BP's Disaster: No Surprise to Folks in the Know
Andrew B. Wilson is a writer and business consultant.
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.
This was not a snap decision for Houston. It came out of a growing disillusionment with the company. In looking back over the last few years at BP, Houston was distressed at the way that corporate downsizing exercises seemed to target the best and most seasoned engineers. He was further distressed that BP had slashed the maintenance budget for the vast and aged Forties Alpha platform to a dangerous, even reckless extent, providing the platform's operating engineers with less than 80 percent of the money they considered necessary to ensure the rig's safety. He regarded the fine as risible and worried that it would only reinforce the prevailing complacency within the company. And finally, he told me over the course of several interviews, he was distressed by an abundance of rhetoric-coming from the CEO-about BP going "beyond petroleum" and joining the environmental activists in campaigning for reduced carbon emissions. "To me and everyone I knew, it didn't make any sense. We were a petroleum company. That wasn't going to change any time soon, and it wasn't anything to be ashamed of, either. All the talk about windmills and solar power was just PR and a lot of nonsense."
Erosion of Trust
In short, Houston no longer trusted the company to do the right thing. As someone who grew up idolizing the company, he came to the reluctant conclusion that BP itself was an accident waiting to happen: It was taking on increasingly ambitious exploration and production challenges, while demonstrating an increasingly indifferent or cavalier attitude toward engineering discipline and excellence. On top of all that, senior management seemed less than fully engaged in the difficult task of extracting and producing petroleum.
"For some time," Houston writes in an article on -conservativehome.blogs.com, " I had been dissatisfied with the way senior BP management focused so heavily on the easy part of safety, holding the hand rails, spending hours discussing the merits of reverse parking and the dangers of not having a lid on a coffee cup-but were less enthusiastic about the hard stuff, investing in and maintaining their complex facilities."
To put it even more bluntly, BP was taking a don't-sweat-the-big-stuff attitude toward safety. Others noticed the same thing. Robert Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a well-known expert on catastrophes involving complex systems, reached the same conclusion based on his own association with BP in 2002 and 2003. At the company's request, Bea studied BP's approach to catastrophic risk management at its U.S. facilities in Texas City, Prudhoe Bay, and Cherry Point, Washington, and made recommendations directly to John Browne, then CEO of BP, and other members of top management.
Hearing of his work and knowing that he had launched an independent study (separate from ongoing government studies and investigations) of the disaster in the Gulf, I sent an email to Bea in early June, showing him Houston's critique of the prevailing attitude toward safety inside BP and asking if he agreed. He immediately replied:
"You are spot on. BP worried a lot about personal safety-slips, trips, and falls-high frequency, low consequence accidents. They did not worry as much (at all) about the low frequency, high consequence accidents-the real disasters. Different categories of accidents require different approaches."
In subsequent interviews, Bea told me that BP had paid promptly and well for his report, but he saw no sign that they were prepared to act any differently than before. About two years later, on March 23, 2005, BP had a major explosion at its Texas City refinery that left 15 people dead and more than 170 injured. Again, BP admitted breaking rules. This time it did not get off so lightly: It was hit with $137 million in fines-the heaviest workplace safety fines in U.S. history.
Following the Texas City accident, an independent report on safety at the five BP refineries in the United States, known as the Baker Panel Report, came to pretty much the same conclusion that Bea had reached before the accident. As Browne, who retired as CEO in 2007, states in his memoir, published early this year, the Baker Panel found that "we had not done enough to make process safety a core value. We had emphasized that individuals had to be safe when they went about their daily work-'personal safety.' . . . But we had not emphasized that processes and equipment had to be safe under all circumstances and operated in a safe way at all times-'process safety.' "
Weekly Standard 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.
This was not a snap decision for Houston. It came out of a growing disillusionment with the company. In looking back over the last few years at BP, Houston was distressed at the way that corporate downsizing exercises seemed to target the best and most seasoned engineers. He was further distressed that BP had slashed the maintenance budget for the vast and aged Forties Alpha platform to a dangerous, even reckless extent, providing the platform's operating engineers with less than 80 percent of the money they considered necessary to ensure the rig's safety. He regarded the fine as risible and worried that it would only reinforce the prevailing complacency within the company. And finally, he told me over the course of several interviews, he was distressed by an abundance of rhetoric-coming from the CEO-about BP going "beyond petroleum" and joining the environmental activists in campaigning for reduced carbon emissions. "To me and everyone I knew, it didn't make any sense. We were a petroleum company. That wasn't going to change any time soon, and it wasn't anything to be ashamed of, either. All the talk about windmills and solar power was just PR and a lot of nonsense."
Erosion of Trust
In short, Houston no longer trusted the company to do the right thing. As someone who grew up idolizing the company, he came to the reluctant conclusion that BP itself was an accident waiting to happen: It was taking on increasingly ambitious exploration and production challenges, while demonstrating an increasingly indifferent or cavalier attitude toward engineering discipline and excellence. On top of all that, senior management seemed less than fully engaged in the difficult task of extracting and producing petroleum.
"For some time," Houston writes in an article on -conservativehome.blogs.com, " I had been dissatisfied with the way senior BP management focused so heavily on the easy part of safety, holding the hand rails, spending hours discussing the merits of reverse parking and the dangers of not having a lid on a coffee cup-but were less enthusiastic about the hard stuff, investing in and maintaining their complex facilities."
