166 Lost in North Sea Oil Rig Blast : Gas Leak May Have Caused Worst Such Disaster

In what is being called the world’s worst oil field disaster, 166 people were feared dead Thursday after an explosion and fire ripped through an Occidental Petroleum Corp. oil platform operating in the North Sea.

Occidental officials and police in Aberdeen, Scotland, said in a joint statement Thursday night that 64 of 230 people had been rescued from the water near the still-burning wreckage of the platform Piper Alpha, 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen.

A daylong search by a small armada of rescue vessels, assisted by more than 20 helicopters, was called off just after dark. Seventeen bodies had been recovered from Wednesday night’s blast, and 149 people were missing.

‘Very Little Hope’

“To be honest with you, when you look at what’s out there, there’s very little hope indeed,” Peter Morrison, Britain’s minister of state for energy, said of the prospect of finding more survivors after flying over the area.

At a news conference in Aberdeen where many oil companies maintain their North Sea drilling support operations, an Occidental official said the disaster was apparently triggered by a leak in the platform’s natural gas storage compartment just beneath the crew quarters.

A rigger on the platform, Derek Ellington, said he heard a gas leak “screaming like a banshee” before the first of a series of explosions.

“It was just bloody horrific, I can tell you,” he said.

Many Leap to Safety

Most of those who survived were either blown off the platform or leaped from one of the main decks more than 100 feet into the sea.

“It was a case of fry and die or jump and try,” said survivor Roy Carey, who was hospitalized in Aberdeen with injuries to both arms and burns to his face.

The intensity of the explosions, which occurred shortly before 10 p.m. Wednesday, split the giant steel platform in two and sent flames hundreds of feet into the air.

Of the platform’s 200 permanent crew members, nearly half were believed to have burned to death in their quarters. Most of those who survived were among those at work on one of the two 12-hour shifts.

The workers, who live on the platform for up to two weeks at a time on a duty schedule of 12 hours on and 12 off, earn up to $1,000 a week for the most dangerous jobs. In addition to the normal crew, about 30 construction workers were on the platform installing pipe.

In London, the secretary of state for energy, Cecil Parkinson, told a hushed House of Commons that “a deep and very, very far-reaching public inquiry” would be conducted into the disaster.

“The government is determined to establish urgently the cause of the explosion and the lessons to be learned,” he said.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, also speaking in the House of Commons, praised the rescue effort and expressed sympathy to the families “of the very, very many we seem to have lost.”

John Prescott, a member of the opposition Labor Party, charged that rig inspection and maintenance had been reduced in recent years and that too little money was spent on training.

Department of Energy officials said a routine safety inspection of the Piper Alpha was completed last week.

“This inspection found one or two minor points to put right that had nothing to do with last night,” Parkinson said Thursday.

Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum, immediately left for Aberdeen to oversee the arrangements for injured workers and relatives of the missing, company spokesman Roger Gillot said at the firm’s Los Angeles headquarters. Earlier Thursday, Hammer issued a statement in which he extended “my deepest personal sympathy” to the victims’ families.

North Sea oil has been a major factor in Britain’s economic recovery during the Thatcher years. Last year, oil and gas from Britain’s sector of the North Sea sold for $21.6 billion and brought nearly $7 billion in revenues to the British government.

The 34,000-ton Piper Alpha is one of the oldest platforms in the British sector. It is more than 600 feet tall and cost nearly $1 billion when it was completed in 1976. Its legs are anchored in the seabed 474 feet below the surface.

Last year, the platform produced a daily average of 23 million cubic feet of gas and 167,200 barrels of oil.

The storm-tossed North Sea is known to be one of the most hostile oil-drilling environments anywhere, and emergency evacuation procedures are practiced frequently and taken seriously by those who work on the platforms.

However, survivors said the series of explosions caused a fireball that completely engulfed the platform too quickly to permit routine escape procedures.

Ellington, said he saw one worker jump from the highest point on the platform, a distance of nearly 150 feet, into the ocean.

“He had no choice,” Ellington said. “He did a beautiful swan dive and got picked up.”

A surgeon treating the injured on the support vessel Tharos said he was surprised that so many survived the leap.

Another survivor, James McDonald, a 50-year-old rigger, said he and other members of the crew fought past men on packed stairways to the lower levels of the platform, and “I just forced my way through the flames. . . The water was red hot.”

“Our men would always hope and wish to be evacuated by helicopter, but that was clearly impossible,” John Brading, chairman of Occidental’s British subsidiary, told journalists in Aberdeen. “To the best of my knowledge, none were evacuated by lifeboat.”

A Royal Air Force helicopter pilot, Patrick Thirkell, recounted how a deep-sea tug helping in the rescue effort launched a small boat that was maneuvered between the steel legs of the blazing platform, carefully picking up a number of survivors before it too was caught in the flames.

“Most of those on the boat were killed,” he said. “The captain couldn’t do anything but back away because he had no crew left.”

Before Wednesday’s disaster, more than 130 people had lost their lives in drilling-related accidents since Britain began tapping its rich North Sea oil and gas deposits in the early 1970s, according to Department of Energy figures.