Piper Alpha Accident

This accident is considered as the deadliest offshore oil rig accident in history. Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform, and it was located approximately 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. The platform became operational in 1976 and was operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. Initially, the platform was constructed to produce crude oil, but later on with the installation of gas conversion equipment, it also started producing gas. 

Piper Alpha produced oil and gas from its 24 wells for delivery to the Flotta oil terminal located on the Orkney Islands as well as to other installations through three separate pipelines. At the time of the occurrence of the disaster, the platform, as per References 13 through 16, produced about 10% of North Sea oil and gas. On July 6,1988, due to gas leakage from one of the condensate pipes at the platform, explosions and a resulting fire destroyed the platform and killed 167 persons [14,15]. 

A subsequent investigation into the disaster was conducted by the United Kingdom government that identified a number of factors that, directly or indirectly, contributed to the Piper Alpha incident s severity. Two of these factors were as follows [13-15]  

Serious breakdown in the chain of command and lack of any proper communication to the platform s crew members. 

Existence of fire walls and lack of blast walls. More clearly, the existing fire walls predated the gas conversion equipment s installation as well as were not adequately upgraded to blast walls subsequent to the installation. 

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Spiral to Disaster a superb training video, recreates the July 1988 Piper Alpha accident in the North Sea. This realistic documentary, which is about 30 min long, includes video of the lire and gas pipeline explosions taken from a nearby ship in the North Sea. This catastrophe resulted in the deaths of 167 men. 

A leak of high-pressure gaseous hydrocarbon can, if it ignites inunediately, produce a jet fire that can impinge on other process plant and then escalate to become a large conflagration, in a similar fashion to the Piper Alpha accident. (Chapter 13)... 

The 61 survivors of the Piper Alpha accident survived because they disobeyed the standing instructions they did not wait for an order to evacuate, they opted for tertiary escape and jumped into the sea where they were rescued by support vessels and fast rescue boats from nearly platforms. 

M. Elisabeth Pate-Comell, Learning from the Piper Alpha accident a post-mortem analysis of technical and organisational factors. Risk Analysis 13 (2) (1993). 

At the other extreme, operators must resist urges for impulsive action when faced with a problem. The immediate cause of the Piper Alpha accident was precipitate, impulsive action to restore to service a pump that was under maintenance. Similarly, the Mumbai High accident occurred because of ill-considered action to help a crew member on the MSV Samundra Suraksha who had cnt his fingers. Gronp think can also sometimes lead to bad, impulsive decision-making, snch as the Equilon Anacortes accident. Also, the Chernobyl accident was partly attribntable to operators who impulsively sought to bend the rules in order to complete a test. (A further, personal example of an ill-considered msh to action is desalbed in Appendix 1.)... 

The need for good, well-rehearsed emergency planning arrangements was also demonstrated in the Piper Alpha accident (Chapter 13) and, more recently, the Fukushima accident has demonstrated that the scope of emergency planning sometimes needs to include consideration of the breakdown of civil infrastructure (Chapter 15). 

Pate-Comell, M.E., Risk analysis and risk management for offshore platforms Lessons from the Piper Alpha accident. Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering, 115(1), 1993,179-190. 

The investigation made 106 recommendations for changes to existing North Sea safety-related procedure. The offshore industry accepted all the recommendations. Additional information on Piper Alpha accident is available in References 10 and 13 fhrough 16. 

Compare the Piper Alpha accident with the Mumbai High North Platform accident. 

The PICs of a task or activity must inform the SIMOPs coordinator when their work is done, and that the system has been returned to its normal state (or that an Operational Readiness review is now needed for systems that have been modified). Problems with false assumptions to do with closeout were a major factor in the Piper Alpha accident. 

The previous seven chapters of this book have demonstrated how much the offshore safety management business has changed and matured in the quarter century since the Piper Alpha accident. Yet, as the Deepwater Horizon and Montara events illustrate, more progress needs to be made, particularly with respect to process and technical safety. The industry has not yet arrived. No doubt ongoing application of the Safety and Environmental Management Systems (SEMS) and safety case techniques will lead to further improvement, yet there may also be a need to make a step change, and to find new ways of improving safety. 

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