Twenty-Five Years Since Piper Alpha

It is 25 years since the oil rig, Piper Alpha melted as a result of a giant gas blowout and subsequent violent explosions. So many lost friends and family that night (only 62 crew members survived out of the 229 personnel on board). I worked for John Brown at the time. Not a word was said to staff about the rig and no collection was made for the affected families. That soured me greatly and was a contributing factor in my leaving the company. An old oil man working as a security guard in his retirement felt the same so he put a tin out in the foyer off his own back. 

I remember watching the television coverage of the disaster that was due to a combination of nature and short-cutting on health and safety measures with mounting horror and nausea. Last night's documentary brought it all back to me as if it were yesterday. Only the hardest of hearts could fail to be moved by the sight of those Scots hard men choking back tears as they recalled the events of that night and the following days.

It is very hard for those outside of the heavy engineering industry to appreciate just how hard a job it is to keep the lights on and our energy hungry society working. Over the eleven years I worked in Oil and Gas I helped deliver several projects during which employees died or were injured. One man lost his life building a jacket (the rig) when a colleague dropped a length of 3" pipe from a 30' drop, cleaving his skull in two. Then there were the colleagues who committed suicide due to the weight of responsibility they felt from being responsible for decisions that could affect so many lives, cost billions of pounds, or result in mass pollution if wrong.

I am thinking about loss a lot today and not just my own.

For more on this disaster, see http://technologism.net/ruscot/en/20th-21st-centuries/12-piper-alpha-disaster