Book Review: Fire in the night: The Piper Alpha disaster

by Stephen McGinty

Macmillan, 288pp, 17.99

Review by GEORGE ROSIE

FOR SCOTLAND AT LEAST, THE late 1980s were dominated by two truly awful events. One was the Lockerbie bombing of December 1989 which ended the lives of more than 200 people in the air and on the ground and brought ruin down on the head of Pan American Airways.

The other was the devastating fire on the Piper Alpha production platform in 1988 which killed 167 men, reminded us of the human cost of offshore energy and more or less drove Occidental Oil out of the North Sea. Within a couple of years the expensive infrastructure the company had built up had been sold off to French oil giant Total.

Fire in the Night is an apt title for Stephen McGinty's new book on the Piper Alpha calamity. I don't think I'll ever forget the vivid television pictures of the huge clouds of flame and smoke rolling up from the platform and climbing hundreds of feet into the night sky. I remember wondering at the time just what it must have been like for the men under those terrible clouds. It's their story that McGinty sets out to tell using a combination of interviews with survivors, witness statements and transcripts from the official inquiry and a later court case.

It makes for genuinely gripping reading. McGinty is a fine journalist. He tells his tale with great skill, energy and tact. He has an eye for the illuminating detail, both human and technical.

He has plainly sifted through almost everything that's been written about Piper Alpha and painstakingly put together a very detailed – but always readable – account of one of Scotland's worst 20th century tragedies.

And the structure of the book is interesting. Here's how his prologue starts: "It began on the stroke of 10pm with a flash of white light and bang that punched through the sea and sent a flotilla of sonic waves rippling down 50 feet to where a diver, Gareth Parry-Davies was at work." It ends with Parry-Davies standing on the deck of a rescue ship looking out at the burning platform feeling that "… nothing was going to put that fire out".

From there, McGinty goes back to put the disaster in its context: the expanding North Sea oil industry, its role as Britain's economic saviour, the see-saw price of crude oil, the industry's distinctly dodgy safety record and its previous fatal accidents (such as the Chinook crash in 1986, which killed more than 40 men). These are all neatly drawn before he goes into the terrible events of 6 July, 1988 itself and what triggered them – without a doubt, the unnoticed (and unrecorded) removal of a pressure safety valve from condensate injection pump A.

The metal "flange" that replaced the valve leaked under pressure from the highly inflammable gas, spilling it out onto the platform module until it found a spark that ignited the explosion. The fire that followed melted the pipes bringing in gas from the Tartan and Claymore fields until a series of much bigger explosions turned an accidental fire into an uncontrollable inferno, from which men leapt 175 feet into the sea, many of them to their deaths. Within an hour, the great platform was a smoking ruin.

McGinty is very good on the performance of the crews of the little safety and rescue boats which plunged time after time into the inferno to save men who were, quite literally, being roasted alive. If this had been a military operation, top medals would have been won. But we're told (in a small footnote) that 20 men were awarded the Queen's Commendation for Brave Conduct, some of them posthumously.

McGinty has a powerful story to tell and he does it brilliantly. But what the book lacks, it seems to me, is a first-class graphic of the platform showing where the fire started, the location of the "modules", where the Tartan and Claymore gas risers rose out of the sea, and how the 65 men who survived made their exits. I also needed a glossary of technical terms. McGinty does a decent job of explaining those but there are so many that I found myself having to backtrack through the book to remind myself what they mean. Which is not just geekery: this is the story of a technology going badly wrong. A handy glossary would have made a difference.

But these shortcomings belong with the editor and publisher. They take nothing away from McGinty's achievement. Books about important tragedies are common enough, but this is one of the best of its kind I've read.

• Stephen McGinty is at the Edinburgh book festival on 25 August.