Wild East (527 hits)
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Submitted by Mike the Scottish (View user info) at 2004-10-11 17:18:40 EDT
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Third city. Doesn't sound too impressive, does it? Everyone's heard of London and Birmingham, but who knows which city is third largest? Same with Glasgow and Edinburgh. Everyone's heard of them, but bothers to check the third largest city? We're the forgotten few, isolated in our slowly declining port city, well away from the Central Belt. If you take the main road North from Glasgow, carry on through Dundee and keep to the coast, you'll come to the North East of Scotland. It's a nice place, very rugged, but I didn't spend much time in the rural regions. You can't, really. It's beautiful. Inhospitable, but beautiful. Being an engineer, I got that same kind of warm glow from the great, towering behemoths, the great explosions of structural excellence. Ach, look at me, I'm rambling. You want to know about 1988, don't you? Of course you do. You see, I'm always surprised at how quickly people forget. Forget those they lost, forget that it even happened... I'll drop you in at the beginning.
The year was 1988. I'd just graduated from Glasgow University with a First in Mechanical Design Engineering. Instead of flying off to Australia and getting even further into debt, like you youngsters seem to do these days, I took an entry-level position as a structural engineer with Occidental Oil aboard the oil rig Piper Alpha. I'd always liked Aberdeen, you see. The way the granite in the tower blocks sparkles after it rains, the way the sea breeze hits you as you're walking down the High Street. Of course, I'd be lying if I said that I took the job because of emotional attachment- this was the end of the Thatcher years, employment was still running pretty low, and the Oil industry seemed to be one of the few industries 'on the up'. I guess there was a little of the pioneer spirit in us too- brash young cowboys, out to explore the Wild East. But anyway, I passed the interview with flying colours, and pretty soon they had us doing the training. You see, being young and cocky, we never paid much heed to all the safety talk, any of that. We just wanted to get out there. There were four of us, working two month shifts. Our job was to ensure the viability of engineering works, just generally making sure the place was in good shape. Lots of poring over blueprints, sitting in a warm office drinking coffee, waiting for the daily helicopter to fly in and drop us off our supplies. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. We flew out in mid-June, the harsh pre-autumnal winds already biting through our flimsy jackets. You'd think that living in Glasgow for 23 years, I'd have been used to it, but no, I was grasping the coat around me like a long lost lover, praying that our job would have less to do with working in the biting cold and more to do with warm offices- but of course, you already know about that! I'd gotten pretty friendly with another of the engineers, going by the name of Greg. A bright, portly chap in his mid-30s, he already done more time offshore than he could care to remember. I seem to remember that he spoke of the job in the language of Vietnam War films. Thus our shift was a tour of duty, and we were the ranking FNGs. But he was a decent bloke, always ready to get us a pint at the end of the day, always ready to concoct gruesome horror stories in a vague attempt to scare us into accepting his natural superiority.
I won't bother to go into the details of the flight over, I'm sure you've experienced the same sort of feeling at some point anyway- gnawing fear, anticipation and excitement. Sort of like the few seconds before the rollercoaster reaches the top. I felt like I was on an incline, and the future was a big, open hole, waiting for me to fall into it's dark depths-tough that may have just been because it was my first real helicopter flight. I was sick when the winds battered the helicopter around a bit (Greg didn't let that one go for months, I'm telling you) but before long, we were on the rig. A bunch of scrawny engineers in a land of grizzled old bachelors in grease-stained boiler suits. It reminded me of the old pictures you see of coal miners- faces blackened, hardened with experience. Greetings consisted of a nod of the head, maybe a gruff "How you doin'?" if you were lucky. It was like coming in a classroom when the lesson's been going on for an age already. Still, at the time, I just told myself that I wouldn't see too much of these guys. Kinda ironic, when you think about it.
I'm going to cut a long story short here, because the truth is that engineering work on oil rigs, even during the mid-80s North Sea oil boom, was interminably dull. Lots of blueprints, lots of sipping lukewarm coffee in an office where window cracks were held in place by a complicated system of duct tape and blind faith. North Sea winds battered us about, sometimes feeling like the whole rig was the plaything of some spiteful deity. I tell you, when an engineer thinks like that, something's up. I'm not claiming that I had the power of foresight, mind, rest assured that if I did I wouldn't have taken the job in first place. But you never think it's going to happen to you, especially when you're young. Like I said before, I was happy to have a stable job. I had no woman back home, few friends other than the guys I'd flown in with, nothing to tie me down. I was young and free, and the monotonous repetition of my job was hardly cause to give it up. Besides, it was summer, and sometimes the weather was nice enough to sunbathe on the helipads, though if you did it for more than half an hour your nipples would be hard for the rest of the day. But i'm getting sidetracked.
