Graduate Project Engineer, Lauren Averill, presented with IChemE SIESO Medal – October 2022

AllWater Technologies Graduate Project Engineer, Lauren Averill has been recognised with the SIESO Medal by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE).  Presented at an Awards Ceremony on October 18th in Harrogate, Lauren and her team received medals for their work on the 2021 process safety project, Deepwater Horizon Disaster.

Derek Spriggs, CEO at AllWater said that Lauren and her team should be rightly proud to have achieved such recognition by IChemE for the impressive work they undertook to complete the interactive Deepwater Disaster process safety project and that ‘many congratulations are in order’.

Lauren Averill photographed with her colleagues, Alexander Reeves and Usaamah Ougradar. The other members of the team were Michael Chu and Brady Durkin.

The SIESO Medal

An annual competition running since 2019, the SIESO Medal awarded by the Institution of Chemical Engineers was established to help raise and nurture awareness amongst science, engineering and business students of process safety, by asking them to present a real-life disaster in a unique way. It is awarded to an individual or group of students and requires applicants to clearly and effectively display the learning outcomes of the particular event. Criteria judged against include accuracy, inventiveness, teamwork and quality.

Previous winners were chosen for projects on  the ‘Texas City Refinery Explosion’ and the ‘Bhopal Gas Tragedy’, in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Lauren Averill and her team from the University of Bradford created Deepwater Horizon as their winning submission specifically for the SIESO Medal in 2021.

A Winning Project: Deepwater Horizon 

Deepwater Horizon is an interactive website-based experience designed to explain the safety process requirements for an offshore drilling rig. In addition to creating the website, Lauren and her team also had to produce a detailed article outlining the accident itself, the issues of process safety encountered, and the learning outcomes achieved from the event.

The project was based on the 2010 catastrophic ultra-deepwater oil well blowout which occured on-board the Deepwater Horizon rig. The disaster took the lives of 11 people, triggered both the collapse of the structure and, subsequently, what became the largest marine oil spill in history. The events leading up to the disaster and the ensuing emergency response processes were pivotal in the later evolution of safety processes, political responses and legislation. 

To view the submission with its interactive experience go to  https://deepwaterhorizon.co.uk  and/or to read the paper from Lauren and her team: https://www.icheme.org/media/18486/lpb285_pg07.pdf

Praise from the Judging Panel

The judging panel was unanimous in its decision to award the SIESO Medal prize to Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Chief Executive of IChemE, Jon Prichard, praised Ms Averill’s team for the collaborative effort they put into creating an interactive training session, which the panel recognised as an extremely effective avenue of learning, and a worthy winner of the award. 

Asked for her thoughts about winning the award and what it meant for her work with AWT, Lauren stated:

“I was delighted to receive my medal at Hazards 32 (the annual IChemE Process safety Conference) and to finally meet some of my team members in person, we finished our final year of university virtually and completed this project without meeting face to face, so it will be good to finally meet.  

Completing this project was an excellent learning opportunity as the lessons learnt, both by industry after this event, and by my team during our work on completing this project, although primarily based in an oil and gas setting can still be applied to the work done by Chemical Engineers. In my role at AWT the lessons learnt are always at the forefront of my mind when considering process safety and plant design. 

Being awarded the SIESO medal is a huge achievement and I feel very honoured to be recognised for our submission. I think it’s a perfect way to start my career and I’m looking forward to the next challenge…”

To read our press release in full:
pressat.co.uk/releases/allwater-technologies-graduate-project-engineer-presented-with-icheme-sieso-medal-6079895b541ea9517988f79013ad96a1/