Health and Safety

The oil and natural gas field activities are physically demanding and unforgiving. As such the safety of all workers on the Trinidad job site is of paramount concern. We believe each employee is entitled to work under the safest conditions possible. Every reasonable effort is made to provide a safe work environment and to eliminate or control hazards that can cause injury to workers or damage to property, the environment or equipment.

Trinidad has at least one safety coordinator in each of its divisions, plus a corporate safety supervisor. Trinidad holds annual safety seminars for all the divisional safety representatives to ensure consistent application of safety practices.

We believe that improved training and skill levels can only improve safety performance, and have made a major commitment of capital and effort to systematically upgrade the required certification levels of the drilling trades, including rig managers, drillers and other positions. A new employee’s initial phase of work from 30-180 working days is critical and is when they are at greatest risk of injury. Two programs aimed at pre-screening applicants and pre-training recruits have improved Trinidad’s safety success. We conduct physical demand assessments and physical examinations of all new applicants, which need to be passed in order to be hired. Newly recruited rig workers then undergo Green Hand Orientation, a computer-based orientation and safety program at Trinidad’s Nisku training facility. This precedes and supports the physical site orientation and other training initiatives.

Trinidad’s rig modernization program has brought many benefits to both operators and Trinidad – among them improved safety. The iron roughneck and catwalk, the programmable logic controls with joy sticks and the top drives together eliminate manual pipe-handling and take individuals out of the drilling rig’s historically most acute danger zones. All of our new and recently built rigs are automated; while previous rigs are being upgraded to the same level of automation upon their next 1000 Day Level IV recertification and refit. These upgrades have proven their effectiveness in driving down back injuries, “pinch points,” and “slip-trip-and-fall” type of injuries.