Soon, it had rolled around to July, though Greg and I only really noticed when there was a new model on our Playboy calendar. It was July 6th, I remember it clearly. I had just finished my shift and was going down to crew quarters for an evening of chess with Greg when a loud bang reverberated around the whole rig. Now, I'd been working with drilling rigs since I could remember and this sounded like no drill I'd ever heard. It was a loud clank, without the sonorous clank of metallic restraint. It took me a good few seconds to realise that it was an explosion. Now I panicked. I ran back to the office- it seemed logical at the time. Greg following behind me, looking lost and confused. From the duct taped windows, we saw what we'd never even really thought of before- a pool of oil spilling out of the guts of our rig, bursting into flames and snaking its way towards the main operational areas on the rig. Greg shouted something about going on a recon for a radio, call for extraction, but I didn't hear him. I don't know if it was shock, fear or confusion, but I remained rooted to the spot, watching as support beams collapsed with an explosive yelp, watching as whole sections of the rig below me collapsed into the burning furnace below. A chill swept over me as I saw the crew's quarters torn in half, dangling like a thread. I saw men, burning, falling. Remember the footage of people jumping from the World Trade Centre? Like that- only they either fell to their deaths, fell into the burning oil or into the North Sea. That got me running.
I didn't know if Greg had found a radio, but I knew that there was little point in waiting for him, so I ran to the helipad (mercifully unaffected), looking for an escape. I saw nothing. A leering fluorescent 'H' in the concrete was all the area revealed. The cold bit into me like steel. In a relatively warm office, jeans and a long-sleeved T-Shirt is acceptable attire- but on an oil rig in the North Sea? I was shivering and lost. All around me men were running, some trying to radio for rescue, others just running, like me, because it was all their fear-struck and panicked bodies could do. More support beams fell, whole sections of the rig just crumbled, belching black smoke as they tumbled into the sea. It was hard to think of the falling mess as the dining hall, the operational control tower or whatever, let alone imagine that there might still be men inside. The helipad was blistering up in the heat, cracks in the concrete reaching out towards me. I had to make a choice. It may have seemed dumb, but there was nowhere else to go. I jumped into the water.
I heard voices from the darkness, gradually bringing with them chains. Then the flames- I could hear flames, fire and heat, rasping at my sides. I thought I was in hell. Maybe I was. Fuzzy images as the whirring grew louder, then the other noises died down. I heard voices. People, leaning over me, putting things over my mouth, shouting. To my right, a man black with burns, sobbing into his blanket, blood bubbling down his chin and mixing with his tears, the mixture falling off his face is great drops. I traced the drops with my eyes, following them to where the pooled on the metal flooring. Stars flew by an open hatch. I was in a helicopter. I don't remember much of the rest of the journey, except gasping out to the pilot what had happened, where was Greg, was I going to die? He just told me his name- Paul, I'll never forget, and reasssured me. He talked to me the whole trip, as I babbled, constantly asking him. Later, screaming for Greg, asking flustered hospital staff where everyone had gone. I fell into a coma, which I'd get out of three weeks later, when the initial hysteria had calmed. A man on my bedside a few minutes later, I remember- he kept asking me why I had kept calling out for Greg when I was being airlifted out- why, when they pulled me from the burning sea I was dying in, I was calling for him. I gave him the most honest answer I could-
"I didn't want to die alone."
And I didn't. They never found his body. I like to tell myself that he was the one to radio for support, calling out in his crude R. Lee Emery voice as the building fell around him. I like to think that he reached the operational control tower, radioed for help, escaped before it fell and was somehow overlooked in the chaos of the event- but I know it's not likely. I was one of only 62 survivors they managed to pull from sea- 167 men weren't so fortunate. As for me? Well kid, that you can see for yourself. I was shipped from hospital to hospital, passed around like a hot potato with third-degree burns, and ended up here. I abandoned the Wild East a long time ago, and I'm not going back, not if you paid me. They say they've got a new technique in facial reconstruction which might help me... I don't know. Sometimes I think it's not worth the effort. But i'm boring you, and I can see you want to be going... can you call the nurse over on your way out, if you wouldn't mind? Thanks.
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In memory of those who died in the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, July 6th, 1988.
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