Working Environment Area Chart (WEAC)

What is WEAC?

Norsok S-002, v4, Working environment, specify use of WEAC.

The NORSOK standards are developed by the Norwegian petroleum industry to ensure adequate safety, value adding and cost effectiveness for petroleum industry developments and operations.

Norsok S-002 apply to the design of new installations and modification or upgrading of existing installations for offshore drilling, production, and utilisation and pipeline transportation of petroleum, including accommodation units for such activities.

The main purpose of the WEACs is to include the results of predictions and verification measurements (e.g. as-built data for illuminance and noise), and describe identified problem areas and nonconformities as well as the status regarding decisions on remedial actions.

Although S-002 is made for newbuilds and modifications, the specifications in the standard are commonly used also in operations. This also include using WEACs to document status of the individual areas.

Experiences with use of WEAC

A bachelor thesis in 2009 by Lars Jensen and Helge Nesse listed the following experiences:

• WEAC worked well with describing quantitative data, such as noise and light.
• WEAC worked poorly describing qualitiative data such as ergonomics and outdoor operations. This is because the qualitative factors are hard to put in concrete terms in the chart. A challenge with the local based information is to recover and trace historical documentation-
• WEAC did not function to document exposure or risk of workgroups / jobs.
• They did not find user friendly software solutions, easing use and updating the data offshore.

Other user experiences have been:

• The chart, as listed in S-002, version 4, Annex A, does not give space in the qualitative part to list status data for typical quantitative factors, such as noise. This limits the possibility to list information about status, remedial actions etc.
• The status factors listed in S-002 does not cover needs during operational phase.
• Fitting Emergency lighting and Air/Changes per hour into the WEAC format is challenging, since WEAC and the Working Environment Area Limits (WEAL) are based on room categories which do not fit with Emergency light and Air/Changes.
• The identified chemicals that are to be used, and that may represent a health hazard, are to be listed. This is very rarely done in the WEACs. Probably because of the large extend of such chemicals in some workplaces. This can also be listed in other documents or databases.
• The WEAC format, as listed i S-002 does not support prioritization by risk.
• Keeping the WEACs updated during projects and operation is perceived as work demanding, costly and not sufficiently valuable.

Since 2012 the Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authorities have kept a focus on use of WEAC for the area documentation.

The WE sustain WEAC database

With this background the company WE sustain released an online WEAC database in 2008. Following increased focus from the Petroleum Safety Authorities on documentation of risk of risk exposed groups and risking of each element and the summed up risk, this database was updated in 2012 to support exposure and risk on work groups.

Adding much functionality to the software made it complex and the user friendliness suffered. In order to ensure easy access of working environment information for first line managers and workforce, the software had a total rebuild and was released as WElix in 2017.

WElix - empowers the first line managers, with updated and prioritized info

With a basis in WEAC, location based status, WElix has addressed the original challenges with WEAC and attempts to provide user friendly support to manage occupational risk as a whole. The information imported to the system is used to generate new results, such as Noise exposure per job and KPIs in addition to status overviews per job and per location. As such the software supports the activities listed in ISO 45001.

Meant to support the management in complying to their responsibilities, ensuring they have control on any yellow and red occupational hazards, the software does not require any training for users of the data. Even so HSE staff need to champion the system, ensuring risk assessments are consistent and at an acceptable quality.

One of the interesting new functionalities in WElix is the KPI called Working Environment Hazard Exposure Score (WEHES). It combines the risk rating of a particular WE hazard with the exposed man hours.

The KPIs can be viewed for any given workplace, area, or even for any task or job. All open WE hazards can be sorted and prioritized by WEHES. This gives support to priorities and management processes.

Feedback from existing users of the old version software has been used in the programming of WElix. An odd example is reports from users that they occasionally lost registered data when the internet went down offshore. In the browser based WElix the data is temporarily saved on the PC, to avoid such experiences.

The software has been made for offshore use. Simplifications are in process, making it cheaper and easier to configure and use for other industries.