
Remembering Piper Alpha - Thevet
http://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2017/07/remembering-piper-alpha.html
======
jdietrich
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9h8MKG88_U)

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

------
teh_klev
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](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.

~~~
King-Aaron
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

------
mysterydip
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.

------
sofaofthedamned
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...

