Piper Alpha Disaster North Sea Offshore - Essay Example

Piper Alpha operations came to an end on 6 July 1988 when an explosion occurred which then led to serious oil and gas fires. This incidence has been recorded as the worst offshore oil tragedy in the world that has ever occurred in terms of lives lost and business loss as it claimed the lives of 167 men and only 61 survivors were saved from the accident. The industrial loss was approximated to be US$ 3.4 billion. It was located in a piper oilfield and is comprised of 4 modules. According to Matsen (2011), the modules were set in a way that the most unsafe operations were far-off from the worker's areas for safety reasons.

 The transfer from oil to gas production hindered the arrangement of these modules by bringing more sensitive areas close to each other which were mainly the cause of the incident. Two condensate pumps; A, B displaced the platforms condensate for transport. Pump A’s pressure valve was taken out for maintenance and the pipe was temporarily sealed with a disk cover which was hand-tightened. The engineer on duty filled a permit that the pump should not be started since it was not ready.

At the end of his shift, he left the permit in the control center and did not notify the on-duty custodian. Another permit had been filed for the general overhaul of pump A which had not been started. The automatic fire fighting system was controlled by diesel and electric pumps but the diesel pump was disabled by the initial explosions. A previous review recommended that a plan had to be put in place to keep the pumps in the automatic form in case divers were not around in an incident that required them but this was never implemented.

Problems with the methanol system lead to the formation of ice due to the prevailing temperatures and pressure stated to build up in the gas condensing structure pipeline which started to block the pipes and thereafter pipe B stopped and could not be started again.  This pump was the major determinant in the supply of power in the whole offshore and a prolonged delay in fixing it would lead to a total fail in the supply of power (PatC-Cornell, 1992). The managers did not find the permit that recommended that pump A was not to be started in any case.

No one around noticed the missing valve and so Pump A was switched on. Because of the missing safety valve, the metal disk that had replaced it was not tight enough and therefore could not hold the flowing gas which contained a lot of pressure. Konrad (2011) says that the men working around that place heard the gas flow but before they could do anything, the gas caught fire and blew up, breaking all through the firewall.  This also destroyed other areas causing an additional discharge of oil and gases leading to an extensive fire, due to the fresh ruptures on the pipework.

The fire did not allow the workers to move to the lifeboat stations as the emergency procedures had instructed. A fireproofed accommodation block was where the workers hid for their safety,  but later wind and fire hindered helicopters from landing and no more instruction could be given. The major problem faced during this tragedy is a communication failure. Most of those in authority to give instruction on evacuations were burned down already when the control room exploded. And the operation crew did have the authority to shut down.

  If there was a good explanation of the emergency procedure in cases of an incident like this that all operations should stop, it would have been easy to contain the fire since the supply of fresh oils and gases would have been contained (Cullen, 1990). The fire would have been easily stopped if the platform was shut down completely but the manager didn’t have the authority to do so. This was due to the fear of the resultant losses and the cost that would be involved in restarting the plant (Woolfson, Foster & Matthias, 1996).

During the conversion from oil production to gas production, the safety concept was ignored since no blow-up ramparts were put in place rather than the initially existing firewalls which could not hold out explosions. If Piper Alpha put in practice adequate maintenance and safety procedures and educated all the workers on the same, the disaster would not have occurred in the first place because maintenance work on the pump would not have been done simultaneously. If the engineer on day shift took his time to explain to the manager on duty the progress of his maintenance work on the safety valve and hand him the permit rather than placing it anywhere, the issue would have been addressed properly, and pump A would not have been started as directed in the permit (Dhillon, 2010).

In reference to the rules and laws of Canada and the United States regarding the safety of workers, the law of compliance which reflects on employers duties, inspections, duties of the workers, joint committees, penalties, and other laws which entail the information systems, training and workers compensations are some of the rules that if they were keenly observed, could be played a big role in preventing this disaster.