Leaping From a Burning Oil Rig: Piper Alpha Down
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the lights of an offshore drilling platform glimmer on the dark surface of the North Sea. Rising 200 feet above the waterline, the Piper Alpha is a towering steel behemoth, a bulky cubic construction of yellow painted girders, pipes, and scaffolding. The sturdy rig is built to withstand the battering storms of a North Sea winter. But right now, the ocean is calm,

The sky is a deep inky blue, the last residue of daylight glowing at the base of the horizon. French sailors have a name for conditions like these. When the ocean is this tranquil and glassy, they call it la mer de huile, sea of oil. Down in the rig's production modules, the air thrums with machinery. Inside this complex system of tubes and cylinders, powerful forces are contained and corralled.

Highly pressurized hydrocarbons, sucked from the Earth's crust, now captive within steel pipes. Given the combustible nature of oil and gas, every step of the extraction process must be strictly regulated. Every step carefully overseen. But down in Production Module C, something is wrong. A safety relief valve, which prevents excessive pressure from building up within the pipework, was removed for repairs earlier today.

As such, the pump that controls the flow of liquefied gas through this pipe is shut down. But due to a combination of bad luck and human error, that pump has just been brought back online without its safety valve. As an oblivious technician activates the pump from the control room, thousands of gallons of liquefied gas begin to surge through the pipe. With the safety valve removed and the end of the pipe sealed off by a temporary steel cap,

There's nowhere for the gas to go. It collects at the end of the pipe, the pressure building and building, until, just before 10 PM, the dam breaks. Oily yellow jets spurt from a hairline crack around the seal. Within seconds, C module is flooded with highly flammable liquid gas. From here, it only takes a tiny electrical spark

For divers doing maintenance work 50 feet underwater, the explosion comes as a flash of white light and a bang that punches through the silence of the deep. For the men working on board the support boats dotted around the platform, the dusk is briefly illuminated by a ring of pale blue flames with a surge of blistering heat. For 29-year-old Joe Meenan, relaxing and watching a film with colleagues on board the rig, the explosion is preceded by a series of deep tremors.

followed by an ear-shattering blast. You could actually feel the energy coming through the floor, actually coming through your seat. Then all of a sudden there was a huge explosion. The whole platform rocked back forward. You actually didn't know what had happened, you just knew something horrendous had happened. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories.

These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet offshore oil worker Joe Meenan. In the summer of 1988, Joe is stationed on the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea. Since drilling began here in 1976, it has become one of the busiest rigs in the world. At one stage producing more than 300,000 barrels of crude oil every day.

10% of Britain's total usage. It's a hive of incessant industry. A round-the-clock drilling operation optimized for the relentless pursuit of profit, whatever the cost. But on July 6th, 1988, a catastrophic fire breaks out on the platform, and the 226 people stationed on board will be thrust into a hell on Earth.

As the conflagration grows around him, Joe will have to make a terrifying decision: stay patient and put his faith in the remote chance of rescue, or take his survival into his own hands. Straight away, you know, you could realise that there's no chance any helicopter's even coming near this platform, never mind landing on the platform, because the smoke was so intense. I thought, well, that's it, I'm dead here.

I'm John Hopkins. From the Noisa Podcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories. It's 9:30 p.m. in the North Sea, Wednesday, July the 6th, 1988. 125 miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland, the Piper Alpha is a metallic beast standing in the waves. The rig is so vast it has its own helipad, living quarters, and even cinema room. Here, a group of off-shift workers are watching a movie.

This evening's entertainment is the comedy Caddyshack, and it's a popular choice. There's barely an empty seat in the house. In the audience, his round, amiable face creased with laughter, is 29-year-old Joe Meenan. Joe is a scaffolder. He and his colleagues are responsible for construction work and maintenance around the oil rig. It's a challenging job, but Joe's used to it. He's worked on North Sea drilling platforms for the last six years, and he's grown accustomed to the hardships of life offshore.

from the cramped conditions to the extreme weather. I went offshore for the first time in 1982. We just kind of got moved around the North Sea as, you know, contracts, new contracts were negotiated. No, we just moved about as we were needed. So that's just the nature of the job I was in. The idea of going where you're needed, of taking opportunities where you can get them, was nothing new to Joe when he started out.

