Twenty years ago next month, a series of explosions sent Piper Alpha, a
towering oil rig in the North Sea off Aberdeen, collapsing into the burning
sea. It was the world’s worst offshore disaster and 167 men lost their
lives.
After a 180-day inquiry by Lord Cullen, the oil and gas industry improved its
safety procedures beyond all recognition.
Decades pass and memories fade. But what, in that time, has happened to the
children those men left behind? Their lives were changed, not just by the
loss of their fathers, but by the large compensation packages given to the
bereaved. There was jealousy within communities and sometimes it tore apart
the remaining family.
Miguel Galvez-Estevez is 21. He had barely taken his first steps when his
father, also named Miguel, left for the last time. All his memories of his
father are second-hand; instead of growing up with the man, he had
photographs, letters and other people’s anecdotes. An only child, he and his
mother, Vivienne, were on their own together for 15 years.
“My dad’s death was never a taboo subject. I was always aware that something
tragic had happened,” he says. “I was old enough to comprehend it when I was
about six. Mum always talked about it, but I think she was waiting for the
right time when I was mentally able to take it in and fully grasp what had
happened.”
Galvez-Estevez Sr was a chef from Granada, Spain, drawn to Scotland by the
high wages of the offshore industry in Aberdeen.
He worked the oil industry’s familiar two weeks on, two weeks off rota. When
he was at home in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, he was the most devoted father,
adamant that his son should have the best of everything.
Before he was a chef, he worked as a steward. Vivienne recalls him saying: “I
will work till my hands bleed for my son to eat food. I pick up rubbish and
cigarette ends off the floor for other people. I don’t care about myself,
but my son won’t do this.”
On his first birthday, at a party in the garden, little Miguel took his first
steps towards his father. There was a primary school next door and Miguel Sr
used to say that, when his son was old enough to attend, he would climb onto
the garage roof and watch over him in the playground.
A fatal mix-up over a safety valve ended the childhood Vivienne had imagined
for her son — a settled family life, the local school, two or three
siblings. Widowed at 31, with a toddler to care for, Vivienne fell out with
her family in Aberdeen over the compensation settlement she received for her
husband’s death.
“My sister thought I’d won the lottery,” she says. “It caused a lot of
jealousy. It was all they ever saw. It was me who was going to bed at night
with nobody, it was my son who didn’t have a father and all they could do
was call Miguel a spoiled brat.”
Vivienne moved seven times while Miguel was growing up. “It was because of my
family,” she says. “I couldn’t breathe.” He went to Lathallan, the exclusive
boarding school on the northeast coast, and while her family’s words were
hurtful, she is the first to admit that her son’s every whim was indulged.
On a trip to the toy store Hamleys in London, aged five, he picked out a
huge glider and a toy oven. Back in the hotel, she discovered he had ordered
a pizza from room service to cook in it.
Miguel is now on his third Ford Probe, a metallic purple Batmobile with pop-up
lights. In 10 years’ time it will, he reckons, be a classic.
There were flying lessons, a stint at college studying construction with a
view to becoming a joiner — “I tried to get an apprenticeship,
it’s really hard at my age” — a flirtation with welding and stints in
skateboarding and music shops. At the moment he is working in Signs Express
and playing in a band. He has just bought his first flat, paid for with
cash. His television is as tall as he is.
Would his father have approved? “He would have had very different standards
for Miguel,” says Vivienne. “He used to say: ‘My son will be a doctor or a
lawyer.’ He thought to be an academic was the be-all and end-all.”
Miguel can see that his life, post-Piper, took a distinctive path. “I’ve been
in private education all my life. Without it, I’d be a completely different
person. I’m 21, I’ve travelled a lot, I’ve never wanted for anything. It
might sound really arrogant and materialistic, but I’ve only seen the other
side of life through my friends. I’ve never experienced it myself.”
Having his father around, even for two weeks out of four, would have changed
the family dynamic. “I would have been a different person. I’m very close to
my mum, very in touch with my feminine side.
“If Dad had been there the attention would have shifted. I wouldn’t call Mum
smothering, but she was overprotective. She would pick me up until I was
about 12.”
