Brad Matsen - Death and Oil: A True Story of the Piper Alpha Disaster on the North Sea

ALSO BY BRAD MATSEN

Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King

Titanics Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers
John Chatterton and Richie Kohler

Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss

Go Wild in New York City

Fishing Up North: Stories of Luck and Loss in Alaskan Waters

Planet Ocean: A Story of Life, the Sea
and Dancing to the Fossil Record

Ray Trolls Shocking Fish Tales: Fish, Romance,
and Death in Pictures

Incredible Ocean Adventure (series for young readers)

Copyright 2011 by Bradford Matsen

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matsen, Bradford.

Death and oil : a true story of the Piper Alpha disaster on the North Sea /
Brad Matsen.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-90678-6
1. Offshore oil well drillingAccidentsNorth SeaHistory20th century. 2. Oil well drilling rigsNorth SeaHistory20th century.
3. Oil wellsNorth SeaBlowoutsHistory20th century. 4. ExplosionsNorth SeaHistory20th century 5. DisastersNorth SeaHistory20th century. 6. North SeaHistory20th century. 7. Aberdeen (Scotland)History20th century. 8. Disaster victimsNorth SeaBiography. 9. SuvivalNorth Sea20th century. I. Title.
TN871.215.M36 2011 363.119622338190916336dc22 2011011902

www.pantheonbooks.com

Jacket design by Brian Barth

v3.1

FOR BARBARA

I began my research into the Piper Alpha tragedy in the autumn of 2008. For the first few weeks, I told friends who asked that I was writing the story of 162 men who died when an oil rig exploded on the North Sea. After many hours of reading the history of the Oil Age, I started saying that my book was also about the true cost of humanitys incredibly ill-advised addiction to petroleum. In just 150 years, our enchantment with oil has bloomed into a dependency on petrochemicals that frightens us all. I recited the famous quote by Sir Walter Scott about fishermen who died at seaIts not fish yer buyin, its mens livesto make the point that responsibility for oil addiction and its consequences lies with each one of us. Not everyone agreed with my logic. Some people insisted that the oil companies and governments are more culpable than consumers because for a century and a half they promoted the use of petroleum for fuel, light, plastics, and fertilizer. They got rich doing it. The oil industry, they said, has also been notorious for trading off the safety of its workers and the health of the environment for profit.

By the time I finished a draft of Death and Oil in the autumn of 2010, the Deepwater Horizon had blown up, killing eleven men and releasing the biggest oil spill in history into the Gulf of Mexico. The rig was on charter to British Petroleum, drilling in five thousand feet of water to reach a pool of oil another twenty thousand feet down. When the news broke, most people outside the oil business were shocked by the extremes to which we now go to satisfy our demand for oil. We were further stunned when British Petroleum and Halliburton and the other contractors who helped BP drill the well blamed each other rather than accepting their own responsibility for the deaths of those men and the fouling of the Gulf.

The book that you are about to read is intensely personal. Men died on Piper Alpha. Their loved ones suffered unspeakable agony. A city was crippled by grief. The oil industry didnt miss a beat. The sadness and outrage I felt in the telling of this story was unavoidable, but my purpose is only to illuminate a powerful moment in the Oil Age from which we cannot simply look away. I have no doubt that Piper Alpha and Deepwater Horizon will happen again. Regardless of how we spread the blame, we can no longer ignore what is done on our behalf.

Six weeks after Bill Barron survived the worlds deadliest oil rig disaster without a scratch he was up to a quart of whiskey a day. When he wasnt drinking or sleeping, he was digging a hole in the front yard of his cottage near the River Don north of Aberdeen. A few days after he started digging, people walking by could see only the top of his head bobbing up and down as he drove the shovel into the ground, brought his foot down on the top of it, and threw the dirt over his shoulder into what had been his garden. Sometimes, he just got in the hole and leaned on his shovel for a while. Neighborhood children stopped to watch. What are you doing, Mr. Barron? one of them asked. Im trying to get to Australia, Bill said, looking up out of his hole without a hint of guile in his weathered Highlanders smile. The adults on his street in Bridge ODon who had known Bill for most of his life passed by quickly as though embarrassed by his apparently insane destruction of his property. All of them, of course, knew what had happened to him. In the Black Dog, the pub around the corner, they agreed that Bill was performing some kind of exorcism by digging his own grave over and over. The truth was that Bill just couldnt get through a day without a buzz or the physical work. This went on for months until his wife, Trish, gave him an ultimatum: Stop drinking and digging or Im taking our daughter and leaving you.

A few minutes before ten oclock on the night of July 6, 1988, Bill Barron was in the cinema on Piper Alpha, Occidental Petroleums champion oil rig 110 miles northeast of Aberdeen in the North Sea. He and a few other men were watching Caddyshack, a farce starring Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield. It was a golf movie. Golf was as central to the Scottish character as haggis, defiance, and whiskey, but everybody had already seen it at least once. Some of the men nodded off, tired after finishing their shifts. Barron was half asleep himself, huddled in the cinema out of boredom more than anything. A couple of the men were venting the tension of their workday by reciting punch lines along with the characters on the screen. When Rodney Dangerfield broke wind at a fancy dinner party, they tortured his words with an Aberdonian Doric brogue. Whoa, did somebody step on a duck?

The cinema was one of the concessions to comfort that publicity flaks for Occidental and the other oil companies liked to point out in interviews about life offshore. The room had theater seats just like the ones back in Aberdeen, with a video projection booth at the back of the room. The men were away from home for weeks at a time, subjected to the stresses of being surrounded by volatile, toxic chemistry, but they had hot showers, clean sheets, good food, and movies to make their days as bearable as possible. The message was that drilling the bottom of the ocean for oil was a technological challenge akin to taking a trip to the moon but that life aboard a rig was pretty good.

Bill Barron was drowsily watching Bill Murray whack the blossoms in a flower bed with a golf club when he picked up a faintly unfamiliar sensation. Usually, the air on Piper Alpha carried the slick fragrance of hydrocarbons and the constant noise of metal-to-metal torment of a dozen kinds, but you got used to it. Sometimes, when the wind shifted, or a big pump shut down, or a heavy load crashed from a crane hook to the deck, the sensory blend changed just enough to trigger an alarm in him. Barron remembered many moments during his ten years offshore when some distinct change in the smells and sounds of the rig urged him to flee. What he heard in the cinema was something new, a treble rumbling more visceral than audible. He sensed it for a few seconds, woke fully, and sagged back into the chair when it was gone.