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Here is the pipelayer GSP Falcon, previously the Acergy Falcon and before that the Seaway Falcon, operated in those days by Stolt Comex Seaway. It has been laid up in Amsterdam for a couple of years, and was discovered by Jan Plug, who had been Captain of it in the old days. It was sold to GSP, a Rumanian company in 2011 and although the crew were retained for a while, they immediately fell out with the president of their new company who seemed to be asking things of them which were, at the very least, inappropriate.
All we amateur photographers have attempted to take pictures of what we see as interesting scenes from passenger aircraft, and a few of us have achieved it. This is Aberdeen Harbour taken from an aircraft on its way to the airport. On the far right of the picture is Girdleness Lighthouse. You can clearly see the harbour entrance, the River Dee and Regent's and Waterloo Quays. Not many ships, either in port to out at the anchorage.
A floating storage unit at a buoy in Sakhalin with the Molipaq in the background. Photo Alexander Fedoseev
I wrote this back in 1999, but it still seems relevant. Since the year 2000 a number of further studies have been carried out with, I think, limited conclusions although a lot of statistics.
In October 1997 the HSE, the UK Health and Safety Executive published their own investigations entitled "HSE Concerns Regarding Shuttle Tanker and Offloading Operations at FSPO/FSUs" after two contacts between tankers and FSPOs in the UK sector. Effectively in response to this document the International Marine Contractors Association together with a number of Operators commissioned a report from Global Maritime which was intended to identify hazardous situations which might cause incidents, quantify their frequency of occurrence, and propose methods of mitigating the effects. One assumes that the intent of the report was also to prevent the occurrence of the incidents in the first place, although this is not specifically mentioned in the preamble.