Yesterday was the 30th Anniversary of the Piper Alpha Disaster which killed 167 men (including two crewmen of a rescue vessel) in one of the costliest manmade catastrophes ever An explosion and resulting oil and gas fires destroyed Piper Alpha on 6 July 1988, killing 167 people, At the time of the disaster, the platform accounted for approximately ten per cent of North Sea oil and gas production, and the accident is the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact.
The bodies of those lost were never recovered
R.I.P to those men
I am off the next few days might make a trip to the memorial at Hazelhead Gardens to pay my respects. The spectre of this tragedy still looms large over the families and The City of Aberdeen
I wasn't born until a couple months after the tragedy but living in Aberdeen and knowing a good number of people who have work on the rigs it is a topic that comes up every now and again outside the anniversary period
Every now and then you come across someone who knew someone on the rig or they know someone who knew someone
Five yrs ago for the 25th anniversary the memorial gardens were redone and there was a big fundraising effort in the city for it, businesses particularly local ones had charity boxes at the till and lots of posters in the windows advertising the initiative
When I went there yesterday there was plenty of flowers laid around the memorial, pictures of some of those that were lost, a poem written by a worker on a neighbouring platform, even a family who were laying flowers at that time. I moved off to the side of the gardens to give them some privacy they were there a good while and it was clear to see how raw the emotion still was
After they had left I went over to have a better look around and there were people who had no real connection to it, crying looking at all the names and flowers, people telling their young children what happened and what the memorial meant
I remember myself going there a few times when I was very young and being told about it. It's a standard thing for an Aberdeen kid to be taken to The Memorial Gardens at Hazelhead and told about the brave men of The Piper Alpha