Scottish Piper Alpha Disaster

Scottish Piper Alpha Disaster. 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 two converted fishing trawlers inched as close as possible, but the paint on each 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, 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, accounting for ten per cent of the oil and gas production from the North Sea. On 6 July 1988, its final day, it was ablaze with 229 men onboard. Only sixty-two would survive.

Fire in the Night will tell, 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 emotional tale of what went on, minute by minute, on that fateful night inside an oil rig inferno. Fire in the Night: The Piper Alpha Disaster.