His father had been a construction worker and in the late 1960s he had moved the family from their Glasgow tenement to East Kilbride, one of several new towns developed by the government to accommodate the growing population after World War II. My dad got a job up in East Kilbride because that's part of the criteria. Back then you had to work in the new town to get a house.

And yeah, East Kilbride was great. It was out in the countryside. Had a good upbringing there. Loads of families with kids all about the same ages, you know, so yeah, it was good. While his childhood was a happy one, as he and his sister grew older, rising local crime rates became a cause of concern for their parents.

Unfortunately back in that days there was a lot of gang problems in Glasgow, East Kilbray, such like and once you came into adulthood you could have went in a few different directions. Some good and some not so good. When Joe was 17 his family moved again, this time to the village of Stonehaven just south of Aberdeen and with the move came economic opportunity.

A few years prior, petroleum had been discovered beneath the bedrock of the North Sea, and the port town of Aberdeen had become Europe's oil capital. Joe's father was one of thousands of men who flocked to work off the northeast coast, where lucrative wages beckoned. In the heady days of the mid-1970s, as big energy companies rushed to set up drilling operations in the North Sea, finding work offshore was as simple as turning up at the heliport.

They all joked like it was get to the heliport and get £200, you know, you'll pass school, you know, a bit like Monopoly. So yeah, absolutely, it was kind of. Back then it was endless cash going through Aberdeen. Money was no object. After finishing school, Joe followed his father into the construction trade with a view to finding employment in the booming oil and gas industry. For the first couple of years, he stuck to working on land. The pay was lower, but the demands were less extreme.

Everyone knew offshore work was a different beast. But then, in 1981, his father died. In his early 20s, Joe suddenly found himself responsible for others beside himself. "Yeah, I suppose it's just coming ahead of the family or whatever, you know, and just taking that bit of more responsibility when you're 20, 21, 22, 23, you know, moving forward." A year after his dad passed away, Joe went to work offshore for the first time.

Despite years of hearing stories about life on the platforms, nothing could have prepared him for his first glimpse of a rig. It was like an island of steel rising from the waves. Its very presence seemed to defy physics. My first experiences were

a real eye-opener and, oh, how's these things, you know, how are they even here? The construction of them, they're sitting in the middle of the North Sea, especially during the wintertime, you've got some horrendous weather conditions, you've got 60-foot waves hitting the side of the platform, you've got 60, 70 mile an hour winds. Offshore work is not for the faint-hearted.

Joe spends his days operating machinery at perilous heights, scaling 200-foot scaffolds to conduct maintenance work, often in the teeth of fierce North Sea gales. Extensive safety training minimizes the risk of accidents, but when you're working with flammable substances like oil and gas, there are some dangers that no amount of training can mitigate. Four years ago, in 1984, a ruptured gas riser on the Piper Alpha triggered a massive fire

Though no one was killed in the blaze, the accident raised serious questions about safety on the platform, and in particular, the potentially catastrophic consequences of a prolonged high-pressure gas fire. An official memo advised various improvements to the existing safety protocols, but the recommendations were largely ignored by management, who maintained that the threats were not serious enough to justify the expense.

In any case, for Joe and his colleagues, the risks are like the bad weather and the isolation. Unfortunately, they're part of the job. We just got used to it. It was just a matter of course. And we probably should have been more aware. That was one of my regrets afterwards, should have been more aware of how dangerous the situation where I was working. I should have been more aware of that and taken that a lot more seriously. And I did.

It's the night of July 6th, 1988, back in the cinema room on the Piper Alpha. Joe crosses one leg over the other and chuckles at the movie. Given the intense nature of the job, offshore riggers work on a fortnightly rotation. Two weeks at sea, two weeks on land, providing essential downtime. Joe's only got a couple of days left of this rotation. On Friday evening, he'll board the helicopter and fly back to the mainland.

Unlike many of his colleagues, he doesn't have a wife or kids back home, but he's looking forward to the break all the same. Joe turns to the guys next to him, fellow scavs with whom he's grown close over the years, and laughs along with the banter.

I kind of got in with a good crowd of folk and scaffolders are kind of like that, you know, they'll look after each other. It was just camaraderie, you made the best of it. Everybody knew they were in the same situation. We all knew what we were doing and we were there for two weeks so we just made the best of it and, you know, just kept going.

