Piper Alpha e o Inferno na Terra: O acidente offshore de 1988 mais devastador que o Deepwater Horizon

Piper Alpha and the Hell on Earth: The Most Devastating Offshore Accident of 1988 That Outperformed Deepwater Horizon

Written by Paulo Nogueira Published on 07/07/2020 at 11:24 Updated on 23/07/2023 at 12:04

Plataforma Piper Alpha em Chamas em 1988

Ask someone in 2020 to name the worst offshore disaster in the world, and they will likely say the Deepwater Horizon accident, a semi-submersible drilling rig operated by BP that was in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But something far more devastating happened 32 years ago today.

Piper Alpha in the Final Stage Before Sinking in the North Sea

This simple sinking buoy located a few hundred meters from the Piper Bravo is all that remains of Piper Alpha. Flames controlled, it floated silently as a memorial to the 167 men who died that night, many of whose bodies are still buried in the tangled wreckage beneath the North Sea.

Most major disasters do not result from a “single big event”, they escalate along a chain of small ones — any of which has the potential to change or completely disrupt the outcome.

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Just before 10 PM on July 6, 1988, a set of events conspired to create a situation that could only be described as Hell on Earth.

There was no turning back. The fire consumed more than half a ton of natural gas per second, equivalent to the entire domestic consumption of the United Kingdom, melting the 20,000-ton platform from the inside out.

Although no criminal charges were brought after the disaster, the UK’s offshore industry accepted all 106 recommendations put forward by the Cullen Inquiry. Recommendations that completely reshaped the sector and turned it into a widely copied model around the world. If those lessons were also learned/remembered in the USA and Brazil, perhaps the Deepwater Horizon could have had a different outcome …

Piper Alpha and the Hell on Earth: The Most Devastating Offshore Accident of 1988 That Outperformed Deepwater Horizon

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Piper Alpha and the Hell on Earth: The Most Devastating Offshore Accident of 1988 That Outperformed Deepwater Horizon

In the cold desert of Ladakh, where it hardly rains, engineer Sonam Wangchuk created the ice stupa, a tower that freezes winter water and stores it for irrigating crops in the spring, a simple engineering feat that mimics nature.

Almost 6,000 residents live concentrated along a single street nearly 9 km long in the interior of Poland. Houses form a continuous row, and behind them, narrow agricultural strips emerge, creating one of the most unusual rural patterns in Europe.

Júlia Pimentel, an 11-year-old from Minas Gerais, independently invented a new formula to calculate the square root using simple addition and multiplication, and her method was published in one of the most important mathematical scientific journals in Brazil.

They planted a sea of eucalyptus to produce cellulose, but the monoculture turned into a green desert, dried up springs and rivers, and pushed families out of regions in Minas Gerais and Bahia.

Chinese woman planted trees for decades while sand buried part of her house, received $5,000 from an American in 1999, and helped transform the desert into a forest of 8 million trees in China.

Without her own home and pressured by rent, a 25-year-old bought a small 15-meter boat, gradually renovated the interior by herself, transformed the interior with paint, new flooring, a larger bathroom, and started living on the canals, paying much less per month.

The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, was covered in flowers and turned into a colorful carpet with more than 200 species in the phenomenon called “desert bloom,” when atypical rains awaken seeds that had remained dormant in the soil for many years.

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