The Jump from Piper Alpha
- Apr 25, 2025
- 4 min read
by Glenn Orgias
July 6, 1988.
— Karen:
This is all I know. Andre had taken to visiting the helideck of the Piper Alpha oil rig, looking from there out at the fog over the North Sea. He once told me that the sound of the foghorn on Piper Alpha was the sound loneliness would make if given a voice. 200 miles from Aberdeen it was. 170 feet below deck, the ocean smashed up against the pylons. A fall from the helideck could kill, hence the netting around the perimeter, but even if you survived the fall you would only survive a few minutes in the twelve-degree water before hypothermia killed you. That’s why the Safety Officer had started watching Andre. There were concerns.
On the afternoon of July 6, Andre called me seven times from the satellite phone on the rig, each time leaving a short message on my answer machine. He was thinking about me, he said, about the thing that I had done, about what it had done to us. “Pick up,” he said, “I need to speak to you.” But I did not. I did not want the confrontation. I just listened to that sweet man crying out his cruel words. There were three hundred people on Piper Alpha that evening, and nearly all of them would die.
CCTV footage shows Andre entering the mess hall just as the blind flange on the main oil pump blows. Only those in the mess survived the initial blast. The explosion destroyed the firewalls around the pumps, ripped through the control room, killing everyone in it, and burned so hot that it melted the steel framework of the rig. Later, when the photos were released, the fire could be seen from space.
They were trained men, but the explosion caused chaos, all the managers were dead. Thick clouds of choking smoke. No leadership. When the eighteen-inch gas line from the Tawn platform ruptured, it sent gas at 120 times atmospheric pressure fleeing into the night, its flame reached 300 feet into the sky and lit the low clouds orange and left the pitch-black night glowing as if it were hell itself.
Those who survived said that the sound of that fire was supernatural, millions-of-years-old compressed gas finally getting to burn and sucking in oxygen so fast it was hard to breathe. The survivors made it to the helideck. Backed against the netting, the men formed a small group. A togetherness. But each became an individual again as they stepped off the deck into the abyss of swarming ocean that reached up to meet them in peaks of different colours like a million tiny fires. There was death below, yes, but no one wants to burn.
I should have answered Andre’s phone call. This is what I know. As it is, the messages left behind are our last connection. His words, words of suffering, words of hate and pain, and yes God they hurt. But there is a part of me that is the love part of me that nothing can kill, not his words, one can try but that part of me loves no matter what, even me, it loves even me, even when it shouldn’t, even if it’s been begged not to. I don’t know if I’m stupid. But I love Andre, that’s all I know. I love.
— Andre:
He watched the men jump from the helideck. He was the last one, him and another man that he had dragged to the edge, a man whose skin had blistered and melted from his face and hands, a man who screamed but whose primal, reflexive scream was lost in the fire noise. The man was a Derrickhand, a decent man sentenced to a final torture. It was unfair, but that didn’t count for much right then, not for him, not for Andre. Do it now, said Andre, looking over the edge of the helideck. It was the only thing. The Derrickhand would not survive the fall; the man’s face was gone, his lips and eyelids were gone, he was living the last seconds of his life, maybe they both were, and if so then what of the things they were leaving behind. He thought of Karen, but it was pointless, there was no time for apologies now.
Andre pulled his life jacket on. “I’m sorry,” he yelled to the Derrickhand, and with that he lifted the burnt man into a sitting position and tried to put a lifejacket on him. The man screamed, a black tongue burnt from screaming in an open flame. The Derrickhand grabbed Andre, and Andre recognised that this had taken the last of the man’s strength. “No,” said the man.
And Andre remembered. His training. You can’t jump from higher than 30 feet with a lifejacket on. It’ll break your neck.
Andre tied the lifejackets to his waist. He had started to shake. He would die shaking. The last time he called Karen he knew she was listening. And he sought to hurt, to have her feel the pain that was eviscerating him. He hated her, then. On the call he revoked everything that had ever counted between them. Andre hoisted the Derrickhand in a fireman’s carry and stepped over the netting of the helideck. 170 feet down. 12 degrees. Maybe 15 minutes to live, maybe 10 seconds. She’ll know, he said, she’ll hear you underneath your words. Say it now, what you feel, and then she’ll know. Andre spoke briefly, unheard words that left behind no delible meaning but that left him lighter, and he stepped from the edge.
The air quietened as he fell, the steel lattice went by quickly and he lost hold of the Derrickhand, and as he got close to the water his knowledge of language disappeared, and the world became just sound and feel and a reaching out in all directions all at once.
Glenn Orgias is an Australian writer. His memoir, Man In A Grey Suit, was published by Viking in 2012. His writing can be found at X-R-A-Y, SmokeLong, Wigleaf, Pithead Chapel and other places.