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About 40 minutes or so, 45 minutes into the movie,

You could hear a successive flaring going on outside from the flare booms. And it was that loud it drowned out the sound of the movie and silence fell over the cinema. Flaring is a common occurrence on any oil rig, a means of burning off excess gas produced in the drilling process. But Joe has never heard it flare so violently or for such an extended period. It sounds like a turbojet engine, a thunderous, flamethrower-like roar.

Eventually, the flaring stops. After exchanging a few tentative glances, the men turn their attention back to the film. The noise started getting back up in the cinema again, you know, the laughter and all that. And then maybe a minute or so, it started up again. It got even more intense. You could actually feel the energy coming through the floor, actually coming through your seat. And then all of a sudden, there was a huge explosion. A volley of sonic waves rips through the floor.

The ground jolts violently, lights tumble from their fixtures, metal panels fall from the ceiling, the projector screen crumples, and for a few surreal seconds, the film is being shone onto a bare wall. Then the power goes out, and the cinema falls into darkness. After the initial blast, an eerie stillness has been left in its wake, a silence filled only by the deep, heavy breathing of the shaken men.

Within maybe 10 to 15 seconds the emergency lighting came on, so it was a matter of "Right lads, let's calm down here now, let's get in an orderly fashion and get back out into the main accommodation." Joe joins the agitated crowds flooding the hallway up to the main accommodation block. The air is warm with smoke. Clearly there's a fire burning somewhere on the lower levels, so why are there no alarms? Joe listens out for an announcement over the tannoy, but nothing comes.

There was no alarms went off, there was no tannoys went out and it's really quite confusing. Nobody's getting any information what's happening. As more bodies fill the hallway, their progress up to the accommodation block slows. Joe cranes his neck to see past the jostling crowds. The stench of burning oil sears his throat and eyes and tendrils of smoke now visibly drift through the gaps in the metal grill flooring. The air is becoming hot and scratchy to breathe.

Up ahead, where the traffic is bottlenecked, panic is breaking out. People are running in different directions, crashing into each other in the narrow, dimly lit corridor. With no announcements, it's unclear what the best course of action is. Joe decides to move away from the gaggle. He hurries down a flight of stairs that leads to the west side of the platform, where the lifeboats are located. He uses the handrails to steady himself as he descends the steps. The steel banisters are already warm to the touch,

Joe's footsteps quicken, eager to reach the lifeboat station, but he never gets there. As I moved over to the west side of the platform, there's people coming back saying, "There's no chance, you can't get out that way, the smoke and the heat is too extreme." Soot-flecked faces pass him in the stairwell, their eyes red from the smoke, their hair singed from the heat of the flames. He spins around and follows them back upstairs.

The main kind of consensus was most people were heading up to the galley area. The galley area was a designated safe area. It was fireproofed and it had a positive airflow. The galley is the canteen and kitchen area where the workers have their meals. Joe pushes forward, moving with a crush of bodies. In the smoky haze, the men walk in single file, their chins pressed into their chests.

They grip the shoulder of the man in front with one hand and cover their mouths with the other. The galley is located near the top of the platform, just below the heli deck. It's the place they've been told to go to in the event of an emergency. Joe ascends a flight of stairs and emerges into the crowded galley. There must be over a hundred men packed in here. They're all huddled together in groups of three or four, throwing frightened glances at the windows where the fire's radiance has turned the surface of the sea into liquid gold.

Joe scans the room, but he doesn't recognize any of the faces staring back at him. All of a sudden the door on the right hand side of me burst open and this guy came in and shouted, "Is there anybody here from Bodden's?" And Bodden's was the actual drilling crew. You know, they'd done all the drilling for the oil on the platform. And somebody recognized his voice and shouted, "We're over here, Mark. Get yourself over here." So he went away. He headed over there.

I thought, "Oh, that's a good idea," so I shouted out, "Is there any scaffolders here?" After a pause, there's an answering cry from the far side of the galley. Joe picks his way through the bodies over to where the scaffolders are gathered. He nods grimly at his colleagues, glad to be reunited with some familiar faces. Around the room, a few angry voices start to rise. There's a handful of management personnel up here in the galley, each encircled by dozens of frightened, incensed workers, all demanding answers.

