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Petroleum Economist
Industry: Oil & Gas
Location: Sharjah, UAE -
Project Director – Gas Cities
Industry: Oil & Gas
Location: Sharjah, UAE
Fire In The Night
by Stephen McGinty on Wednesday, 09 July 2008
The Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform. An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men. To date it is the world’s worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost.
Fire In The Night: The Piper Alpha Disaster is published by Macmillan priced GB£17.99 and available through www.amazon.co.uk
It began on the stroke of 10 pm with a flash of white light and a bang that punched through the sea and sent a flotilla of sonic waves rippling down fifty feet to where a diver, Gareth Parry-Davies, was at work.
While the sky above was a bruised blue and had not yet turned to black, delayed by the long light nights of high summer, Parrydavies was resident in a darker world, one illuminated only by the torch attached to his yellow steel helmet.
Dressed in a standard red and black diving suit, he was firing a grit gun at a horizontal metal strut that made up one small part of the massive steel legs that descended down into the blackness where they were rooted into the seabed 400 feet below.
The noise of his own steady breathing, amplified by the bowl of the helmet, was broken up by the flow of questions, checks and the odd joke made by John Barr, the diving supervisor. Parry-Davies had completed about forty per cent of the task when he was shaken by a bright white light, which despite the helmet's lack of peripheral vision, he recognised as coming from the right.
The heavy bang was simultaneous. In his hand, the grit gun died. He began to breathe in the heavy, shallow breaths of the startled. The first suspicion was that the hose powering the grit gun had burst. He had begun to look round, catch his breath and assess the situation when 20 seconds after the first, a second bang and a larger curtain of light settled briefly over his helmet.
On the intercom Parry-Davies heard Barr instruct him to ditch the tools, abandon the job site and return immediately to the diving bell. Parrydavies was already kicking his legs through the water, the tools tumbling into the gloom when he received the order.
The dive control room hung like a gondola underneath the main diving module, which was a suite of small cramped offices on the 64-foot level of the oil platform, accessed via a ladder and a hole in the main module floor. Barr had been knocked off his chair by the bang, which emptied shelves of their books and files.
The control room was slung low so that its windows provided a clear view onto the dive skid, the metal framed structure where divers prepared to exit and enter the sea, but now water from the sprinkler system was spraying down onto the windows, obscuring his view. The water, however, would not flow for long.
Edward Amaira, a fellow diver who had been sheltering from the wind in the ‘Wendy House', a nearby storage facility, was the first to reach the dive skid and begin to organise the retrieval of Parrydavies.
The duo on the dive skid became a trio with the arrival of Keith Cunningham, already wearing an emergency breathing apparatus of facemask and oxygen tank. A veteran of a previous explosion four years earlier, he had been joking that they were due a repeat just moments before it occurred. Although there was a strong smell of smoke the dive skid was clear of actual smoke for the moment, yet there was a hint of flame.
The main oil line, a 30 inch steel pipe, ran horizontally above the skid. On cold days the divers would reach up and touch it to warm their hands. Oil was now running down the outside of its steel skin where small orange flames darted.
Inside the bell, Parry-Davies was in constant communication with John Barr who told him that he was still in "free time", which meant he had not been underwater long enough to require decompression.
When the bell was raised back onto the skid, Parry-Davies saw by the tense expression on his workmates' faces that something was wrong, but he was not panicked enough to begin to quiz them. Instead, with their silent assistance he set about stripping off his heavy gear. As Amaira was unaware of exactly how long Parry-Davies had been under and had not heard Barr's instructions, he followed standard procedure. The diver was to go immediately to the decompression chamber.
STAN Macleod, the diving superintendent with responsibility for the entire dive operation, had been leaning against a filing cabinet in the office of Barry Barber, his opposite number from Occidental, when the explosion occurred. The room shook, the shelves collapsed, the lights tumbled from their fixtures and a number of the ceiling's metal panels clattered to the floor, their short drop broken on someone's head.
When they had recovered from the shock, the men began to assess the situation and ready, if necessary, for evacuation. Macleod went looking for "the breathing apparatus". Unable to find it, he left the office via the south exit which took him to the decompression chambers.
There he saw small pieces of debris that resembled pipe lagging lying smoldering on the floor. The heavy steel door from one of the two decompression chambers also lay there. It had been blown from its hinges. There was also the "ominous glow of flames".
After checking that Parry-Davies was being recovered, he returned to the main office to confer with Barry Barber. He noticed that in the intervening few minutes the sprinkler system had failed to activate beyond a slight trickle. There had been no tannoy announcements.
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