2 Lessons Learnt From The Alexander Kielland

It would be foolhardy if not downright irresponsible if anyone embarked on a new career without at least doing an online search on potential risks

. It is a ghastly read, naturally, but you will be more informed of the whole process and come out of it for the better.

If you're thinking about a job on an offshore oil platform, you would do well to see just exactly how bad things can get. The two worst disasters in the industry happened over two decades ago, and numerous lessons in construction and safety management have been learnt since then. So take this article as a condensed Second from Disaster episode, only with oil platforms instead of aircrafts.

Don't worry about being put off. Many viewers of that National Geographic show went on to apply for air pilot and traffic controller jobs.

*Alexander Kielland - The Leg Broke: When you live on an oil platform for days and weeks on end, it might not feel like you're at sea. But at sea you are, and in the old days even the biggest and sturdiest platforms have a tendency to capsize.

Alexander Kielland was an American-owned rig situated 200 miles from the Scottish coast. Built as a mobile drilling unit, it was converted to a floating hotel for accommodation of up to 386 workers. In 1980 it was stationed at the platform Edda 2/7C.

The rig heeled a third of the way over in 40-knot winds, and after fourteen minutes all the cables snapped. 130 men were in the mess hall and the cinema, and 82 more were stationed at their posts.

Rafts were ample, but the release mechanism failed; many were trapped in any case and could not get to the surface. A few swam to Edda; the standby vessel came an hour later.

123 people died of a crack in one of the bracings, which in turn was traced to a fillet weld measuring 6mm that was badly handled at the factory where the rig was built.

*What Did We Learn From It? You might think that listing by 30 degrees would have warranted an immediate evacuation, but Kielland's sister rig (or fellow Norwegian writer) Henrik Ibsen experienced a similar event shortly afterwards. It was righted again with no fuss at all.

Perhaps the biggest culprit lies in the lack of redundancy. A bridge has a safety load so an unlikely traffic jam with container lorries won't overload it; the Kielland would have survived if it had a bigger load factor, or a few spare legs and cables.

More importantly, in response to the lost 14 minutes that might have saved most of the crew, platforms now institute a command structure in parallel to their maritime counterpart.

If you ever wonder why there's such a tight command hierarchy on a seemingly solid and serene platform, the Kielland is the reason. The industry has learned its lessons.

by: Susan Bean

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