Fire in the Night ― The 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, the tongues of flame extending hundreds of feet 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 scalps burned 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 the world's worst offshore oil disaster. In a narrative that combines interviews with survivors, witness statements and testimony from the official inquiry into the disaster, Fire in the Night reveals the human stories of bravery and loss within the unfolding tragedy.