ABSTRACT
Many severe accidents such as Piper Alpha and Deepwater Horizon are mainly a result of long event sequences, which have developed gradually for a significant period, before it comes to a point of no return where control is lost, and emergency preparedness has to take over. During the significant build-up period, sometimes referred to as a ‘spiral to disaster’, there are often several opportunities where control could have been regained, if the awareness and understanding of the sequence of events had been sufficiently understood. However, since it was not, the opportunity to prevent the major accident failed. This paper presents and discusses some selected historical accidents and near-misses in the Norwegian oil and gas industry, the aim being to improve the understanding of accident propagation and in particular signals and warnings that could have been seen, but was not. The ambition is to achieve insight that can be used to improve future risk assessments and the ability to detect unforeseen events in general.
