Book description
The fire was visible seventy miles away as a distant, flickering flame
on the horizon. The heat generated was so intense that a helicopter
could only circle at a perimeter of one mile. Flying at a height of 200
feet, the air crew saw that the tongues of flame extended high above the
rotor blades. On the surface a converted fishing trawler inched as close
as possible, but the paint on the vessel's hull blistered and burnt, and
the rope handrails began to smoke. In the water surrounding the inferno,
men's heads could be seen bobbing like apples as their yellow hard hats
melted with the heat. At the centre stood, at least for now, the Piper
Alpha oil platform, 110 miles northeast of Aberdeen, once the world's
single largest oil producer. On 6 July 1988, its final day, it was
ablaze with 226 men onboard. Only sixty-one would survive. Fire in the
Night tells, for the first time and in gripping detail, the devastating
story of that summer evening. Combining interviews with survivors,
witness statements and transcripts from the official enquiry into the
disaster, this is the moving and vivid tale of what happened on that
fateful night inside an oil rig inferno.
Stephen McGinty is an award-winning journalist with the
Scotsman newspaper. He has previously worked for the Glasgow
Herald and the Sunday Times, and is the author of the
critically acclaimed This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal
Thomas Winning and Churchill's Cigar.
