It wasn’t an explosion. It was a sonic boom. Because of the broken compressor, an aging gas line became pressurized and, weakened by corrosion, ripped apart. Natural gas was shooting from the gash in the line at supersonic velocity. The entire platform was one spark away from becoming a floating inferno. That scenario was what had happened on another North Sea platform, Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha, in 1988. Gas from a ruptured line had ignited, engulfing the rig in flames and killing 167 men. Only 59 crew members survived. Even after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Piper Alpha remains the industry’s shorthand for horror - its worst offshore disaster.
Fortunately, the Forties Alpha had a different outcome. No one died that day, thanks in part to the high winds of the blustery late autumn in the North Sea. Disaster was averted by what Houston attributed to “sheer luck.” BP later admitted to breaching health and safety regulations and was fined £200,000. Houston left the company a few months later, disenchanted with a senior management that seemed to see safety as a game. The company and its executives were “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.”
What Houston saw aboard the Forties Alpha, though, went beyond a misplaced understanding of safety. As BP prepared to sell the depleted field, it began to resist spending money to maintain the platform. “They flew very close to the wind,” Houston said. “It was being run for the minimum cost and the maximum profit right up until the sale.” John Browne may have fancied himself a problem solver, but by the time he became chief executive, his concerns were primarily financial. He responded to the siren call of market analysts who cheered a rising stock price and strong quarterly earnings but understood little about the difficulty of running machinery as complex as an offshore drilling rig.
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