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Piper Alpha

Piper Alpha was an oil production platform in the North Sea that exploded on July 6, 1988, killing 167 workers. The disaster was caused by a series of explosions and resulted in the platform being destroyed. Several key lessons were learned, including the need for better management of changes to facilities, a focus on process safety over personal safety, more rigorous permit and isolation procedures for maintenance work, improved shift handovers and crew training, stronger safety culture and emergency response planning. The disaster showed that regulations alone are not enough and that all risks must be addressed.

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Ibrahim Muhammad
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92 views4 pages

Piper Alpha

Piper Alpha was an oil production platform in the North Sea that exploded on July 6, 1988, killing 167 workers. The disaster was caused by a series of explosions and resulted in the platform being destroyed. Several key lessons were learned, including the need for better management of changes to facilities, a focus on process safety over personal safety, more rigorous permit and isolation procedures for maintenance work, improved shift handovers and crew training, stronger safety culture and emergency response planning. The disaster showed that regulations alone are not enough and that all risks must be addressed.

Uploaded by

Ibrahim Muhammad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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PIPER ALPHA: THE DISASTER

AND LESSONS LEARNT


The Piper oil field lies about 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen in Scotland. Discovered in
January 1973, it was one of the first deep-water reservoirs to be exploited in the northern
North Sea.  Production of oil started in December 1976, less than four years after discovery, a
record that has only rarely been beaten.
Piper Alpha proved spectacularly productive and when the operator, Occidental requested
permission to increase rates, permission was granted provided that gas be exported instead of
flared.
A gas treatment plant was retrofitted and gas export started in December 1978. After
removing water and hydrogen sulphide in molecular sieves, gas was compressed and cooled
by expansion. The heavier fractions of gas condensed as a liquid (essentially propane) and the
rest of the gas (mainly methane) continued to export. The condensate was collected in a large
vessel connected to two parallel condensate pumps (duty and standby) and injected into the
oil for export to Flotta. 
Excess gas was flared in Phase 1 and exported in Phase 2.  Piper was operating in Phase 2
mode until three days before the disaster, during which the molecular sieves were removed
from service for routine maintenance.
On 06 July 1988, a series of explosions ripped through the Piper Alpha platform in the North
Sea. A total of 167 men died, and many more were injured or traumatized as a result.
Approximately 10% of UK oil production was affected by this disaster, which was the
world's biggest offshore oil disaster, it cost an estimated £2 billion (the equivalent of $5
billion today).

LESSONS LEARNT

Management of Change (design issues):

Piper Alpha was designed to produce and export oil. Exporting gas - and separating
condensate - was an afterthought and required extensive modifications. The new facilities
were located beside the control room, under the electrical power, radio room, and
accommodation modules, so when the disaster struck, it did so with so much effect on the
entire rig. In the first explosion, the control room suffered severe damage, the radio room was
rendered useless; communications were lost almost at once.
Personal safety over process safety:
Despite the extensive fixed fire protection system on Piper Alpha, not a single drop of water
was applied from Piper Alpha itself to any of the fires. Water alone would not have put the
oil fires out (and with gas fires one should not even attempt to do so) but it might have cooled
the structure and pipelines and have prevented — or at least significantly delayed — the gas
line rupture which was the major escalating factor in the Piper Alpha disaster. After the
rupture of the first gas line, Piper Alpha was doomed.
For many years, the practice on Piper Alpha was to switch the fire pumps from automatic to
manual when divers were in the sea. As diving was such a regular part of normal operation,
in practice the pumps remained manual most of the time.
When the fire broke out on Piper Alpha, the only way to activate the fire-fighting system was
to start the pumps locally. Despite valiant attempts, dense smoke and fire prevented anyone
from reaching them.
It is not known whether the initial explosion on Piper ruptured the fire water ring main or
damaged the control system for the fire pumps. Electrical power was likely knocked out, but
there was a diesel backup. It is not known how effective the deluge would have been had it
deployed as the nozzles were often blocked with scale and the fire-water pipework on Piper
Alpha was undergoing phased replacement

Permit to work and isolation for maintenance:


The night shift operators were aware that condensate injection pump A was out of
commission for maintenance and also that maintenance had not yet started: the maintenance
and associated work permits had been suspended overnight. The suspended work permits
were not displayed in the control room but the safety office. It appears that the operators were
not aware of another suspended permit. The pressure relief valve for pump A had also been
removed. Even if operators had gone to the safety office to check, permits in the safety office
were filed by trade and not by location.
The pressure relief valves for the condensate injection pumps were located one floor above
the pumps. Although it is almost always best practice for a pressure relief valve to be sited as
close as possible to the unit that it is protecting, condensate on the downstream side had to be
able to drain to an appropriate vessel, so the valve was placed about 8 meters above (and 15
meters away from) the pump.
To reinstate condensate injection pump A, two separate actions would have been required:
reinstate electrical power and open the gas-operated suction and discharge valves. By
reconnecting the air supplies to the valves, they could then be opened using toggle buttons on
a local control panel by pump A. There was no locking of isolation valves, spading, or
double-block-and-bleed to prevent re-pressurization of a system isolated for maintenance.
The permit-to-work system on Piper Alpha relied heavily on informal communication.

Handover:
On Piper Alpha, communications between departments, between shifts, and between crews
were personal, informal, and tailored to the job. While bespoke communications can have
some benefits, minimum standards were not set or met.
Incoming crews were supposed to be given safety induction training by the safety
department. There was a huge gap between what the safety department intended to convey,
and what they conveyed. Communication is a two-way thing. According to witnesses, if the
newcomer had worked offshore before, then training was brief to the point of non-existent.
The safety induction consisted of being handed a booklet and told to read it. Much of the
information was out of date or inapplicable to Piper Alpha.
Operators kept a log but often failed to record maintenance activities. Shift handover was a
busy time. The Occidental procedure required maintenance and operations to meet, inspect
the work site and sign off permits together. However, the operators were busy with their
handovers at the same time, and the practice developed where maintenance would sign off
the permit and leave it in the control room or safety office. At shift changeover, lead
production operators would not review or discuss suspended permits.

Interconnections:
Communications between Piper Alpha, Claymore, Tartan, and MCP-01 were lost from the
first explosions. This delayed shut-down on the other platforms, particularly on Claymore and
Tartan, shutting the inter-platform oil lines would probably have made a difference.

Emergency response — evacuation:


One of the most shocking aspects of the Piper Alpha tragedy was the inability to evacuate
the personnel on board. It was assumed that, whatever happened, evacuation would be (at
least substantially) by helicopter. This assumption, so easy to criticize with hindsight, was
based on several premises, the most important being that no event on Piper Alpha would
render the helideck inoperative almost immediately and that sufficient helicopters would be
available to evacuate everyone on board.
However, within about a minute of the first explosion, the helideck became enveloped in
black smoke (presumably from oil fires) and helicopters could not land on it.
No lifeboats or inflatable life rafts were launched successfully from Piper Alpha. All those
who survived did so by making their way to the sea by whatever means they could. This
included climbing down knotted ropes and jumping, from as high as the helideck, over 50
meters above sea level.

Safety culture:
There were many warnings that all was not well with safety management systems on Piper
Alpha long before the accident.
Less than a year earlier, on 07 September 1987, a contract rigger was killed in an accident on
Piper Alpha. The accident highlighted the inadequacies of both the permit to work and the
shift handover procedures. A golden opportunity to put this right was missed.
When the disaster occurred, offshore safety was governed through the use of prescriptive
regulations. Such regulations have their uses, provided all eventualities have been considered.
But a regulations-bound system falls because practices not covered by regulations are simply
not addressed. People become complacent when they are encouraged to think that safety can
be ensured by rules enforced by inspectors: it is impossible to cover all eventualities in a set
of general rules.

Safety Training:
Some workers who ignored what they were taught survived, by not entering the
accommodation block, which eventually failed and sank into the sea, but in general training
in emergency procedures on and off the platform was lacking. In particular, management
leadership was especially inadequate in dealing with such emergencies.
Safety Audits:
As in all areas of offshore operations, audits are many and complex. The audits in Occidental
Petroleum’s North Sea field were in place and carried out regularly, but they were not carried
out satisfactorily. They identified few problems, possibly even overlooking issues such as
corroding sprinkler deluge pipework. Some issues highlighted in audits were just ignored.

Blast pressure refit:


The structure and protections for the control room and electrical supply systems were not
changed when Piper Alpha began to produce a higher percentage of gas versus oil. The initial
explosion destroyed critical safety and control systems because there were ineffective blast
walls.

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