One of the senior managers on the platform shouted that being a Mayday sent out, which there had been from the radio room just after the first explosion, and there should be helicopters here within the next half an hour to come and rescue us. So just stay where you are guys. The management staff urge patience and appeal to protocol, but it's clear from their disturbed expressions that this is uncharted territory for them too.

There was only dribbles of water coming out of it.

Whether I had been not really realizing how bad the situation we were in or some kind of defensive thing in my mind. But when I realized, you know, when I turned on the tap and there's only dribbles of water coming out of it, I'm thinking now we've got no power, we've got no water, we've got nothing to fight this fire with now. We're really in a bad situation. It's 10.15pm, a quarter of an hour since the explosion. The temperature in the galley is rising.

Beyond the windows, angry flames flicker like forked tongues. Joe stands in the corner with the scaffolders, their eyes darting from the windows to the floor, which is beginning to heat up beneath their feet. There have still been no announcements, no evacuation plan, even though it's become clear that this fire has not been contained and is steadily engulfing the entire platform. Among some men, the mood has turned dark, their outlook growing increasingly bleak.

Some folks started to realise that there possibly would be a chance that we weren't going to get off that night. And some of the guys were starting to get a bit worried, having some negative thoughts which I tried to say, "No, no, that's not going to happen." Joe echoes the words of the senior staff. They just have to stay calm and follow orders. There are helicopters stationed on the support vessels for emergency evacuations.

Fire protocol dictates that if the lifeboats can't be launched, then an airlift will be arranged instead. But as the minutes pass and the tension rises, the question on everybody's lips grows more urgent: Where are the helicopters? Things are getting desperate. The steel structure of the platform was starting to lose its strength, started to bend, and therefore it was twisting the platform. There was windows breaking, there was glass breaking, there was windows getting smashed.

When heated to over 800 degrees Celsius, the nature of steel changes. As the molecules expand, the metal becomes flexible, semi-molten. And with the inferno building throughout the platform, the structural integrity of the rig has started to fail. Suddenly the emergency lights blink out, and the room is plunged into blackness. Joe looks over at his colleagues, his friends,

The fire through the glass illuminates their faces with a throbbing orange glow. After a pause, one of the scavs turns to the other with an ultimatum. "Well, if we stay in here, guys, and anything else happens, we'll not be in a position to do anything for ourselves. Why don't we go outside and climb up onto the helidet and see if we can see anything for ourselves?" The plan is agreed. Swiftly, the Scaffodas make their way through the galley towards the exit.

As they go, Joe spots a group of guys he recognises. He calls out to them. I says to them, "Are youse guys not coming with us?" And they look to each other and they said, "No, we've been told to stay, we're just going to stay." He says, "Okay, good luck to youse guys." Joe follows his co-workers through the double doors and onto the open deck. Immediately, he is enveloped by a suffocating smog of sickly black smoke.

A shimmering heat haze rises above the fire, which has spilled out beyond the lower decks and billowed up around the rig. Red flames coil around the guardrails. Joe looks up at the helideck and something terrifying becomes apparent. Straight away, you know, you could realise there's no chance any helicopter's even coming near this platform, never mind landing on the platform, because the smoke was so intense, thick black, oil-based smoke, fire.

Even if they did get on the platform, you can imagine the panic there would have been. People trying to scramble to get on a helicopter. It would never have happened. That's that then. No lifeboats, no helicopters. If they're going to escape the burning rig, they'll have to find another way.

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It's 10.20 p.m. in the North Sea.

Onboard a support vessel, stationed in the waves a short distance from the Piper Alpha, it's all hands to the pumps. Dubbed upon her launch as "the most expensive fire engine in the world," MSV Tharos is desperately needed right now. After the crew moves the vessel into position, the water cannon on deck splutters into life. A huge white jet erupts from the nozzle and arcs through the air, bridging the 75-meter gap between the Tharos and the platform.

The men on board the support vessel watch tensely as water rains down on Piper, sizzling against the red-hot metal. The crew has never witnessed a blaze of this magnitude. It's a horrifying sight. A ballooning fireball wreathed in dark gray smoke. The efforts of their water hosts feel futile. Meanwhile, on the top deck of the Piper Alpha, Joe and his fellow scaffolders make their way through a labyrinth of mesh walkways and access doors.

