Piper Alpha disaster inquiry author calls for oil industry reporting culture

The man whose report into the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster led to sweeping reforms within the oil and gas industry has said managers within the sector should be “inquisitive” about workers' experiences and safety concerns.

Lord Cullen of Whitekirk pressed the case for a thorough “reporting culture” within the industry.

He spoke as he issued a call to sector leaders to be alert to signs of danger, highlighting past examples in the industry and further afield in which warning signs that were not acted upon resulted in tragic consequences.

Lord Cullen was giving a keynote speech at Oil & Gas UK's Safety 30 conference, taking place in Aberdeen almost three decades on from the Piper Alpha tragedy.

The North Sea platform off the coast of Aberdeen exploded in July 1988, killing 167 people.

A subsequent inquiry led by Lord Cullen resulted in more than 100 changes to safety practice.

Introducing his talk on “signs of danger” on Tuesday, he said: “There is much to be learnt from the reasons for major accidents, by which I mean the underlying reasons for those accidents.

“Those factors tend to recur, whatever the context, so they remain highly relevant despite differences in conditions over the course of time.”

He told the audience at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre: “When I read reports about major accidents, I'm struck by how frequently they had been preceded by signs indicating danger.

“But those signs were not recognised or, at any rate, effectively acted on to prevent the accidents in question, or at any rate to limit their extent.”

He told how signs of danger can take a variety of forms, such as a previous accident at work, a report pointing out signs of danger in the workplace or cases where “people may be so accustomed to things happening, they don't recognise them as dangerous”.

Lord Cullen warned it is “perilous to ignore” the factors which underlie major incidents and said there is no point in having investigations that do not lead to a lasting improvement in safety.

“Sometimes the warning signs are in reports about danger,” he said.

He highlighted reports issued in the 1980s which pointed to possible risks associated with the Piper Alpha platform ahead of the tragedy.

“In the event, those reports predicted what actually happened on the night of the disaster,” he said, adding that management had shown a “dangerously superficial approach” to the identification of potential hazards.

He continued in broader terms: “Management should also be alert to safety concerns raised by members of the workforce and indeed should be inquisitive about their experiences. There should be a reporting culture.”

Lord Cullen cited the examples of various high-profile disasters over several decades around the world in making his points.

“What we find is that in some cases there was an investigation but it was limited in scope, or it was superficial, or its results were not driven home to forestall further trouble,” he said.

“In other cases there was no investigation. Signs did not give rise to concern or even curiosity. Some signs were treated as commonplace or misread as innocuous, so there was no corrective or preventive action.

“What underlay these attitudes to safety? For my part they seem to indicate at least three factors - first, poor safety awareness, secondly a failure to give priority to safety and thirdly a failure to show or instil in others responsibility for identifying and resolving safety issues.”

He said that a workforce's accident practices are often shaped by the tone set by management and urged those at the conference to have “an absorbing concern with safety”.

The Piper Alpha platform was engulfed in a ball of flames after a gas leak ignited on July 6, 1988. It was the world's worst offshore oil and gas tragedy.

Oil & Gas UK chief executive Deirdre Michie said: “We must continually think the unthinkable in our industry - as even though there was an appreciation of major accident hazards at risks at the time of Piper Alpha, the scale of the incident that unfolded was unimaginable.

“Quite rightly, it represented a watershed moment for health and safety in our industry."