A Care Ethics Analysis of the Piper Alpha Oil Platform Disaster STS Research Paper Presented to the Faculty of the School of En
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A Care Ethics Analysis of the Piper Alpha Oil Platform Disaster STS Research Paper Presented to the Faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Virginia By Summer Xu October 31st, 2019 On my honor as a University student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment as defined by the Honor Guidelines for Thesis-Related Assignments. Signed: _______________________________________________ Approved: _______________________________________ Date ________________________ Benjamin Laugelli, Department of Engineering and Society Introduction On July 6, 1988, a sequence of explosions and failures across the Piper Alpha oil platform, owned by Occidental Petroleum, resulted in the death of 167 workers in the world’s deadliest offshore oil industry disaster, in terms of human fatalities. This case has become a landmark in industry safety, as it helped to establish industrial safety standards, has pushed safety research forwards, and has served as a crucial example of safety in engineering practice (Nasa Safety Center, 2013). Currently, several scholars agree upon the lack of organizational integrity and technical redundancies that ultimately resulted in the Piper Alpha disaster. Scholars are especially focused on placing the blame on the technological failures and regulatory insufficiencies that allowed such a tragic sequence of events to unfold (Cullen, 2018). However, despite being such a famous landmark of engineering safety, virtually no literature exists evaluating the morality of those who should be held responsible. A failure to recognize the ethical stake engineers play in their design will allow engineers to continue blindly following rules and regulations, rather than understanding their obligation to act ethically for the good of the greater whole. I will employ the ethical framework of care ethics to demonstrate that the Occidental Petroleum company did not act ethically in the events leading up to and during the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, and should therefore be held accountable not only for the events that night, but also for the aftermath that continues to this very day. This paper will specifically examine Occidental’s morality using the three of the four elements of care ethics, which explores how it did not exercise proper responsibility, competence, or responsiveness to its employees, thus resulting in the deaths of 167 workers and a lasting toll on the 59 survivors (Hull, Alexander, & Klein, 2002). 1 Background The Piper oilfield, located 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland, was discovered in 1973, and began oil production in 1976. The Piper Alpha oil platform was the primary oil production platform operating in the Piper oilfield. It was owned by the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, which is owned by the larger McDermott International Incorporated. Claymore and Tartan, two of the nearby oil platforms, were located 18 and 12 miles from Piper Alpha, respectively, and were connected to Piper Alpha by oil and gas pipelines (Rosenthal, Boin, & Comfort, 2001). See Figure 1 at the end of this section. When oil is extracted from beneath the ocean floor, the well extracts a mixture of oil, natural gas, and sea water to the platform. At the platform, the oil is separated away, and the gas must be condensed and pumped back into the oil before export to the shore refinery (Nasa Safety Center, 2013). On the Piper Alpha platform, Pump A and Pump B, of which only one was needed to continue oil production, were responsible for pumping gas condensate into the oil for export. On the day in question, Pump A was disabled by the day crew for routine maintenance and equipment overhaul, and a blind flange was hand-tightened to seal off the open pipe. The night crew was not aware of this, and when Pump B malfunctioned, they mistakenly began operating Pump A. The blind flange of Pump A was not able to sustain the high pressure of the gas, resulting in the first of the many fatal explosions that night. This was followed by rupture of the main oil line, which further fed the fire, and caused rupture of all other pipelines. Because Piper Alpha was connected to four gas and oil pipelines, the failure of the other oil platforms to shut down production caused additional hydrocarbons to take the easier route of backflowing into ruptured pipelines on Piper Alpha, thus drastically exacerbating the fire and smoke (Rosenthal, Boin, & Comfort, 2001). Following the disaster, Lord William Cullen of White kirk 2 carried out a Public Inquiry, which resulted in 106 recommendations for changes to North Sea safety procedures, all of which were adapted by the offshore oil industry (Nasa Safety Center, 2013). Figure 1. Locations of Piper Alpha, associated platforms, oil terminals, and gas terminals (Macleod & Richardson, 2018) Literature Review The Piper Alpha disaster has been analyzed by countless scholars due to its prominence in the discussion of engineering safety. Although many scholars have scrutinized the several errors contributing to the accident, there has been no work done to analyze the ethics behind it. The current analyses available focus on risk analysis frameworks, and highlight issues such as organizational breakdown, poor control dynamics, and poor design choices. 