To put it even more bluntly, BP was taking a don't-sweat-the-big-stuff attitude toward safety. Others noticed the same thing. Robert Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a well-known expert on catastrophes involving complex systems, reached the same conclusion based on his own association with BP in 2002 and 2003. At the company's request, Bea studied BP's approach to catastrophic risk management at its U.S. facilities in Texas City, Prudhoe Bay, and Cherry Point, Washington, and made recommendations directly to John Browne, then CEO of BP, and other members of top management.
Hearing of his work and knowing that he had launched an independent study (separate from ongoing government studies and investigations) of the disaster in the Gulf, I sent an email to Bea in early June, showing him Houston's critique of the prevailing attitude toward safety inside BP and asking if he agreed. He immediately replied:
"You are spot on. BP worried a lot about personal safety-slips, trips, and falls-high frequency, low consequence accidents. They did not worry as much (at all) about the low frequency, high consequence accidents-the real disasters. Different categories of accidents require different approaches."
In subsequent interviews, Bea told me that BP had paid promptly and well for his report, but he saw no sign that they were prepared to act any differently than before. About two years later, on March 23, 2005, BP had a major explosion at its Texas City refinery that left 15 people dead and more than 170 injured. Again, BP admitted breaking rules. This time it did not get off so lightly: It was hit with $137 million in fines-the heaviest workplace safety fines in U.S. history.
Following the Texas City accident, an independent report on safety at the five BP refineries in the United States, known as the Baker Panel Report, came to pretty much the same conclusion that Bea had reached before the accident. As Browne, who retired as CEO in 2007, states in his memoir, published early this year, the Baker Panel found that "we had not done enough to make process safety a core value. We had emphasized that individuals had to be safe when they went about their daily work-'personal safety.' . . . But we had not emphasized that processes and equipment had to be safe under all circumstances and operated in a safe way at all times-'process safety.' "
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Read the full article here: http://www.connectture.com/pa-393.aspx
There are a bunch of filthy rich oligarchs from "both sides of the aisles" who can literally get away with murder. The reason the Dems were not totally against Bushoccio and his Crime Family, is that he was speaking the Wal-Mart, filthy rich first language to them all as well as their big corporate masters.
Now THAT is what Mission Accomplished was all about. The Neo Con wet dream has come true.
Today we need to look past BP to solve the gulf coast problems now. We need to look at the person that we elected; the President to solve the oil gusher.
As a born in the USA citizen here are some of my suggestions.
The Executive Office must cut govt. red tape to employ new oil spill technology on immediate basis.
A panel made up of scientists; (petroleum, mechanical, chemical, computer and or electrical engineers, biologists, associated technicians, and oceanographers) are to be sent to the coast now.
An area of the coast is to be set aside, quarantined, for experimentation of various processes that will stop and or reduce the impact of the oil that is being spewed forth into our gulf waters.
Innovators, bring forth their inventions and processes presenting them to the panel for immediate evaluation in the quarantined area. Once processes and or inventions are determined to be better than or of equal value to the processes presently being employed in the gulf; the new processes will also be employed on a now basis in the gulf area.
In Joe the plumber speak:
Sewer of a new building that Joe's crew was working on broke open. The sewer is spewing forth you know what and has started to reach the pool area of the new building. Joe interrupted his golf game to address the problem quickly. Joe knows there are regulatory plumbing codes involved to do the plumbing in a regulatory way. "Joe, knows that this is an emergency situation" and will think about the plumbing codes later! Joe knows above all things he needs to stop the sewage flow now!
Joe realizes he doesn't have the equipment on hand to stop the sewage flow and fix the broken sewer. So Joe calls in plumbing specialists. Joe quickly reviews which specialists tools will work and he employs them. Joe states he'll worry about meeting the plumbing codes after the emergency is taken care of. Joe states he has to save the pool from being overtaken by the sewage NOW!
Joe has made an Executive decision. To date from Internet sources, only one of the thousands of new processes that can and will stop the advance of oil in the gulf has even been considered. Voice your opinion and your need to your State Representative, and to the Executive in charge. Remember to ?VOTE!?
You won't find any other animal that will knowingly destroy its own food and water supply. All of these people who say environmentaists are nuts ought to consider whether they intend to continue eating, breathing and drinking. If they do, it might actually be wise to tolerate some of the 'granola' aspects of the environmentalists, as their core message is in reality spot on.
Environmentalism is not about saving whales, it's about quality of life. Not being able to eat seafood from a patch of water the size of Nebraska is a quality of life issue, not an asthetic one.
But go one America, despoil your land, your water, and your air like senseless, stupid savages. Just don't expect to live your final years of life in any sort of comfort, or for your children to have much in the way of opportunities.
Deregulation & the rush to "downsize for the bottomline" has caused deterioration in all segments of industry resulting in a continual state of "crisis management". To some extent the real effects of this deterioration have been masked by "outsourcing" and over reliance on unpaid overtime. But many different industrial sectors have similarly potential "worse case scenarios" ready & primed to explode into similar disastrous consequences.
Thank god for Monty Python: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo
Economists refer to this as a 'moral hazard'. Indeed, we are experiencing the result of decades of severe moral hazard, and the result is that any business beyond about $100M in revenues spends most of its innovative energies not on new products but on figuring out ways to cheat the system or defraud investors.
When you remove personal or corporate responsibility from commerce, the outcome is totally obvious and terrible. But, since Americans seem to have tremendous tolerance for criminality, there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe the situation will change any time soon.