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October 2013 www.sname.org/sname/mt e Legacy of Piper Alpha continued (historical note) case process also was a post-Piper Alpha innovation. is requires the duty holder to submit to the health and safety executive a safety case, giving full details of the arrange- ments for managing health and safety and controlling major accident hazards. (To learn more about the safety case model, see Living Document,? beginning on page 62 in this issue.) A culture of safety is now rmly embedded into o shore operations. Following Piper Alpha, the industry has taken best practice and adopted it as a set of routine procedures; what was considered an excellent way of working in the 1980s has now become minimum standard. Good examples include sub-sea isolation valves and double block and bleed systems to isolate sections of the platform. Mooring arrangements also have been improved. Matrices now govern risk management and cover every signifi- cant activity and practice. Risk assessments are documented and audited and all parties, including installation engineers, operators, and surveyors, are now involved in the pro- cess. Formal procedures are now the norm and much more emphasis is placed on docu- menting and controlling all stages from design to implementation. Less mature offshore fields such as those o West Africa have embraced best practice and are implementing the recom- mendations made since Piper Alpha. is means that lessons are not being re-learned and that the newer elds can begin operat- ing at a high level of safety. But complacency cannot be allowed to return. e industry is changing and expanding into signi cantly deeper waters and into locations that expe- rience extreme weather conditions, such as the Barents Sea, the waters o the Shetland, and around the Falkland Islands. Even new operations in the U.S. gulf are using larger rigs to drill deeper than they have ever done before. Improvements following Piper Alpha are making these operations much safer, but operators and not govern- ments are transferring the knowledge and the high standards. Self regulation prevails in this industry. Statistical focus One failing of the current safety management process is that the industry remains focused on statistics. If 100 near misses will result in 10 accidents, which, in turn, lead to one fatal- ity, then it follows that attention should be given to reducing those near misses. But this is unlikely to capture low-probability events or subsea technical issues in which near misses may never be recorded but which could lead to a disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. It is sad that a major incident is often required to bring about regulatory change. In the case of Piper Alpha, the principal lessons of duty holder, safety case, and risk assess- ment techniques have been applied widely both within the North Sea and also in other mature and emerging o shore locations. is has very likely saved lives. But safety must be applied within a consistent and robust global regulatory framework. It is only through iden- tifying the root causes of potential problems and managing those risks within the context of a comprehensive safety management pro- cess that major accidents can be prevented. Often the focus is on single incidents, systems, and processes whereas an emphasis should be placed on multiple systems and multiple teams of operators to ensure all safety pro- cesses are aligned. Offshore oil and gas exploration will always be a high-risk activity, but it should be possible to identify, assess, and manage those risks. To achieve that, oil companies, regulators, and insurance interests need to work together, and this is happening. ere is a more structured approach to marine assur- ance surveys for vessels operating in the oil eld, through the OCIMF, and underwrit- ers are continuing to reduce construction risk by requiring Marine Warranty Survey third party oversight. Piper Alpha is an important accident to review periodically. It highlights many failings and weak spots that the industry had assumed were ne. e o shore industry has learned many hard lessons from Piper Alpha and is now a much safer place since it occurred? but disasters of any kind cant be allowed to happen again. MTBrian Jones is associate director of London O shore Consultants Limited (LOC). Andrew Johnstone is an as- sociate of LOC. Cullen believed that many accidents were predictable and that risk could be reduced through better design and engineering techniques.