3 Lord Cullen, the investigator of the Piper Alpha disaster, is a strong advocate for process safety. He has given 106 recommendations following the accident, all of which have been accepted and implemented into the offshore oil industries, in addition to other engineering applications. He especially emphasizes the necessity of executing deeper, in-depth investigations in order to drive home the results of each accident. He believes that if this does not occur, then history is doomed to repeat itself. Although he does argue for the necessity of instilling responsibility in others for identifying and resolving safety issues, he never specifically mentions the morality that must come to mind when approaching engineering decisions (Cullen, 1993). Additionally, the 106 recommendations that he does make do not pertain to a change in code of ethics or morality, but are rather technical in nature. For example, he recommends changing the responsibility of offshore oil safety from one organization to another (Nasa Safety Center, 2013). Elisabeth Pate-Cornell is a Stanford University Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. She has published two papers regarding the Piper Alpha accident, both of which utilize risk analysis frameworks to identify the complex root causes of the incident. Specifically, she uses the probabilistic risk analysis framework to identify the accident sequence of the Piper Alpha incident. This analysis ultimately isolates several causing factors, such as technical design flaws, misguided priorities in management, tradeoff between productivity and safety, mistakes of personnel onboard the platform, and errors in judgment due to management pressures (Pate-Cornell, 1993). This analysis effectively explores risk management measures that reach past the purely technical, however it still does not root back to the morality of the engineers or management when making preliminary decisions. In both of these papers, the scholars direct the cause of the Piper Alpha disaster towards organizational insufficiencies and technical failures. However, although there were clearly 4 questionable ethical concerns at play, there has been little analysis done regarding the morality of the company itself. The scholarly papers that have been published thus far has made tremendous progress in determining the root causes of the disaster in order to ensure that future technologies do not fall victim to the same mistakes. While it is crucial to analyze the actions and technical errors that led to a certain failure, it is perhaps equally as important to understand how and why Occidental Petroleum did not behave ethically during this time. By doing so, we can better understand how to ask ourselves ethical questions and therefore design with those we design for in mind. Conceptual Framework When considering the relationship between Occidental Petroleum and its employees, and the care that they owe each other, we can see that this relationship fits nicely into the care ethics framework. Care ethics was developed by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings in the 1980s. It is unique from other frameworks because it stresses the relationships between two parties, the context in which the relationship lies, and how the different parties must show empathy and care for one another. Other ethical frameworks, such as utilitarian and duty ethics, do not consider how ethics may change within different contexts, which may not be logical given that certain decisions may be ethical in one situation, but unethical in another. Care ethics specifically focuses on the notion that we owe a duty of care to those we have any sort of relationship with (Poel & Royakkers, 2011). In this paper, I am focusing on the relationship between Occidental Petroleum as a company, and the duty of care they owe to their personnel as their employers. Duty of care is especially more prominent if one party is superior to the other, which in this case, 5 Occidental Petroleum clearly holds more power and therefore has a greater obligation to care for its personnel. Care generally refers to the attitudes or actions we enact in order to repair ourselves and our surroundings so we can live as well as possible. This can be broken down into four stages of care, which are attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Poel & Royakkers, 2011). Attentiveness refers to becoming aware of a need, such as looking for cracks in a cup before pouring a drink rather than simply pouring the drink and watching to see if it leaks. Responsibility can be thought of as a group or individual owning a mistake and proposing a solution for that fault. Competence is the act of providing good and successful care. For example, engineers are competent if they are able to design a technology that performs the requested safety features.