Piper Alpha Concepts

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure

by Tim Harford · 1 Jun 2011 · 459pp · 103,153 words

move in the opposite direction.’ – Attributed to E.F. Schumacher 1 When failure is unthinkable On the morning of 6 July 1988, maintenance workers on Piper Alpha, the largest and oldest oil and gas rig in the North Sea, dismantled a backup pump to check a safety valve. The work dragged on

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, caught fire and exploded. The explosion, serious in itself, was compounded by several other failures. Normally, a gas rig such as Piper Alpha would have blast walls to contain explosions, but Piper Alpha had originally been designed to pump oil, which is flammable but rarely explosive. The retrofitted design also placed hazards too close

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could be coordinated, so platform workers retreated to the rig’s accommodation block. Two nearby rigs continued to pump oil and gas towards the blazing Piper Alpha, their operators watching the inferno but fretting that they lacked authority to make the expensive decision to shut down production. It might have made little

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three more weeks, wilting like old flowers in a betrayal of mass, steel and engineering. Industrial safety experts pored over what had gone wrong with Piper Alpha and learned lessons for preventing future tragedies. But fewer lessons seem to have been learned from a related accident: a meltdown in the financial markets

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which was triggered by Piper Alpha’s destruction. This was the ‘LMX spiral’, and it nearly destroyed the venerable insurance market Lloyd’s. Insurers often sign contracts in which one insurer

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syndicates could and did find that, through a circle of intermediaries, they were their own reinsurers. The spiral was coiled and ready to unwind when Piper Alpha was destroyed. The insurance syndicates who traded on Lloyd’s were hit with an initial bill for about a billion dollars, one of the largest

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chain reaction. The eventual total of claims resulting from the billion-dollar loss was $16 billion. Some hapless insurance syndicates discovered that they had insured Piper Alpha many times over. Parts of the spiral are still being unwound over two decades later. If this sounds familiar, it should. Within the first few

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of discovering something that would prevent future financial crises, I realised that I was missing a hidden, yet vital, parallel. It was the horror of Piper Alpha’s destruction itself, rather than the financial meltdown that followed it, which could tell us more about financial acdents. If we want to learn about

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is not clear to most bankers, or to banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Piper Alpha, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle – engineers, psychologists and even sociologists – the connection is obvious. James Reason, a psychologist who has spent a lifetime studying human

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wrong. Tight coupling means the unintended consequences proliferate so quickly that it is impossible to adapt to the failure or to try something different. On Piper Alpha, the initial explosion need not have destroyed the rig, but it took out the control room, making an evacuation difficult, and also making it impossible

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would often settle a little, and the column, balanced like a see-saw on the central pile, would then snap as the ends sagged. The Piper Alpha disaster is another example: it began because a maintenance operation crashed into rules designed to prevent engineers working long tiring shifts, and it was aggravated

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mistakes. Mistakes are things you do on purpose, but with unintended consequences, because your mental model of the world is wrong. When the supervisors at Piper Alpha switched on a dismantled pump, they made a mistake in this sense. Switching on the pump was what they intended, and they followed all the

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last thought of his wife and young daughter, and a prayer, Williams leapt from the deck of Deepwater Horizon. Like the few survivors of the Piper Alpha disaster, he faced a ten-storey drop. Mike Williams survived; eleven others died. The exact distribution of blame for the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the

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capabilities were most needed to plug the leak, the rig itself was being torn apart by a series of explosions. In an awful echo of Piper Alpha the blowout preventer could not be triggered from the rig’s deck because power lines had been severed in the initial explosion. A safer design

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Day, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/6/newsid_3017000/3017294.stm; Piper Alpha Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha; The Fire and Blast Information Group, http://www.fabig.com/Accidents/Piper+Alpha.htm 183 Parts of the spiral are still being unwound over two decades later: John Kay

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industry, 94, 110–11, 114, 236–7 PhilCo, 11 Philippines, 136 Phillips, Michael, 249 Picasso, Pablo, 260 pilot schemes, 29–30 Pinochet, General Augusto, 70 Piper-Alpha disaster (July 1988), 181–3, 184, 186, 187, 208–9, 219 planning, 19, 68–9; centrally planned economies, 11, 21, 23–6, 68–9, 70

