Adair and crew battle to stop oil leaks

Press, 11 July 1988, Page 6

Adair and crew battle to stop oil leaks

NZPA-Reuter Aberdeen Crack firefighters on the North Sea Piper Alpha platform, site of the world’s worst drilling disaster, are battling to stop oil leaks still feeding fires and hampering the recovery of bodies.

The veteran Texan oil troubleshooter, Paul “Red” Adair, told reporters after a foray on to the smouldering wreck on Saturday, “If you do some praying for us, pray we have a good wind like we did this afternoon.”

The platform was ripped apart in a raging fire which claimed 166 lives. Three days after the disaster, it was still so hot that members of Mr Adair’s team had to spray each other with water.

The operation, 120 miles from the coast of Scotland, was due to continue at dawn. “That deck is at a 45 degree angle. We’re having to use ropes to let ourselves down,” Mr Adair, aged 73, said over a radio link to a support vessel after he and two others were lowered on to the wreck by crane in a special basket.

Asked how he felt about the possibility of finding bodies of the over 140 men still missing, he said: "It’s just part of the work you have to do. You learn

to Jive with these things.” Only 64 people, many of them badly burned or injured after jumping into the North Sea water, survived the disaster. Mr Adair said he had found no firm indications of the cause of the first explosion, which ripped through the crew accommodation area as many slept.

A spokesman for Occidental Petroleum, which brought in Mr Adair as the world’s leading expert, denied accusations by a former safety officer that standards on the platform were lax. A former Occidental Loss Protection officer, Jack Donaldson, told the “Observer” newspaper: “It is fair to say that Piper Alpha would be the most highly dangerous platform in the North Sea.”

He said the platform was overloaded, placing the six legs anchoring it to the seabed under strain, and the crew accommodation was a fire risk.

The Occidental spokesman replied: “This is just

flat wrong. Everything was up to standards and the charges are wrong.”

He added there was now no real danger that what remains of Piper Alpha would explode. “The fire is burning off the oil and gas. That also means there’s not any real pollution,” he said.

Mr Adair said he would stay as long as it took to clear the decks and cap three or four wells which were still leaking and feeding fires.

Asked if a similar disaster could happen again, he replied: “Well, that’s the romance of oil. You never know, but you prepare and do everything.

“To me this is a different situation from most of the ones we’ve been on. With half the platform going like it has, that makes it a little difficult for us sometimes to get in there and work,” he said. Mr Adair, widely regarded as the world’s leading expert in tackling fires and oil leaks on stricken rigs, was speaking from the support

vessel Tharos moored alongside Piper Alpha. The mangled platform still belched flame as leaking gas and oil from the wells burnt off. The decks tilted and the derrick lay precariously across the remains of the steel scaffolding.

Mr Adair said he and his team would return to the platform using special winches and baskets early today to continue clearing the way for a bid to stop leaks from some of the 36 wells that had channelled oil and gas to Piper Alpha.

“It appears to me there are three or four wells that are burning ... and two are burning pretty good,” he said. “We’re waiting on some equipment.”

Only 64 oil workers survived the series of blasts and the inferno that began near the crew sleeping quarters. Some workers slid down hosepipes into the icy sea and others took their chance jumping 60m.