BP’s Gulf disaster was no surprise to those who understood the corporate culture.
BY Andrew B. Wilson
Shortly after lunch on November 27, 2003, Oberon Houston was in his office beneath the helideck of BP’s Forties Alpha oil platform in the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland. One of a select group (1 percent of BP’s staff) of young engineers and managers targeted by the company for rapid advancement, Houston, 34, was working out maintenance plans for the coming week when he heard what he thought was a deafening explosion.
Only it wasn’t an explosion. A gas line had ruptured—allowing thousands of pounds of pressurized gas to escape at supersonic velocity. That caused a thunderous sonic boom. Debris from the burst pipe and its cladding rained down, adding to the impression that “an artillery shell had just hit the platform.” The escaping gas quickly formed a huge and potentially lethal cloud around the rig. Now the threat of an actual explosion was very real. The smallest spark would detonate more than a ton of methane gas.
No one died or was even hurt that day on Forties Alpha, thanks in part to high winds that helped to disperse the gas after about 20 minutes of extreme danger to the platform and its crew of 180 people. But Houston, the number two in command aboard Forties Alpha, knew full well what could have happened. “Unlike a similar incident on the ill-fated Piper Alpha platform,” he observes, referring to an earlier accident in the North Sea, “the gas did not ignite, so what could have been a major disaster for myself and everyone else on board was averted by sheer luck.”
The Piper Alpha disaster took place on July 6, 1988. One hundred and sixty-seven people perished in a giant fireball on the rig operated by Occidental Petroleum. Only 62 crew members survived. In immediate loss of human life, Piper Alpha stands to this day as the worst disaster ever in offshore drilling and production—far exceeding the 11 killed in the massive explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon platform on April 20.
Though Forties Alpha could have produced a similar conflagration, it was nothing more than a near miss which was soon forgotten. BP admitted breaking health and safety laws by failing to guard against corrosion on the ruptured pipe that allowed the gas to escape. It was fined $290,000. The bigger loss came in early 2004. Houston resigned, and BP lost one of its best young engineers.
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