On the evening of 6 July 1988, the Piper Alpha oil production platform in the North Sea suffered a catastrophic gas explosion, followed by a conflagration that destroyed the structure; 167 people were killed, and almost all the physical evidence of what had occurred became charred debris, lost to the waves. After the disaster, a public inquiry struggled to form a complete picture of the event, for reasons that also make it a hard subject for documentary-makers.
Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story copes with the challenge superbly, leaning heavily on survivor testimony – 61 men escaped from the rig – and combining it with a simple 2D diagram of the platform’s layout to give us the fullest picture possible. It doesn’t have the special-effects budget that would be required to simulate the ferocity of the fire or the intensity of the thick, black smoke – possibly no amount of pyrotechnics or CGI would be able to do that anyway – so reconstructions of the disaster itself are kept to a minimum. Instead, the focus is on the verbal responses given by survivors to the inquiry, which have been dramatised. It’s excellent work by a cast of little-known actors, made all the more powerful by them using nothing but a chair, a table and the transcript.
Context is provided by archive newsreel, and by the wives and children of the men who were aboard Piper Alpha, who talk of families reluctantly adjusting to a life where the father/husband would be absent and hard to contact for a fortnight at a time. These were ordinary working people, carried out to sea by economic forces beyond their control: the daughter of one survivor explains how her dad ended up as an employee of the billion-dollar US oil company Occidental after the Linwood car factory near Glasgow, a major Scottish employer, shut down in 1981.
As Letter from America by The Proclaimers plays in the background (with its lyrics of “Linwood no more …”), we see Margaret Thatcher cosying up to flamboyant Occidental boss Armand Hammer, promising his lavish investment in Piper Alpha and other North Sea oil-production platforms and rigs would surely trickle down to benefit all. Another clip is a bewildering nugget from the pop culture of oil-rush Britain, taken from Shirley Bassey’s eponymous 1976 BBC TV show: Bassey stands on a North Sea rig in hard hat and overalls, surrounded by men grappling with greasy drilling equipment, belting out Everything’s Coming Up Roses.
Occidental’s safety and maintenance procedures would later be gravely criticised by the inquiry, but the aftermath of the Piper Alpha calamity and the families’ fight for justice is to come in two further episodes of Disaster at Sea. For now, we are in the “iron village” of the rig itself, as horror unfolds with extraordinary power and speed. For children of the 1980s, Piper Alpha is one of a handful of notorious disasters that punctuated the decade, alongside Chornobyl, Lockerbie and the Challenger space shuttle – in its mechanics, it’s nearest to Chornobyl, as it begins with red lights blinking on a control panel, warning men who know their workplace is potentially lethal that something is slightly wrong. Before anyone has time to remedy the situation, something is terribly wrong.
Those statements from the inquiry tell a bleak story of men left helplessly confused by the enveloping smoke and by the lack of guidance. They relied on Piper Alpha’s default safety protocol, which was to gather in the dining area at the top of the platform in the event of a fire: it was just beneath the helipad, from which airlifts to safety would be organised. But men towards the bottom of the structure immediately realised they couldn’t climb upwards, and those who did make it to the dining room merely found themselves trapped in a dark room that rapidly became unbearably hot and smoky, and which didn’t give them a view of the rest of the platform.
The programme highlights telling, horrifying and strange details, from the men in the dining room using squashed tomatoes to cool themselves since there was no water at hand, to the film-maker riding with RAF Search and Rescue who heard a pilot’s transmission stating the fire was visible from 120 miles away. One Piper Alpha worker casually took a book with him as he evacuated, to read on the rescue vessel he assumed would save him soon; minutes later, he was in a group that disagreed about which staircase to sprint down. The men who chose the wrong staircase died.
The shocking story is skilfully told by those unfussy dramatisations of the survivors’ words, as the actors leave us in no doubt about how deeply traumatised the men were by their experience. A grim and difficult task is performed with care.
• The first part of the three-part series Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story aired on BBC Two and the whole series is available on iPlayer
