Safety

The in-house safety training programme includes life jacket training and swimming instructions. In the Middle East, for example, Van Oord set up a low-threshold training course to teach project employees basic safety precautions. They are also taught how to use the life vests. The course participants enter the water to practise swimming with a life vest.

The swimming lessons are vital because we have learned by experience that many of our project contract workers do not know how to swim, or not very well. This can lead to hazardous situations, for example when they are switching to a transfer boat, during maintenance work at the edge of a vessel, or while carrying out survey work on a survey boat. A swimming instructor was taken on in Dubai several years ago to work with employees on our floating equipment who do not know how to swim. The instructor teaches them to swim in a few weeks' time.