Piper Alpha, a North Sea oil production platform with 226 men on board, exploded in a ball of flames caused by a gas leak on 6 July 1988. Within two hours, the rig had collapsed from its position 300ft above the sea, and become a flaming ball of twisted metal.At its height, the fire could be seen 70 miles away; nearer to the disaster, the heat was so intense that a helicopter could only circle at a perimeter of a mile; a fishing trawler which tried to approach to save survivors found paint on its hull blistering and its handrails beginning to smoke.
Only 59 survived, most having jumped into a sea aflame with burning oil. Two crewmen of a rescue vessel also perished.
At the time of the disaster, the platform had been in use for 12 years and was the world’s single largest oil producer, accounting for around 10 per cent of North Sea oil and gas production. Piper Alpha was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact.
Dominick Hoare, joint active underwriter at Munich Re Underwriting, recalled the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. ‘Lloyd’s was in a state of shock when news of the disaster came out,’ he said. ‘There was a very emotional reaction to the number of fatalities and injuries. After that initial emotional response, the Room had to come to terms with the magnitude of the loss as it dawned on us what a truly catastrophic event had happened.’
Lloyd’s initially struggled to quantify its exposure. Said Hoare: ‘Piper Alpha revealed just how deficient some exposure monitoring systems were then.’ He added, ‘Life has changed dramatically since.’
Piper Alpha was a turning point for Lloyd’s and the insurance industry as a whole. At a $1.4 billion insurance loss, at the time it was the industry’s costliest man-made catastrophe.
Today, Lloyd’s risk systems are acutely fine-tuned and precise. Added to which, since the Realistic Disaster Scenario (RDS) framework was introduced in 1995, syndicates have had to demonstrate an accurate handle on risk accumulations for major offshore complexes.
As the memory of the Piper Alpha disaster recedes, it’s reassuring to know that the lessons learned, certainly from an exposure management perspective, are not forgotten.