving training centers in the US, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, and Russia with satellite locations in France, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.
*Mark of Schlumberger
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that road accidents are the ninth leading cause of deaths worldwide and account for injuries to approximately 50 million people each year. By 2020, assuming no change in behaviors or investment in safety infrastructure, the worldwide death rate from traffic-related incidents is projected to increase by 65%.