Piper Alpha Accident - 1988

Introduction

The paper aims to emphasize on one of the significant tragic incidents of the history i.e. the Accident of Piper Alpha in 1988. The Piper Alpha was 170 km large offshore construction work in the North Sea in the oil field of about Piper. The company, Occidental Petroleum, was from Aberdeen and was one of the major setups which used to produce Petroleum (78%) and Texaco (22%). About 10% of total oil and gas production at this time in the North Sea have been carried out on the Piper Alpha to the earth's surface. The platform began in 1976 with the production, such as oil platform was designed and built and later converted to gas. The event occurred due to an accident that the Piper Alpha was stuck by a fire resulted in the killings of 167 people (Bea & Gale, 1990).

If the beginning of the accident is a trivial technical problem, it is mainly a communication error is the cause of the disaster. This is followed by a series of events mainly due to safety devices not adapted to a partial modification of activity of the platform, the production of oil to the gas. A new pipeline gas was asked a few weeks before July 6, the day there is a small leak (Petrie, 1988). That morning, the valve of one of the compressors that compress the gas for transport to the coast has been removed for review. The pressure tube was temporarily sealed with a sealing plate. The service engineer filled out a form saying that the compressor should never be turned on, but failed to inform the service technician compressor status. In case of fire pumps should automatically turn on and pump sea water to extinguish any fires. However, the procedures prescribed Piper Alpha to the pumps in manual mode whenever divers were in the water, which was the case for operations clogging the pipeline.

Background

The offshore construction work consisted of four modules and each was separated. According to the safety requirements of the modules have been arranged so that the dangerous work was carried out as far as possible from the crew compartments. The conversion from oil to gas broke through but this concept and had the consequence that. Some sensitive areas next to each other, such as the gas compression next to the control room, were finally arranged in an accident. Against otherwise dominant representation of the offshore construction work by an individual explosion cannot destroy. The disaster developed gradually. Within the first hour, there were some critical moments where the right decisions to prevent the disaster or could have significantly reduced at least in its effects (Ganick, 1984, pp. 267-279).

The management of Occidental Petroleum appointed himself to the fact that it affected the first accident. On one of its platforms in the North Sea The charge that they are already four years earlier A fatal accident on the Piper Alpha with which a worker died obscured. Occidental destroyed the remnants of the ...