Fire in the night

Stephen McGinty published Fire in the Night in 2008. It is a work of non-fiction about the loss of the Piper Alpha oil platform, and it was put together from interviews with survivors and from the statements of witnesses to what happened that night.

The platform stood 110 miles north-east of Aberdeen, and at the height of its production it was the largest single oil producer anywhere in the world. On 6 July 1988, its last day of operation, it was carrying 226 men, and it was destroyed by fire.

The scale of the blaze is what people who saw it remember first. The flames could be seen from seventy miles away as a flicker on the horizon, and the heat was so fierce that a helicopter could only circle at a distance of a mile, with tongues of flame reaching hundreds of feet above the rotor blades. A converted trawler came as close as it dared to the burning structure, far enough for the paint on its hull to blister and its rope handrails to begin smoking. Sixty-one men survived.