The Oil Disaster: The Causes Of The Piper Alpha Platform

Located in the North Sea approximately 120 kilometers eastward of Aberdeen was the Piper Alpha platform. It was a production platform owned by Occidental Petroleum. Construction and placement of the platform began in 1975, where it sat in the Piper field. Production on the platform did not begin until 1976. The production of oil escalated after the platform began drilling operations with Piper Alpha making up to 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day. At its peak of oil production the platform brought in ten percent of the United Kingdom’s oil production. In the coming years the rate that crude oil was produced began to decrease because of the depletion in the well’s formation.

In 1980, a gas recovery module was installed on the platform. The module made it feasible to produce oil and gas when before the installation it only had produced crude oil. A sub-sea pipeline connected the Piper Alpha to the Flotta oil workstation. The gas recovery module that was installed connected the Piper Alpha to the MCP-01 gas-processing platform and to another platform named the Tartan platform, using gas pipelines. The gas that was produced from connecting the two platforms was about 33,000,000 standard cubic feet of gas. The events leading up to this, including the conversion from oil to a gas-producing platform, inevitably was the reason leading up to the causes of the Piper Alpha Disaster. It is considered the worst offshore accident that has ever occurred.

On July 6, 1988 an explosion resulting in fire broke out on Piper Alpha. The disaster killed 167 men including two rescue workers. There were sixty-one survivors who saved themselves by multiple go for it attempts including: 27 climbed down ropes to a lower deck and then to the sea, 1 by a sta...

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... the incident, such as the Human Factors Theory and the Accident/Incident Theory was inevitably the cause of the disaster along with management failure and poor decision-making made by employees. Ultimately the lack of communication and organization is what sparked this whole disaster. If a few more steps were taken, by upper and lower level employees the job would have been done correctly and the whole incident would have been avoided and I would not be writing this paper on the causes behind the Piper Alpha disaster, but it did not happen. The Piper Alpha was the worst disaster in oil industry history and killed almost 200 men, but not everything was bad because of the incident. There was one good thing that came from this; the Piper Alpha Disaster in fact, saved millions of lives by changing the safety procedures of the oil and gas industry for the years to come.