Remembering Piper Alpha | Hacker News Reader

Remembering Piper Alpha

blogs.bl.uk

48 pointsThevet7 comments

If anyone is interested in the engineering and management failures that led to the disaster, I can highly recommend the lecture at the link below. It's presented by Sir Brian Appleton, a chemical engineer who provided technical advice to the Piper Alpha inquiry. He examines the systemic safety shortcomings in great detail and reveals some fascinating and broadly applicable lessons on managing a complex system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9h8MKG88_U

Somehow I'd not seen that before, thanks for posting.

BBC Scotland produced a 1hr30min documentary about Piper Alpha a few years back. There's some pretty harrowing experiences talked about by the survivors and those who lost family members and friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PcDNRSsM24

It's fairly brutal stuff. My mum's friend lost her son in the accident, I don't think there was community throughout Scotland who didn't know of a family that had been affected by this tragedy.

I can second this. Although I remember the event, I was a bit too young to really understand what had gone on. This documentary was terrifying.

I remember watching a similar doco as a kid, before my Dad went away to help set up the initial systems on the Wandoo A and B platforms in the North West of Western Australia. He'd not been offshore in a rig environment before and the conversation about the Piper Alpha came up.

As a kid about to see his Dad off for several weeks, it was a pretty distressing documentary to watch.

Edit: Just realised that you linked a different video to the one I recalled

After reading through the wiki timeline of events, I understand my company's policy (and emphasis) on "any employee can stop work at any time for a safety issue and we will back them up on it".

This could have been much less tragic if the employees who had the ability to cut things off sooner felt they had the authority to act.

Jesus this brings back so many memories. Knew family member of a friend who died, but I was too young to care at the time. We complain about health and safety sometimes, but...

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