After realizing that the smoke was preventing the rescue choppers from touching down on the heli deck, they've decided to climb to higher ground. Somebody suggested let's go along to the radio room. The radio room was adjacent to the heli deck. It was like a converted container. So we climbed up on the roof of that because that was the highest point we could get to in that area.

and this thick black smoke was coming over and it was almost like you know if you're on the beach and you're watching the sea coming in the waves thick black smoke was coming in waves and every so often be a gap in the waves so you stand up and grab a breath of fresh air joe crouches on the roof of the radio room through intermittent gaps in the smoke he glimpses the dark blue evening sky

Maybe if a helicopter could hover above their new vantage point, it could drop a rope down with a harness and hoist the men to safety. That is, if they can see it through the smoke. Then, out of nowhere, a droplet of cold water lands on Joe's scalding skin.

The Tharris, our support vessel, that had a water cannon right at the top of one of the cranes and it was fanning back and forward on paper and it was catching us up on top of this radio room soaking our clothes and our hair. The Tharris' water cannon sprays across the eastern side of the platform. Some of the men fall to their knees and spread their arms wide, gratefully soaking themselves in cooling water. But as Joe watches the jet slam against the metal framework, a new danger presents itself.

They were that powerful, these water cannons, if they'd hit somebody on the platform, if they had killed them, they would have severely injured them. It would be a cruelly ironic way to go. Staying on the exposed roof of the radio room is just too risky. Somebody suggested, "Right, why don't we go over to the west side of the platform? Maybe the Tharros could move a bit closer. We could climb onto the crane, climb down onto the Tharros." I mean, it was a desperate situation.

Right now, any idea is better than staying put. They descend from the roof of the radio room and start heading west. Periodically their route is blocked by some blazing obstruction, forcing them to find an alternative path. They turn back and pass beneath the shadow of the oil derrick, a vast crane-like structure that towers over the platform and is now lit up like a funeral pyre. Joe wipes a curtain of sweat from his brow.

Which is when there is another almighty bang as a second massive explosion rips through the night. We actually didn't know what had happened, we just knew something horrendous had happened. A high pressure gas pipeline has just ruptured, instantly releasing the equivalent of the entire annual gas consumption of the UK. A colossal fireball surges into the sky, wrapping the rig and the men on board in a canopy of superheated air. For Joe,

The shock of the blast jolts him into a strange kind of clarity. Quickly, he runs to the radio mast and starts clambering up, away from his colleagues who scatter in the wake of the explosion. I don't think it was panic. It didn't feel like panic, but I knew what I was doing was a silly thing I was doing because I was going nowhere. The sky above him glows with a pale red twilight. Below, the screams of wounded men merge with the roar and crackle of the flames.

Joe climbs and climbs, the metal scorching his hands, gripped by an instinct that tells him to go higher, away from the bonfire of steel burning below. But then his foot slips. He instinctively closes his fingers around the bar as his feet thrash in mid-air. Just at that point I thought, well, that's it, I'm dead here. Joe wraps his forearms around the horizontal strut and holds on tight.

Intense heat pulsates from below, melting the rubber soles of his flailing trainers. 30-meter walls of flame now encircle the platform, a ring of fire fed by over 50 million cubic meters of gas. By this stage, scores of men have already tragically perished in the blaze or drowned in their bid to escape. And as Joe dangles from the mast, it seems his fate is also sealed. But even in the face of this impossible situation,

He refuses to give up. Something keeps him fighting. My dad died in 1981 and he actually worked on Pied Ralfa as well. I don't know if it was maybe something to do with that, that he made the world survive because that would have just destroyed my mum, you know. It was only my mum and sister left then, you know, so I dare say there must have been a bit of my dad's, you know, character in me as well, you know.

possibly because he had passed away by that time and he gave me that extra emphasis, inspiration to survive. With gritted teeth, Joe lifts his foot back onto the rung of the radio mast. Greater clarity takes over and he starts to descend the ladder again. It was like somebody flicking a switch, you know, a light switch on or something and sort of just took over what I was doing. I'd say whether it was a woke survivor or some higher being looking after me,

I came down the ladder to the level below the helideck, run along to the access stairs that would take you back up onto the helideck, run over to the north side of the platform, had a look over, that huge explosion had cleared all the thick black smoke away so you could actually see down to the sea. Joe peers over the edge of the helideck. It's 175 feet to the water below. In his safety training, Joe was warned that jumping into the sea from higher than just 30 feet can be fatal.

