Piper Alpha disaster

Introduction and commercial application Safety and the environment have become important elements of all parts of the field life cycle, and involve all of the technical and support functions in an oil company. The Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 has resulted in a major change in the approach to management of safety of world-wide oil and gas exploration and production activities. Companies recognise that good safety and environmental management make economic sense and are essential to guaranteeing long term presence in the industry. 

The UK government enquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 has had a significant impact on working practices and equipment and has helped to improve offshore safety around the world. One result has been the development of a Safety Management System (SMS) which is a method of integrating work practices, and is a form of quality management system. Major oil companies have each developed their own specific SMS, to suit local environments and modes of operation, but the SMS typically addresses the following areas (recommended by the Cullen Enquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster) ... 

Ctillen. The Public Inquiry into The Piper Alpha Disaster (cmliiO)... 

W. D. Cullen, The Public Inquity into the Piper Alpha Disaster, Her Majesty s Stationery Office, London, 1990, especially Paragraphs 6.109, 6.187, 11.3, and 18.29. 

Competence assessment is also required if workers are assigned to new areas of work. In the offshore industry, considerable importance is being attached to the issue of demonstrating competence, following the recommendations of the inquiry that followed the Piper Alpha disaster. 

Cullen, the Hon. Lord (1990). The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster. UK. Dept, of Energy. London Her Majesty s Stationery Office. 

Ever since the inception of the petroleum industry the level of fires, explosions and environmental pollution that have precipitated from it, has generally paralleled its growth. As the industry has grown so has the magnitude of its accidental events. Relatively recent events such as the Flixborough incident (1974), Occidental s Piper Alpha disaster (1988), and Exxon s Valdez oil spill (1989) have all amply demonstrated the extreme financial impact these accidents can produce. 

Isolation - It has been shown that the addition of isolation valves at periodic intervals is not as cost effective as prevention measures such as thickness inspections or tests. However all pipelines should be provided with a means for emergency isolation at it entry or exit from a facility. Offshore facilities may be particularly vulnerable to pipeline incidents as the Piper Alpha disaster has shown. In that accident a contributing factor to the destruction was the backfeed of the contents of the gas pipeline to platform once the topside isolation valve or piping lost its integrity. Further isolation means (i.e., a subsea isolation valve SSIV) were not available. 

If instmments are placed on manual, particularly emergency instruments, then a common cause event has been created. For example, one of the contributing factors in the Piper Alpha disaster was that both firewater pumps were on manual. They had been placed in that state to ensure that any divers in the water were not sucked into the firewater intake in the event of an automatic start of the pumps. Unfortunately, the fire on the platform prevented operators firom getting to the pumps to turn them on. The lack of firewater capability materially contributed to the magnitude of the disaster. 

The first safety cases prepared for the process industries were those developed for North Sea offshore oil and gas operations following the Piper Alpha disaster that occurred in the year 1988. The Cullen report (Cullen, 1990) that was written following that accident was highly critical of offshore operating practices and recommended that a safety case approach be implemented. The Seveso incident that occurred in Italy further prompted the increased use of safety cases. Since that time the use of safety cases has spread to other industries (such as mining and railway operations) and to other nations, primarily in Europe and Australasia. (It is notable that the safety case regime approach has not been taken up for offshore oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico—instead a more prescriptive approach based on industry consensus standards is used.)... 

Maitland, G. (2011) Offshore Oil and Gas in the UK An Independent Review of the Regulatory Regime. Report by Chairman Geoffrey Maitland, FREng, December 2011 (hereinafter, Maitland Review). Lord Cullen (1990) The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster. Report by the Chairman The Hon. Lord Cullen, Cm. 1310, 1990. HMSO London (hereinafter, Cullen Report). The events and responses surrounding the Piper Alpha disaster are beyond the scope of this work. For further discussion on this, see Chapter 6 in this volume. 

The Activities Regulations Sect. 32. Failure to transfer such information was the direct cause of the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 see note 1 to this chapter. 

Matters remained like this until the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988 in which 167 men were killed, making this the worst accident in the history of the offshore industry globally in terms of lives lost. The unprecedented scale of this disaster was a profound shock to industry and regulator alike and prompted the establishment by the government of a further inquiry into its causes under the chairmanship of the senior... 

Paterson has described the evolution of the UK offshore safety regime in Chapter 6 of this book, The impact of the Piper Alpha disaster in 1987 and the Cullen Report were also very influential in policy making outside the United Kingdom, and the Australian regulatory regime for offshore safety is based on the same concept and premises as the UK regime. 

Cullen, W.D. (1990). Ute public inquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster. London, HMSO. 

The regulatory principles developed on the NCS are in line with the recommendations in the Lord Cullen report after the Piper Alpha disaster. Cullen largely abandoned any faith in the abihty of the law, even in the form of more adaptable secondary legislation. Instead, the report placed more responsibility on means as a Quantified Risk Assessment to speak to the industry in a language that it could understand and to shift the role of the regulator fiwm one of physical inspection to one of reviewing the safety management system of the operator (Paterson, 2007, p. 58). 

Cidlen, The Hon. Lord W.D. 1990. The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster. London H.M. Stationery Office, de Leval, M.R., Carthey, J., Wright, D. J. and Reason, J.T. 2000. Human factors and cardiac surgery A multicentre study. Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, 119(4), 661-72. 

McGinty, S. 2008. Fire in the Night - The Piper Alpha Disaster. London Macmillan. 

We have already noted how, within individual enterprises, losttime injury claims data are not a reliable indicator of safety. The aggregate data collected by compensation authorities are even more problematic from this point of view. If we assume that the aim of a prevention agency is to minimise death, serious injury and longterm disablement, then a focus on LTI claims data will not be helpful. By way of illustration, LTI rates and compensation costs on offshore oil platforms are low, but the potential for disaster is high, as demonstrated by the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1987 in which l67 people died. A prevention authority should therefore target such installations despite the negligible numbers of claims which they may generate on an armual basis. 

The Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in the mid-1980s, involving over 150 dead, was worsened when natural gas continued to flow from another gas platform to Piper Alpha (which was the jimction or collecting platform) because no-one told the other platform to cut the flow the emergency plans had apparently not included a multiplatform approach. 

Safety eases entered the UK safety world as a result of the Control of Industrial Major Aeeidents Hazards regulations (CIMAH regulations) in 1984. Safety case principles were further examined and developed by Lord Cullen in his report into the Piper Alpha disaster (Cullen 1990) in which a major accident in an offshore oil facility in the North Sea resulted in 167 deaths. As a result of this report, the approach to offshore safety shifted from compliance to achievement of safety objectives. A safety case would demonstrate through argument and evidence that the required safety objectives would be met. Regulations laid down what must be addressed in a safety case. 

CAA (2003) CAP670 Air traffic services safety requirements. Civil Aviation Authority Cullen (1990) The public inquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster. HM Stationery Office, London Haddon-Cave C (2009) The Nimrod review. The Stationery Office, London lEC (2002) lEC 61508 Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems. Part 1. International Electrotechnical Commission Kuhn TS (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press MoD (2007) Defence standard 00-56 Issue 4. Safety management requirements for defence systems part 1 requirements part 2 guidance on establishing a means of complying with part 1. Ministry of Defence... 

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