ARTICLE
Preparing Your Oil and Gas Business for Weather Emergencies
From Planning and Preparedness to Response, Recovery and Rebuilding, Wesco Supports Our Customers When Disaster Strikes
By Adam Weber | January 8, 2024
Read Time: 4 Minutes
With extreme weather events on the rise, having an emergency plan in place to protect your oil and gas business is more critical than ever. Offshore rigs and coastal refineries are particularly vulnerable to extended shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, and safety hazards from increasingly powerful hurricanes. Planning and preparation are essential to minimizing safety incidents, downtime, and interruptions caused by these natural disasters.
It's important to have a partner to help you prepare your people, facilities, inventory, and operations for potential emergencies. As your single-source emergency preparedness partner, Wesco ensures you have what you need, when you need it, backed by services that will help you get back up and running as quickly as possible. Our experts help you minimize downtime and interruption to your business by helping you prepare before disaster strikes.
- 800 locations worldwide
- Local Wesco inventory is tailored to meet local demand
- Flexible, time-sensitive delivery by local Wesco vehicles
- Late order cut-off times for same-day shipment
- Emergency shipments direct to customers
- Emergency 24/7 service is available
Protect Your People and Facility
From rig and refinery workers to fuel tank drivers, you must ensure that all employees are safe during and after an emergency. Establishing proper notification protocols and remedies will help safeguard your people and facilities should hazardous situations arise.
Power Quality
A complete power factor and power quality audit helps to protect critical equipment and prevent unexpected outages. We identify improvements to system resiliency, reductions in repair and outage costs, and opportunities to extend equipment life.
Emergency Notification System Assessment
Through an on-site review of emergency notification systems, we identify gaps in evacuation plans and systems and provide recommendations for upgrades to your response strategies and signaling systems if needed. This helps to ensure safe and effective evacuation during emergency situations to better protect your people.
Hazardous Lighting Assessment
We examine the current lighting and electrical systems in harsh and hazardous environments to help eliminate maintenance costs, reduce SKUs, improve safety, and reduce energy consumption. Our teams identify opportunities to provide more durable and efficient lighting regardless of the environment.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Assessment
Through an on-site evaluation, we identify opportunities to close PPE compliance gaps, replace or upgrade equipment, and more efficiently manage PPE inventory. Assessments can be done for whole body protection or specific protection applications. We can also recommend application-specific safety equipment.
Safety Labeling and Signage Assessment
We can assess the status of a facility’s safety and signage labeling, providing a variety of service and product options that protect employees and facilities against inherent risks. The purpose of this is to prepare for possible critical visual communication needs.
Spill and Leak Remediation Assessment
Conduct a facility survey to discover potential risks and provide recommendation for spill and leak prevention and corrective responses, including substrate-to-spill compatibility and options to address workplace safety needs.
Wet and Damp Area Assessment
Our team reviews the current state of electrical systems to identify potential safety and maintenance issues such as power failure, contamination, corrosion, liquid ingress, or other problems that can negatively impact a plant’s manufacturing process.
The Electrical MRO Products and Supplies You Need When You Need Them
Adhesives
Caulks, putties, tapes, threaded gaskets, sealants
Electrical
Enclosures, circuit breakers, fuses, conduit and fittings, transformers
Electrical Supplies
Cable ties, terminations, tapes, marking and heat shrink
Janitorial
Cleaning supplies, chemicals, products, dispensers
Lighting
Lamps, ballasts, fixtures
Material Handling
Ladders, packing and shipping, shelving and storage
Safety
First aid, PPE, eye wash, portable coolers, signage
Test and Measurement
Gas detection, test equipment, meters and instrumentation
Tools
Hand tools, power tools, tool storage
Protect Your Inventory and Operations
Having sufficient inventory in place will help your business weather any emergency. By reviewing your current supply chain processes and implementing enhancements now, you can minimize the time it takes to get your oil and gas operations back up and running.
Inventory Emergency and Disaster Preparedness
We offer to review or establish response protocols and procedures for critical systems. This will include strategic material planning to ensure continuous operations during an emergency or a natural disaster, including alternate inventory locations, contingency stocking levels and kitting of critical components and safety equipment.
Supply Chain Services
Through our local and national relationships with thousands of suppliers, Wesco provides comprehensive custom catalogs for your critical inventory needs, competitive pricing, and timely delivery for spot-buy product purchases. Having fewer products and suppliers simplifies your material response plan, makes maintenance easier, and results in less downtime. Green procurement services may also be available.
Materials Management
By managing some or all of your facility’s on-site inventory, we help you improve material management practices to better classify, track and control supplies. This increases efficiency and provides greater inventory control.
Kitting
Our team pre-packages multiple components into one kit to reduce errors, improve material handling, and minimize the time it takes to bring up temporary power solutions. Wesco kitting solutions streamline ordering processes and reduce downtime when timing is most important.
Lean Warehousing
Our team can assist in developing an organized and efficient critical inventory recovery plan by applying Lean principles to inventory organization, storage, layout, flow, and handling processes. Along with optimizing inventory levels, we provide timely access to critical spares replenishment.
Damage from extreme weather can halt oil and gas operations for days or even weeks. Preparing for emergencies beforehand is crucial to ensuring the safety of workers and your company’s ability to bounce back. As your single-source emergency preparedness partner, Wesco has the expertise and distribution network in place to protect your entire enterprise. Our team can help fortify your business before disaster strikes.
Emergency Preparedness and Response Services for Your Business
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Weber, VP of Global Accounts, Industrial, and SPS
Adam Weber, VP of Industrial Global Account Sales within Wesco's EES division, joined Wesco in 2005. Adam is responsible for leading a team that oversees Wesco’s largest industrial relationships across multiple vertical segments, including multi-year contracts that span the globe and are localized with Wesco regional operations.