Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story review – this oil rig horror is up there with Chornobyl

Shocking and superb, this documentary is packed with terrifying details of the notorious 1988 catastrophe, from the fire that could be seen from 120 miles away to the squashed tomatoesOn the evening of 6 July 1988, the Piper Alpha oil production platform in the North Sea suffered a catastrophic gas explosion, followed by a conflagration that destroyed the structure; 167 people were killed, and almost all the physical evidence of what had occurred became charred debris, lost to the waves. After the disaster, a public inquiry struggled to form a complete picture of the event, for reasons that also make it a hard subject for documentary-makers.Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story copes with the challenge superbly, leaning heavily on survivor testimony – 61 men escaped from the rig – and combining it with a simple 2D diagram of the platform’s layout to give us the fullest picture possible. It doesn’t have the special-effects budget that would be required to simulate the ferocity of the fire or the intensity of the thick, black smoke – possibly no amount of pyrotechnics or CGI would be able to do that anyway – so reconstructions of the disaster itself are kept to a minimum. Instead, the focus is on the verbal responses given by survivors to the inquiry, which have been dramatised. It’s excellent work by a cast of little-known actors, made all the more powerful by them using nothing but a chair, a table and the transcript. Continue reading...

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