BBC Scotland - BBC Scotland - The day 167 men perished in the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster (2024)

6 July 2017 | Updated 6 July 2018

On the evening of 6 July 1988, an explosion ripped through the Piper Alpha oil and gas platform 120 miles north-east of Aberdeen. Out of the 228 men on board, 167 died in the world’s deadliest oil rig disaster.

Faulty maintenance procedures on one of the platform’s pipelines led to a gas leak igniting. The resulting blast almost completely destroyed the platform structure with flames reaching up over 300 feet into the air. The fire on the burning rig could be seen from 70 miles away.

Escaping the wreckage, the 61 survivors avoided certain death by leaping over 100 feet from the burning platform into the North Sea. The temperature on the surface of the water surrounding the wrecked platform was hot enough to scorch the scalps of the men in the water and melt the paint from the hulls of the boats sent to rescue them.

With the rig burning out of control, a team of Texan expert oil well firefighters was drafted in to tackle the inferno. It took a full month for the fires to be extinguished and one of the firefighters later likened the catastrophic damage to the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11.

The scale of the disaster led to a review of offshore safety and working practices. 106 urgent changes were recommended. All of them were accepted by the offshore oil and gas industry.

At the time of the disaster, Piper Alpha was one of the country’s largest oil and gas platform producing over 300,000 barrels of crude oil a day — around 10% of the UK’s total daily amount.

Oil was first discovered in an the Piper field off the north-east coast of Scotland in 1973. Three years later the Piper Alpha platform was in place and by 1980 it had been refitted to pump North Sea gas as well as oil.

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