Inviting Disaster

by James R. Chiles · 7 Jul 2008 · 415pp · 123,373 words

of failing to communicate in a clear and timely way tolled on the night of July 6, 1988, when an explosion and fire aboard the Piper Alpha platform killed most of the crew. This giant steel platform, standing in 475-foot-deep waters in the North Sea, had two jobs before it

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melted and collapsed. The Piper Alpha drilled for oil like any rig—producing 140,000 barrels a day—and it also had a gas-processing plant aboard that purified huge volumes

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of natural gas piped to it from other platforms nearby. The Piper Alpha then pumped the finished goods to shore. On the afternoon of July 6, a day-shift crew doing routine maintenance work disconnected a safety valve

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a banshee” as it shot out, one survivor said later. Another hour went by before the other platforms shut down their gas shipments to the Piper Alpha. Having no good escape route to the sea one hundred feet below, some workers stayed put and were killed by fumes and fire; others jumped

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not going to happen on my watch” is clearly not justifiable anymore, not when so many tasks cross from one shift to another. On the Piper Alpha, workers and managers had gotten sloppy about following the “permit-to-work” system, which was supposed to prevent the use of equipment that was in

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and little, this mound of paperwork swamped that key manager with unimportant checkoffs while monstrous risks went sneaking by. The garden-variety errors on the Piper Alpha—leaving a job half done and failing to make sure that the right people knew about an unsolved problem—would have been of little consequence

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platform destroyed, and 12 percent of North Sea gas production cut off. THAT LITTLE BLACK BOOK Compare the risky habits that had developed on the Piper Alpha to how ordnance-disposal men communicated danger during World War II. As the war proceeded, these squads came across increasingly devilish timers and booby traps

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tons of ammonium perchlorate stocks burned, then exploded. Fire department blamed welding torch for trigger; company blamed leaking gas pipeline. Deaths: 2 (managers on-site). Piper Alpha (offshore drilling rig): explosion and fire North Sea July 6, 1988 Offshore platform processed large volumes of natural gas from other rigs via pipes. Daytime

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, 6 pilot operated relief valve (PORV), 50–54 origin of, 50–52 malfunction of, 41, 47, 52–61, 188, 190, 291, 304 Pioneer Tunnel, 260 Piper Alpha, explosion and fire on, 245–47, 308 Potter, Jerry, 268, 273 Poudre B, 133, 297 pressure cooker, invention of, 51–52 Prince William Sound, oil

A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr · 2 Jul 2009 · 872pp · 259,208 words

words, far fewer than he devotes to the mildly amusing theft of his trousers from a train. Neither of them mentions the great tragedy of Piper Alpha, when 185 men were burned or blown to death (two thirds of the British toll in the Falklands War). The great tomes on Wilson and

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) ref1 Philby, Kim ref1, ref2 Pierrepoint, Albert ref1 Pike, Magnus ref1 Pimlott, Ben ref1 Pink Floyd ref1, ref2 Pinter, Harold ref1 Pinwright’s Progress ref1 Piper Alpha ref1 Plaid Cymru ref1 Polaris ref1, ref2 Poles ref1 Police, the ref1 police, performance league tables ref1 Political and Economic Planning (PEP) ref1 politics ref1

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have become prime minister in 1997, but died of a heart attack. 56. In June 1988, 185 men died when a North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up – yet the extraordinary story of the oil boom is little mentioned in politicians’ memoirs. 57. Bitter-sweet: Tory chairman Chris Patten helped John

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have become prime minister in 1997, but died of a heart attack. 56. In June 1988, 185 men died when a North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up – yet the extraordinary story of the oil boom is little mentioned in politicians’ memoirs. 57. Bitter-sweet: Tory chairman Chris Patten helped John

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit

by Loren C. Steffy · 5 Nov 2010 · 305pp · 79,356 words

entire platform was one spark away from becoming a floating inferno. That scenario was what had happened on another North Sea platform, Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha, in 1988. Gas from a ruptured line had ignited, engulfing the rig in flames and killing 167 men. Only 59 crew members survived. Even after

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the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Piper Alpha remains the industry’s shorthand for horror—its worst offshore disaster. Fortunately, the Forties Alpha had a different outcome. No one died that day, thanks

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protégés, and his specialty was the drilling of relief wells. He’d been involved in 83 of them, including the one that killed the infamous Piper Alpha blowout in the North Sea in 1988. He had directed 40 projects himself and had never missed an intercept, and he had no intention of

