WHEN WE hear the word "oil" these days, all we think of, understandably, is the price. Do we ever think of the cost? asks Henry Kelly.
Yesterday, July 6th, was the 20th anniversary of the terrible disaster which befell the Piper Alpha oil rig, 120 miles of the north-east coast of Scotland. An explosion an fire caused the deaths of 167. There were 225 workers on the rig and the survivors slid down pipes or simply jumped into the sea. Witnesses described the scene as a "350-foot inferno".
For Norwegians, this terrible news revived memories of a tragedy experienced eight years earlier when a rig in their own oil-field collapsed. The mayday call from the Alexander L. Kielland accommodation oil platform came just after 6.30 on a March evening in 1980. Seconds before, the workers on the platform had felt a shudder. Metal fatigue had caused welding on a supporting brace to give way.
This in turn caused one of the five support columns to be torn free. The rig began to list. In 20 minutes it had rolled over completely in the huge waves of the North Sea off Norway's west coast, far out from the city of Stavanger. It was the worst disaster in Norway's offshore history: 123 people died, 89 survived.
The accommodation rig was moored at the Edda platform in the Ecofisk oilfield, which in 1969 had seen the beginning of the whole Norwegian oil success story. Things happened so quickly that few people had time to don lifejackets. The waves were 30 feet high, the temperature nearly freezing. Three of the seven lifeboats were smashed against the rig's legs while being lowered in the vicious gales.
Amid the darkness and panic, no one on board could find the mechanism that would have released inflatable life rafts capable of holding 400 people. Seven aircraft, 19 helicopters, nine Norwegian naval vessels and no fewer than 71 commercial craft came to the scene. The ensuing commission of inquiry ordered by the Norwegian government didn't shirk from admitting the failures of emergency systems.
That honest admission of failure is what strikes you when you walk into the magnificent Norwegian Petroleum Museum in central Stavanger. The first thing you see is a model of the horribly twisted piece of steel which buckled and brought the accommodation section of the rig down into the sea in less than half-an-hour.
Think of a massive circular bucket - the type you see swaying at the end of a steel rope on a crane; imagine it mangled and torn, and you get the picture. It dominates the entrance to the museum which traces in video, audio and other devices the history of the world's and man's exploitation of fossil fuels. More than that, however, it underlines that Norwegians realise and will never forget that their vast income from oil and gas has been taken from the sea-bed at some terrible human cost.
This is a huge country with a small population. It is also a country deeply grateful to the men and women who build the rigs, plug them into the sea-bed and service and exploit them so that Norwegians can enjoy a decent quality of life. Small wonder that the United Nations' International Labour Organisation arm defines off-shore jobs as "the most hazardous in the world".
The cold economics suggest that Norway has vast wealth, deposited in banks all over the world against a rainy day. The latest suggestion is that it also has 400 years of fossil fuel resources at a time when the world is wondering what part man's activities play in changing the earth's climate.
Norwegians are too pragmatic and too hardy to be over-superstitious, but even they see something almost spooky about the coincidence of the end of their sardine industry and the beginning of their oil bonanza. The two things happened almost at the same time, around 1968/69. At one time Stavanger alone had more than 70 sardine-canning plants. Today Norway has just one, near Bergen. The only remains of sardine history in Stavanger are the museum and the gift shop, though locals will still point out with a grin that the man who invented the sardine-can key came from Stavanger.
When the sardine was king the city grew in size and importance; then, as the industry declined, along came rescue in the shape of oil and gas. Within a few years Stavanger was the centre of the country's offshore industry. It remains so to this day.
Norwegians remember too, exactly when the oil began to gush, just as they remember that terrible night in 1980. It was at exactly 12 noon on Christmas Day, 1969 that the crew of Ocean Viking secured the first well in what would be called the Ekofisk field. They knew it was the big one and so it was, proving to have the largest resources of any North Sea oilfield.
A few months earlier the first moon landing had taken place and the rig manager, Ed Seabourne, is alleged to have said as the first drops of crude arrived: "What the astronauts have done is great, but what about this?"