This is almost six times that. Hitting the water from such a height will be like landing on concrete, but what choice does he have? The inferno is building around him, the air scorching his lungs with each breath. It's now or never. Took a few steps back and there's this safety net that goes round the heli decks, look, and they've got metal supports for the safety net and I knew I could use that to try and propel myself away from the platform.

I knew exactly what I was doing but it was almost like an outer body experience watching yourself doing what you're doing. Joe plants his foot on the metal rim of the helideck. The life jacket he's wearing could break his neck on impact with the water so he removes it and throws it over the edge. In the next instant he drives his foot down and propels himself forward over the rim of the helideck beyond the safety netting and into the darkness beyond. For a split second it's as if he's suspended in space.

Then gravity takes hold and he drops like a stone. And it was only at that point when I came back to myself, the first thought that came into my head was, "What the bleep have I done?" Joe tumbles through the night air, a tiny speck silhouetted against the flames. The wind roars in his ears as the oil-slicked water charges up to meet him. I didn't really know what was going to happen next. I was just throwing myself into a black hole basically.

Joe is almost horizontal as he hits the sea, his left side breaking the surface first. His body plummets down 20 feet, disappearing into a cold black abyss. He looks up. Beautiful shapes dance on the surface, flickering lights of pink and orange. He starts kicking and crawling upwards, resisting the urge to breathe in seawater. Seconds later, Joe's head breaks the waterline. He gulps down the hot, smoky air,

and starts looking around for something to hold onto. There was a lot of debris, there was a lot of floating objects in the water, there were some bodies in the water also, and I was just very fortunate that I never landed on any parts of debris that was in the water or any parts of the platform that was sticking out on the way down. I don't know, it's quite scary.

From what he can tell, he's relatively unharmed. And in another unbelievable stroke of luck, Joe's life jacket has landed just a few feet away from him. He swims over to it and zips himself into the flotation device. All the lifeboats were stationed at the north end of the platform. And at least one of them had got blown off in that second explosion. And part of the roof of one of them was floating in the water next to me. I managed to grab a hold of that as well and started propelling myself away from the platform.

Pete radiates against the back of his head as he kicks his legs and swims away from the platform. He spots the half-destroyed shell of a lifeboat nearby and makes for it. Clambering on board the damaged vessel, Joe stops and steadies himself before staring back at the devastation behind him. I look back at the platform as trying to just remember what I was witnessing.

And one thought in my head was, if there's anybody left on that platform, they've got no chance they're gone. So I was sitting there, looked down at my hands and arms, because I only had a short-sleeved t-shirt on, and had these huge blisters on my hands and arms. I couldn't figure out how that had happened. In the chaos, his arms and hands have become badly burned. But given the shock, the pain right now is minimal. The giant blisters on his limbs glow red, and Joe takes a few moments to catch his breath.

until eventually the sound of an approaching motor cuts through the crackle of the flames. He looks over his shoulder. It's a lifeboat. He came over, asked me if there was anybody else in the lifeboat. I said no, got me into the fast rescue craft, lay me along the side of the fast rescue craft. That's kind of when my injuries started taking effect on me. So I was in the neck of consciousness then for the next 40 minutes or so.

For a while, everything is a haze, a collection of random images, arriving on board the Tharos, being stretched through to a hospital area, medics buzzing around him. And then, an hour or so later, there's the roar of helicopter propellers and the smell of diesel, as Joe and some of the other survivors are flown back to the mainland. When they finally reach Aberdeen and the helicopter skids on the concrete of the hospital roof, it confirms something that not so long ago seemed impossible: he's going to live.

It's the following morning. Joe lies in his hospital bed, his arms and hands swaddled in thick bandages. He's sharing this ward with a dozen or so fellow survivors, some far more severely burned than he is. Earlier, the doctors were able to explain how Joe sustained the blistering on his hands and arms. They said, well, we're 100% sure your burns occurred when you jumped off the platform. Just that five or six seconds,

exposed to the heat, the temperatures were so extreme on the platform. It was just the reason for my head burns was heat radiation from the temperatures on the platform. That was the reason for when I sat in a lifeboat and looked down at my hands and arms and I could see these huge blisters on my hands and arms and I couldn't figure out how that had happened. That was the reason it happened during the fall.

