Alexander L Kielland, Norwegian North Sea, 1980 Kielland disaster took 123 lives in March 1980. See also: Occidental’s lawsuit against contractors operating during the disaster The story of a parent who lost their son in the disaster A timeline of what happened The Alexander L. According to the report, the company had inadequate safety measures in place at the time, though Occidental never faced criminal charges. Two rescuers also died in their attempt to help, and bringing the fire under control took three weeks.Ī public enquiry made 106 recommendations to help prevent future incidents, including greater clarity over work permits, more robust fire suppression systems, and forming a single regulator for offshore safety. At this time, there were 226 workers on the platform, though only 61 would survive the disaster. Piper Alpha’s oil extraction design could not withstand gas explosions, leaving crew vulnerable and preventing them from attempting to control the fire.Ī mayday call soon followed. An emergency stop quickly halted all extraction, but the initial explosion devastated the platform’s control room. The gas then ignited, and while automatic fire control measures would usually dampen the flames, crews had disabled these during maintenance.Įxplosions on the platform began just after 10pm. The night crew turned on the dangerous pump after another pump failed, resulting in the leakage of gas condensate from the two blind flanges. The engineers used work permits to notify the evening crew that the condensate-injection pump they had worked on should not be switched on under any circumstances. When the maintenance crew’s shift ended, the work remained incomplete and the temporary covers remained in place. During the work, the open condensate pipe was temporarily sealed with two large metal caps, known as blind flanges. Engineers had removed the pressure safety valve of the corresponding condensate-injection pump as part of routine maintenance earlier in the day. The Piper Alpha disaster began on 6 July 1988, following a gas leak from one of the platform’s condensate pipes. In the early 1980s the offshore platform started producing gas, with three main gas transport risers and an oil export riser. At the time, this represented approximately 10% of the country’s total crude oil production. One of the UK’s largest offshore oil platforms, Piper Alpha produced more than 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day at its peak. US-based Occidental managed Piper Alpha, located 120 miles north-east of Aberdeen. This became the deadliest offshore oil rig accident in history.Īfter explorers discovered crude reserves in 1973, a joint venture started operations on the UK Continental Shelf in 1976. In 1988, explosions on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the British North Sea killed 167 people. The memorial to the Piper Alpha disaster in Aberdeen, UK. Here, we give an overview of the offshore platform and rig disasters that directly caused the most fatalities, and how they came to happen. Some governments work with the seas to wash away what happened, but often the chaos of an emergency is enough to obscure the truth. Some of the disasters below have relatively little reliably information available. Countries have improved their offshore regulations and created better equipment as a result of the disasters below, but these come as a result of hundreds of deaths. Thankfully, greater emphasis on safety and better knowledge of risks have made offshore disaster less common and less severe. In many of the worst disasters, these elements claimed the most lives, helped by bad equipment design, fumbled emergency procedures, and poor enforcement of protocols. In reality, the most lethal element in offshore life often comes from harsh weather conditions and the daily threat of an unforgiving ocean. Offshore platform and rig disasters make many people think of massive explosions and oil slicks. The most notorious offshore incident, Deepwater Horizon, had a death toll far smaller than the worst offshore rig disasters.
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