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, 210–211 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah, 32 Parker, Bill, 210-211, 215, 216 Parus, Don, 65, 67 Petroﬁna, 46 Phillips, 46 Pillari, Ross, 90, 237 Piper Alpha, 57 P&J Oysters, 210–211 Pleasant, Chris, 177–178 BOP and, 171–172 , 177, 242–243 negative-pressure test discussion and, 173–174 well

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?

by Brett Christophers · 17 Nov 2020 · 614pp · 168,545 words

imposing regulatory ‘burdens’ would precipitate capital flight.62 Furthermore, when the industry was required to regroup in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the Piper Alpha tragedy, which killed 167 people, its Cost Reduction Initiative for the New Era was a quintessentially ‘oligopolistic response’ that further attenuated competition – ‘generating barriers to

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> g formula, 45, 380, 391–392, 409; on rent and inequality, xix, 45, 86–88, 380, 391–392, 409, 419–421 PIMCO, 292–293, 309 Piper Alpha tragedy, 123 Pitkethly, Robert, 173 platform rents, 179–226; about, xxxiii, 179–183; data and, 192–197; geography of transnational profit recognition, 222–226; growth

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond · 2 Jan 2008 · 801pp · 242,104 words

. When I asked a Chevron safety representative who happened to be a bird-watcher what had prompted these policies, his short answer was: “Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal.” He was referring to the huge oil spill from the running aground off Alaska of Exxon’s oil tanker the Exxon Valdez in

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1989, the 1988 fire on Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea that killed 167 people (Plate 33), and the 1984 escape of chemicals at Union Carbide’s Bhopal chemical plant

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illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable. The public can do that by suing businesses for harming them, as happened after the Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal disasters; by preferring to buy sustainably harvested products, a preference that caught the attention of Home Depot and Unilever; by making employees of

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defined in Dominican Republic in Polynesia in Tikopia Pérez Rancier, Juan Bautista Perry, Matthew Pertamina pesticides Peters, Thomas Phelps-Dodge Corporation photosynthesis Picts Pigman, Chip Piper Alpha oil platform Pitcairn Island collapse of and Easter Island evacuation of H.M.S. Bounty survivors on human impact on isolation of maps population of

Scotland Travel Guide

by Lonely Planet

, circular white room, with fish-scaled balustrades evoking the briny origins of Aberdeen’s wealth, commemorating the 165 people who lost their lives in the Piper Alpha oil-rig disaster in 1988. Marischal College & Museum MUSEUM (www.abdn.ac.uk/marischal_museum; Marischal College, Broad St; 10am-5pm Mon-Fri, 2-5pm

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History

by David Edgerton · 27 Jun 2018

oil workers typically neither. Oil was only temporarily visible. 1988 saw an explosion and fire on a US-owned rig in the North Sea, the Piper Alpha. This rig, one of the earliest, took oil and gas from the pioneering Piper field, the equivalent of a gigantic coal mine. 167 men died

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?

by John Kay · 2 Sep 2015 · 478pp · 126,416 words

the LMX spiral, so elaborate and complex that it was simply impossible to ascertain the underlying risks to which the holder was exposed. When the Piper Alpha oil rig went on fire in the North Sea in 1987, killing 200 people and triggering what was then the world’s largest marine insurance

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claim, underwriting names who had never heard of Piper Alpha discovered they had re-insured it over and over again. The total value of claims at Lloyd’s turned out to be ten times the

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perpetual inventory method 321n4 Perrow, Charles 278, 279 personal financial management 6, 7 personal liability 296 ‘petrodollars’ 14, 37 Pfizer 96 Pierpoint Morgan, J. 165 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster (1987) 63 Ponzi, Charles 131, 132 Ponzi schemes 131, 132, 136, 201 pooled investment funds 197 portfolio insurance 38 Potts, Robin, QC

Collapse

by Jared Diamond · 25 Apr 2011 · 753pp · 233,306 words

. When I asked a Chevron safety representative who happened to be a bird-watcher what had prompted these policies, his short answer was: "Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal." He was referring to the huge oil spill from the running aground off Alaska of Exxon's oil tanker the Exxon Valdez in

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1989, the 1988 fire on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea that killed 167 people (Plate 33), and the 1984 escape of chemicals at Union Carbide's Bhopal chemical plant

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illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable. The public can do that by suing businesses for harming them, as happened after the Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal disasters; by preferring to buy sustainably harvested products, a preference that caught the attention of Home Depot and Unilever; by making employees of