According to the child psychologist Dr Adam Abdelnoor, chief executive of the
children’s learning support charity Inaura, the way a child copes with
bereavement depends on how old they are at the time of death. By the age of
five or six, they understand that death is permanent. Before then, it is a
hard concept for them to grasp.
The Piper men’s on-off presence in the family home would later give their
children “room to deny death at a fundamental level for a very long time”.
A child will, even if they have no memories of their own, create a “continuing
bond” with their late father, “a line through an idealised image that they
carry with them”, says Abdelnoor. “That father will not grow old, they will
exist in a series of happy memories or images. There will be none of the
traumas of adolescence.”
Barry Martin was 10 and his brother John was 16 when their father, John, a
rigger, died of smoke inhalation in the Piper Alpha accommodation block. He
was 32. Although another boy in Barry’s class, in the Ross-shire town of
Alness, also lost his dad, there was little sympathy.
“There was a lot of talk and finger pointing about how much money we got,”
says Barry. “There were jokes about Piper Alpha in the playground: what’s
got four legs and goes bang?”
The family moved to Inverness, Barry started secondary school and his life
fell into place again. “At first I didn’t tell everyone. It was like keeping
a dark secret, but I just wanted to be a normal person. It’s a difficult
enough time to fit in anyway.
“When it came out, people didn’t ask any more and they were quite
understanding. And in Inverness, they didn’t bother about the money so much.
People forget.”
Unlike Miguel, Barry has real memories: of his father returning home from the
rig with a bag stuffed with giant Toblerones and other duty-free goodies; of
going to football matches and impromptu hikes with 5am starts. Supporting
Rangers is still, he says, “special to me. It is one of the strongest things
I have got from my dad”.
John, being older, went fishing with his father, watched films, tried
weightlifting. “They had a brilliant bond,” says Barry.
For Miguel, never knowing his dad was “a blessing in disguise”, he says. “My
girlfriend’s father passed away when she was 10 and she still cries, she’s
got memories.
“I don’t have anything to cling on to and I think that’s helped me a lot.”
Piercing together the story of a needless tragedy
Stephen Phelps first looked at the Piper Alpha disaster 12 years ago while
making documentaries for the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and
Error series. He returned to the subject as a dramatist this year for the
20th anniversary.
Based on the Cullen report, Phelps’s radio play mixes reconstructions with the
survivors’ evidence in a moving way. “These were big rough, tough men,” he
says. “They thought they could cope with anything and there they were,
trying to be solid and serious while dealing with their inner turmoil.”
In 90 minutes, Phelps pulls together the context of the disaster — Piper Alpha
was the “Clapham Junction” at the centre of a group of production facilities
— the cost-cutting, sloppy procedures, inadequate safety facilities and the
stories of men trapped in an inferno, cooling their faces with squashed
tomatoes, disobeying the standard safety procedures to make desperate
escapes.
Most of the survivors got out in the first half hour. In his research, Phelps
took some comfort from the fact that most of the deaths were as a result of
gas and smoke inhalation: “Hardly anybody died of burns, or drowned, or had
major trauma.”
Phelps wrote the drama “to do honour to those men and the wrong done to
them”. For him, the North Sea in the 1980s was “Thatcherism writ large
— everything was contracted out, no one took responsibility. Lots of men
knew there were safety problems, but they were not prepared to make a fuss.
Their contract would end and they wouldn’t be asked back”.
Piper Alpha is on Radio 3 on July 6 at 9.55pm
my daughter was only four months old when her father was killed on the piper alpha.my father also worked on the platform but was on his two weeks off when the disaster happened. she has never saw her paternal grandmother because of the compensation claims. i hope safety lessons are learned from this
joanne fraser , south shields, uk
Piper Alpha will never be forgotten, but lessons can be learned from this horrific disaster. I stay in Aberdeen - most people know someone who perished. My Father worked on the Piper and was on his 2 weeks off from rotation - he very rarely talks about it....i count not just him but myself very luck
Gordon K , Aberdeen, UK