July 6, 1988
Piper Alpha
A North Sea production platform, ten at night
A pump had been taken out for maintenance and its pressure safety valve removed. The paperwork saying so did not reach the night shift, and they started it.
Gas escaped and ignited at ten at night. The fire then destroyed the control room and the radio room in the first minutes, so nobody could give an order or make a mayday.
The two other platforms feeding oil into Piper's line kept pumping, because the men on them could see it burning but had no authority to shut down. That fuel fed the fire for hours.
The standby procedure was to muster in the accommodation block and wait for helicopter evacuation. It was above the fire. The men who followed the rule died there. The men who lived mostly ignored it and jumped a hundred and seventy-five feet into a burning sea.
A hundred and sixty-seven were killed, including two crewmen of a rescue vessel that came alongside. Sixty-one survived.
It remains the worst offshore disaster in history, and it moved safety responsibility offshore away from the Department of Energy.
Two of the dead were crew of a rescue vessel that went alongside.