Famed Texas Firefighter Visits Burning Hulk : Adair Begins Taming North Sea Oil Rig

Veteran firefighter Paul (Red) Adair on Saturday boarded the burning wreck of a North Sea oil platform where 166 men died in the world’s worst oil rig disaster.

He and members of his firefighting team were lowered to the smoldering hulk in a metal basket attached to a crane on a ship, where they began the dangerous task of making the damaged platform safe.

Occidental Petroleum Corp., which operates the Piper Alpha platform 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, said it would take several days to make the wreck safe. It said fires are still burning on several of the 36 wellheads. No gas is believed to be escaping but the risk of an explosion could not be ruled out.

Cooling water from the support vessel Tharos was being pumped onto the wreck before efforts began to clear debris.

“This phase will take some days,” a spokesman for Los Angeles-based Occidental said. “Once the debris is removed, there will be better access to begin the work of capping the leaking wells.”

Adair, 73, who is based in Houston, spent an hour on the platform before examining video pictures taken by an unmanned submarine that circled the damaged underwater structure of the installation.

“It seems to me there are three or four wells that are burning . . . and two are burning pretty good,” Adair said after examining the remains of the platform.

Authorities declared a 10-mile danger zone around the platform after rescuers stopped searching for 149 workers still missing.

Only 64 oil workers escaped death when explosions and fire ripped through the platform Wednesday night.

Occidental said a surface ship Saturday recovered part of the platform’s living quarters where up to 100 men were trapped after a first explosion. The company said the part of the living section recovered appeared undamaged, but no bodies were on board.

Occidental said no oil appeared to be leaking from a rupture discovered in a main line that takes crude oil from the platform to the shore.

The disaster was a major blow to Britain’s oil industry and has forced the precautionary closure of six other offshore fields in the area accounting for 12% of the nation’s oil production.

At a news conference in Aberdeen on Saturday, an Occidental spokesman denied suggestions made by British newspapers that the company may not have carried out enough safety measures on the platform because of cost considerations.

“I think what we would say is that our standards have maintained a high level and represent the best of industry practice,” the spokesman said.

Occidental’s head of British operations, John Brading, denied allegations by the company’s former safety manager that lives could have been saved if the wooden living module had been replaced by a steel-walled structure fitted to the gas compression chamber where the explosion is believed to have occurred.

Recovered wooden sections of the living quarters had only scorch marks and were not burned through, he said.