Fire In The Night

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.

The rig, always roaring with so much activity that large plastic ear protectors were mandatory, was ominously quiet. There was a stillness but one behind which, depending on a person’s proximity, could be detected the faint crackle of fire.

The standard procedure in the event of an incident was for Barry Barber to contact the radio room who would then inform him of the cause of the disturbance and the safest route to a lifeboat. It was not to turn out this way. When Barber eventually got through to the radio room, the person who answered sounded panicked, confused and unable to assist in providing a safe route. So the two men implemented their own safety system.

Macleod then called John Barr to check on the status of Parrydavies. Barr told him he was out of the water, but he had just learned that Parrydavies had been instructed in error to go into decompression.

Parry-Davies had been accompanied to the decompression chambers, which were up a flight of steel stairs, by another diver. The missing door on the first chamber, forced him to use the second, whose internal lights now no longer worked. He climbed in, the door was locked and, over the course of one minute, the pressure inside the chamber was blown down to the equivalent of 40 feet underwater.

He sat down then tried to relax and breath steadily, but it was disconcerting to be locked in a steel prison in the midst of an obvious crisis. Less than a minute later a fresh face appeared at the small window of reinforced glass and peered in. It was Stan Macleod.

He wore a facemask and breathing apparatus, and gave Parry-Davies the standard diving signal for “OK” – the thumb and forefinger touching in a circle with the three remaining fingers raised. He then gave him the thumbs up, to indicate that they were bringing him back up to atmospheric pressure.

Outside the chamber, Stan Macleod and John Barr were both far from okay. Next to the chamber were the oxygen quads, a collection of twelve bottles (five feet six inches tall, ten inches in diameter) filled with oxygen under high pressure for use in the decompression chamber.

A hose usually played over them to keep them cool, but there was no longer any water pressure. When he arrived Macleod had tried to cover them with a fire blanket but now burning oil had begun to drop from above onto the blanket that was now ablaze.

While John Barr was at the controls of the decompression chamber, Stan Macleod began to look around for a scaffold pole. His plan was to use it to break off the pipework attached to the chamber and so speed up the return to atmospheric pressure that would release the door and allow Parry-Davies to escape.

Macleod was terrified. His heart was racing and his face became contorted with fear and rising panic as his search became increasingly frantic. He was convinced that at any second the bottles, weakened by heat, would crack and that all three of them would be killed in the explosion. He did not believe they would make it.

Then, suddenly the door clicked open. Parry-Davies squeezed out and the three men rushed off together.

It was 10.06 pm.

OVER the next ten minutes it was clear to Stan Macleod and Barry Barber that if they couldn’t climb up to the lifeboats they would have to scramble down. A few yards from the corner, attached to the railings, but hanging over the sea, was an emergency liferaft sealed inside a white plastic capsule like a small, fat man’s coffin.

Keith Cunningham set about launching it. He removed the steel pin that secured the safety straps and watched as the raft, still sealed inside the plastic capsule, tumbled down into the sea. A line which tethered the capsule to the railings was then to be pulled which would activate a gas canister inside the raft, causing it to inflate and burst out of the capsule. Regardless of how long and hard Cunningham tugged at the raft it refused to inflate.

Beside the emergency liferaft was a knotted escape rope, which Cunningham then began to unwrap and lowered down towards the water. This was designed as a last resort, for it meant accessing the water (which even in summer remained just 10 degrees) unprotected by life-boat or raft.

The act of lowering the rope sent a frisson of fear through the crowd of men who were bunched tightly together in boilersuits and orange lifejackets. Escape now meant going hand over hand down a thick coarse woolen rope, suspended almost 70 feet above a sea whose temperature, they had been repeatedly told, would kill them within minutes. A few men began to back away.

Back at the 68 ft level, Stan Macleod and Barry Barber had organized the men into a line next to the escape rope. As soon as one person climbed over the barrier and began to scramble down, Macleod would tap the next one on the shoulder and say: “Right. Go!”