Aside from the burns and bruises, Joe has avoided any more serious injuries. After a day in the burns unit, he's wheeled into the main ward, where more survivors are sitting up in bed. They greet him with solemn smiles and words of solidarity. For the next few days, the patients help each other process their shared ordeal.

It's amazing how quickly, you know, the rehabilitation kicks in. And myself and the guy, Roy Carey, who Roy was very badly burnt on his head and his face and his hands. We got into the main ward where there was some other people, some other survivors from that night. And the camaraderie was quite good. By now, the Piper Alpha disaster has become international news. One day, the patients in the main ward receive something that lifts their spirits enormously.

A great uplifting thing for us when we were in the hospital, I found it especially uplifting anyway, was we got these cards and letters and messages from school children from all over the world. England, Wales, Ireland, Australia, Canada, America, New Zealand. I found that really uplifting. After a couple of weeks, Joe is discharged from hospital.

He returns home for further rest and recuperation. And while many of his fellow survivors struggle with PTSD in the months that follow, Joe appears largely unaffected. I was absolutely just so happy to be alive. I just couldn't believe what I'd come through and I was just so happy and I just thought everything was fine. I thought everything was okay until the Christmas day of 1988. I'd been out the night before, I'd got up in the morning, I was in my own flat.

and I just switched on the TV that morning and then all of a sudden I was overcome with grief. All I could do was think about that night and all the people, all the families, this was going to be their first Christmas without their loved ones that never survived that night. I was overwhelmed with grief and I just sat there and cried.

It seemed like an hour, but it could only have been half an hour, it could have been 15 minutes, I can't remember. I was overcome and I was howling with grief that day. But I don't think that was a bad thing either actually. It was quite a good thing to get it out, you know. But yeah, it does catch up with everybody at different stages and different times and maybe sometimes when you're least expecting it as well.

Of the 226 people stationed on the Piper Alpha at the time of the fire, only 61 survived. It is the worst offshore disaster in history. The 60 or so men that were working that night, 63% of them survived. Out of the other 160 or so men,

that were off shift that night, it was only 13% of them survived. So if you were outside and you were working and you were maybe down in the lower levels, you had more of a chance to survive. But the people that stayed inside that were off shift, unfortunately, didn't give themselves much of a chance to survive. An official inquiry is launched into the cause of the initial explosion.

It is determined that the first domino to fall was a gas leak in one of the production modules. The escaped fuel was then ignited by an electrostatic spark, the cause of which is still unknown. In the resulting explosion, pieces of flying debris damaged the firewalls separating the production modules, thus allowing the fire to spread and more pipes to overheat than rupture. It was a catastrophic chain reaction that cost 167 lives.

The company that operates the platform, Occidental Petroleum, is found liable for damages and ordered to pay compensation to the survivors and to the families of the dead. Ultimately, it becomes evident that safety conditions aboard the platform were indeed lacking. Following the disaster, Joe never goes back to work offshore, but he remains a vocal advocate for offshore worker welfare. In the aftermath of the tragedy, a range of new emergency protocols are introduced to make the work safer.

These changes are largely the result of efforts from Joe and other survivors of the Piper Alpha disaster, who spend the years after the accident raising awareness of what happened. It's hugely different, the oil industry now, safety-wise, mostly in the North Sea. Just that experience and the feedback I've got, it's really been rewarding, if that's the right word. It makes me feel quite proud and it makes me feel as if I'm maybe

Doing summer food for that 167 guys that never made it that night, that gives me a little bit of feeling that I'm making a difference, hopefully. Next time on Real Survival Stories, we meet Justine Barwick, a 47-year-old care worker from Australia. Justine loves the Queensland coast and takes regular trips there to enjoy long, relaxing holidays with her friends and family. But one day, swimming in waters she's safely explored hundreds of times before,

things take a sudden and shocking turn. Out of nowhere, Justine faces a monstrous attack, a fight in the waves, and a life-threatening injury. With major trauma to her main artery, the life is literally draining from her. The countdown has started. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen to Justine's story right now without waiting a week by subscribing to Noisa+. Click the link in the episode description. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries.

You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

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