Piper Alpha oil platform disaster

From a historical perspective, the following, fairly succinct, and certainly authoritative, statement on Safety Cases comes from Lord Justice Cullen s report on the Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Oil Platform Disaster (Cullen 1990) ... 

The importance of a safety culture cannot be understated. Safety culture has been identified as a contributory factor in many catastrophic incidents occurring within the hazardous industries in recent times, including the Ladbroke Grove and Southall rail crashes, Texas BP refinery explosion, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, and the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster (Hendershot, 2007). 

Hulll, A.M., Alexander, D.A., Klein, S., Survivors of the piper alpha oil platform disaster Long-term follow up study. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 181, 2002, 433-438. 

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. 

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]. 

It is likely that most of the senior managers involved in the SEMS program will not be present at the facility. They could be on another platform or they may work onshore—maybe in another part of the country. This lack of presence can cause problems when it is necessary to make "big decisions quickly. For example, the Piper Alpha catastrophe deteriorated so badly because an OIM on another platform oontinued to pump oil into the conflagration. It would also appear that lack of communication between those working on the Deepwater Horizon rig and the managers onshore was a factor in that disaster. 

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