The maritime safety equipment and servicing manufacturer Viking, headquartered in Esbjerg, Denmark, has received type approval from classification society Lloyd’s[ds_preview] Register for its new offshore evacuation chute system. The newly developed system is certified to operate at an unprecedented evacuation height of 81 m to sea level, the company informs. With the approval of this new system, Viking says it has answered the needs of offshore fixed and jack-up rigs to handle extreme heights.
»The system’s certified evacuation capacity is 146 people in just 10 minutes, comfortably beating the threshold required by maritime authorities, even from such an extreme height,« says Kristian Ellertsen, Norway-based Offshore Technical Manager for the company.
With rig sizes increasing, and evacuation heights exceeding what is possible with enclosed davits and lifeboats, chute-based evacuation solutions have become increasingly important. Designing and building them, however, demands significant know-how and experience. In 2013, Noble, one of the worlds the largest offshore drilling contractors, was in the early planning stage of its CJ70 jack-up rig for delivery in 2016. The company required an evacuation system capable of coping with the rig’s unprecedented height, but the previous record for such a system, held by Viking, was »only« 64 m.
»Developing something of this height was not easy,« explains Kristian Ellertsen. The new 81-m system reasserts Viking’s lead in the field of evacuation systems. Already, two systems have been installed on the »Noble Lloyd Noble« jack-up rig that is due to be completed during 2016 at the Jurong shipyard in Singapore, destined to operate in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea.
Viking has a network of more than 70 branch offices, agents and 270 certified servicing stations and worldwide stock points
