- "Sweeping changes needed in the way that safety in the offshore industry is assessed. This is the conclusion of the Cullen report into the explosion on the oil rig Piper Alpha that killed 167 men on 6 July 1988.
- Operators, says Cullen, must adopt this new philosophy on safety, producing a 'safety case'. This includes continuous hazard assessment over the plant's lifetime, fault tree analysis, which looks at all the ways an error could develop, and takes account of ways that 'human factors' contribute to disasters.
- In his analysis of the causes of the Piper Alpha disaster, Cullen is critical of the amount of training that workers on Piper Alpha received. The lack of training showed most clearly in the poor operation of a system for monitoring potentially dangerous work. Under this system, one 'permit to work' should have been filled in for each dangerous operation. No such permit was filled in to show that a safety valve had been removed from a pump in the part of the platform that compressed gas.
- If such paperwork had existed, the shift on the night of the disaster would probably not have tried to restart the pump with the missing valve. A flange fitted at the site of the valve was not leakproof. Gas leaking from this flange probably sparked off the whole disaster.
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The first explosion caused a lot of damage in the part of the platform that separates oil, setting crude oil alight. Oil from the platform and from a ruptured pipe fed this fire and led to a second explosion and a much more intense fire. The explosions and fire damaged emergency equipment, such as water sprinklers, that should have slowed down the course of the disaster."
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Ironically, factors such as poor training and lack of correct procedures when filling in permits to rowk had come to light almost a year earlier, when a rigger died on Pipe Alpha on 7 September 1987. That accident, according to Cullen, highlighted factors that contributed to the disaster almost a year later on 6 July.
- CULLEN Piper Alpha Disaster investigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha
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