What Caused the Giant Piper Alpha Oil Rig Explosion?

July 6th 1988 120 miles northeast of Scotland the Piper Alpha oil rig at 14,000 tons and two and a half times the height of the Statue of Liberty it is one of the largest rigs in the world Piper Alpha was the world's most successful oil rig what that means was that in a single V paper alpha produced more barrels of oil than any other oil rig or oil platform in the world a crew of 226 rotate shifts to keep the oil and gas flowing Jeff Mullins is the chief control room operator that evening at 9:45 p.m. Jeff suddenly hears an alarm indicating a problem with one of the rigs condensate pumps then condensate injection pumps tripped more than any other equipment we had no panic we knew we needed to get it back on because it was gonna start affecting production that evening pump a is offline for maintenance leaving just pump be working the same pump that's now been shut down by the alarms trip system the condensate pumps were an integral part of the production facility you couldn't have them both offline for any great length of time without shutting down everything to avoid a full shutdown but decision is made to halt maintenance on pump a and bring it back online but what nobody knows is that pump a has a fatal flaw during maintenance its safety valve has been removed meaning that there is nothing to stop thousands of cubic feet of gas escaping into the atmosphere the faulty pump is switched back on then at 9:55 p.m. disaster a spark suddenly ignites the escaping gas and an explosion rips through the rig confronted by 700 degree flames most of the 226 strong crew are now either dead or severely injured the nearest analogy is that as of course between Titanic and the towering inferno oh hell was breaking loose another I was just asking for help it's only way you could describe it I've seen of absolute carnage and flames explosions debris things were escalating so fast at that point it was almost impossible to to take things in by 10:00 to midnight less than two hours after the initial blast the Piper Alpha is on the verge of collapse finally the rig's legs start to give way and the Piper alpha starts to slide into the sea where a module was and the rest of the platform just started drifting apart and the other three quarter's of the platform just barely saw a feeling that the Nazi that's my worst memory of the night because I know if the people were still on it they would have gone at the bottom of the sea [Music] a total of 167 men lost their lives that night just 61 survived

Channel: Smithsonian Channel

Views: 884,409

Keywords: TV online, watch, spark, safety valve, shifts, alarm, survivor, Facts, Gas, survivors, Oil, Jeff Bollands, dead, North Sea, leak, 167, July 6, Documentary, channel, stream TV, Alpha Piper, survival, condensate, shale, Pipe, explosion, Disaster, faulty, legs, video, Episodes, offline, free tv, 1988, 226, maintenance, pump, platform, smithsonian, rig, free videos, alive, rescue, flames, scotland, cubic

Id: VXZRx7sE1qc

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2017