As the men queued they remained largely silent, standing alone with their thoughts and struggling to suppress the mounting anxiety, which intensified with the noise from the fire. Standing in line, Alastair Mackay, a diving systems electrician, thought the sound resembled “the whole platform…dying”.

For the first few minutes the line moved smoothly, although those in life jackets found the climb difficult as the thick knots repeatedly stuck under the stiff floatation compartments on the front of the orange vests. A few, when tapped on the shoulder, couldn’t move, their legs fused by fear.

Instead they stepped aside and allowed the next man to go. One, however, responded to Macleod’s bullying and did manage to climb over. Unfortunately another worker, once on the rope and a few feet down, became petrified, suspended 60 feet above the grey waters.

Unable to move down and unwilling to move back up, he held up the line, until Macleod climbed over lowered himself down and repeatedly sat on his head while screaming at him to shift. He shifted.

The majority of men scrambled down the rope to the rig leg where they climbed onto the fast rescue craft in groups of four or five before speeding back to the Silver Pit, the stand-by vessel.

Once Keith Cunningham had climbed down to the 20 ft walkway he stayed there to hold the rope and assist the older guys, men in their late forties and early fifties. Some were a little overweight and frightened to be swinging out over the sea with nothing but a rope and their own strength to support them. He held on until Barry Barber came down. He thought he was one of the last.

Just two men remained, seemingly too frightened to move. Together they crouched down against the railings of the navigation deck. Cunningham kept looking up at them and shouting for them to come down, but they didn’t move until eventually they were covered in a shroud of smoke.

Then Cunningham heard a tremendous din, a noise so loud it seemed to shake every part of him. He spun round and was able to utter a single word to Barry Barber, who was also standing on the walkway, before immediately launching himself into space.

“Jump.”

A second massive explosion had occurred which, like the instant inflation of the canopy of a large hot air balloon, sent a ball of curling white and orange flame along the underside of the rig and into Cunningham’s path.

He appeared to fall through flame then sink ten feet or so into the sea’s chill. Looking up from under the surface, as if through a murky pane of glass, he could see a bright light and feared surfacing, but had no choice but to rise and breathe. Once he broke the surface he saw, and felt, that the sea had been sprayed with oil and bright yellow flames surrounded him. The air above the water had become superheated to over 200 degrees and was, he thought, like putting your head in a roasting oven. He took a deep breath, dived back down and under the water began to kick away from the rig.

John Barr had been climbing down the rungs of the ladder towards the water when the explosion sent men racing down after him, pushing and shoving to clear the way to the icy water and a respite from the heat that was prickling and burning their skin.

In the water, a total of six men, including Barr and Christopher Niven, were struggling to try and put the steel boat bumper between them and the intense heat, clinging to the steel pipe and pressing their face against it as a protective barrier then, every few seconds ducking their heads under the water to keep cool as their faces began to burn. They looked up as chunks of burning debris, some the size of a small car, fell into the water.

ON the deck of the Silver Pitt the first few rescued men stood and watched and could not quite believe what they saw. The fishing vessel was stern on, two hundred metres from the south side.

The wind was blowing the thick black smoke away to the north and revealed that flames ran almost from the surface of the sea, up in a thick band under the platform, enveloping it, then roared on up around the drilling derrick before flourishing three or four hundred feet above the rig’s highest point and into the night sky.

A solid wall of heat, almost tangible, now butted against their faces. The rope handrails were smoldering. Through the heat haze shimmer, they could glimpse figures on different levels of the platform, a fraction of the 200 men still on board.

It was 10.20. Twenty minutes earlier Gareth Parry-Davies had been under the surface. Now he stood on the ship’s deck, still in his diving suit, and looked out at Piper Alpha. “I can recall this terrible feeling – I had this feeling that the platform was finished then, that nothing was going to put that fire out.”

RELATED LINKS: Piper Alpha, Paradigm shift