The Piper Alpha Disaster: A Personal Perspective with Transferrable Lessons on the Long-Term Moral Impact of Safety Failures

The 1988 Piper Alpha disaster remains one of the worst safety-related accidents of its kind in the Oil & Gas sector. However, whereas the myriad lessons learned from this disaster are common knowledge among chemical and process engineers, the valuable safety lessons from this harrowing story are arguably not so obvious to laboratory chemists. Herein, a breakdown of and personally lived long-term perspective on the Piper Alpha accident is provided to show the transferrable lessons available for improving chemical laboratory safety culture.