Free Fire on the Horizon by Tom Shroder Page B

establish oil-producing platforms ever farther from shore. The Tharos and others like her were built not just for saving lives, but also to save the environment by performing well-kill operations that couldforcefully bring an uncontrolled well blowout to an end. She was outfitted with what was then state-of-the-art technology: a dynamic positioning system to maneuver her into position alongside a burning rig, an enormous gangway that could activate off her side to give survivors a dry means of escape, and monstrous fire cannons capable of shooting 40,000 gallons per minute a distance of 240 feet, powerful enough to blow a man off the deck of a nearby rig or worse. Get too close, and they could cut a man in half.
    The Tharos also carried multiple fast rescue boats and its own Sikorsky S–76 helicopter capable of plucking twelve men at a time off a burning rig and transporting them to the Tharos’s ninety-bed hospital outfitted with all the gear needed to sustain life, including an operating room and patient monitoring facilities. She cost a then unheard-of amount, exceeding $100 million. The Duke of Edinburgh called her “the most expensive fire engine in the world.”
    Not for long. In July 1988, the Piper Alpha platform was at work in the North Sea doing what she’d been built to do—tapping into existing wells, separating the oil from gas, and pumping both cargos through undersea pipelines to tanks 128 miles away on the Scottish shore. The disaster was set in motion by a series of unlucky coincidences and a mundane human error. The rig was undergoing an upgrade, which its managers decided to complete while pumping continued, rather than absorb the high cost of shutting down. A small part of the work involved replacing an old valve on a backup gas pump with a new one. The technician’s shift ended before the work was finished, and his replacement was busy with something else. The maintenance worker filled out the paperwork that should have warned everyone on the rig not to operate the pump under any circumstances, but it got lost. That evening, the primary pump went down. When the backupwas started, gas poured from the valve vent. A random spark ignited an explosion, which triggered a cascade of increasingly violent secondary explosions, fed by thousands of gallons of crude oil and natural gas.
    The blasts took out the main control room, the generator, and the power distribution system, and also destroyed the one chance of fighting the fire—the deluge system, a curtain of lifesaving water. The raging fuel-fed fires made launching lifeboats impossible. Some risked the hundred-foot plunge into the fire and ice hell of the frigid North Sea, now covered with flaming oil slicks. But almost half the crew mustered in the large accommodation area to await evacuation by the Tharos’s helicopter then located only a thousand feet way. The helicopter never came. The fire and smoke made landings impossible. Most of the crew burned to death or were overcome by smoke and toxic fumes. Nor did the Tharos’s water cannons do much good. The continual replenishment of explosive fuel made fighting the fire a losing battle. And the Tharos’s huge gangway failed at the critical moment, just as it started to extend its arm of safety. The rig’s crew was close enough to choke on the smoke and feel the heat of the huge fireball, to see the burned faces and charred bodies. Some worked for thirty-two hours without a break, only to watch helplessly as the platform disintegrated.
    So confused was the Tharos’s crew that the first man it saved swam unassisted to her pontoons and climbed an external ladder to safety. It was only after he told Tharos hospital staff who he was and where he came from that they realized an actual survivor was on board. Of the 226 men aboard the Piper Alpha that day, only fifty-nine survived, many with severe burns. Few of those had been rescued due to direct assistance of the Tharos.
     

    While vessels like the