Norwegian Petroleum Museum

Norwegians watched their worst industrial calamity ever recreated on national television Sunday night in a new series that traces the country’s forty-year “oil adventure”.

Many saw for the first time how the capsizing of the Alexander Kielland semi-submersible housing platform took the lives of 123 offshore workers and changed the safety rules and norms forever.

Dramatic reenactments, interviews with survivors, their families and key figures from Norway’s shaky early days offshore showed how 28 years ago some questioned the price of looking for oil offshore. The method of death was the upturning of an oil platform, and it showed the hopelessness of crews tossed around by a foundering offshore behemoth.

“I asked myself (in the aftermath) if (looking for oil) was really worth the price,” the country’s late-70’s-era Prime Minister Odvar Nordli was shown saying.

High winds are understood to have fatally detached one of the worn braces welded between the platform’s five buoyancy silos. The weakened structure gave way after first toppling violently and uprooting its anchors.

On March 27th, 1980, many of the 212 crew were resting and waiting for bad weather to break so their shift could end. Only 76 had ever seen a safety course of the kind now standard for all going offshore by helicopter.

The series Olje! (Oil!) has aired every Sunday night for weeks on national television network NRK. Sunday’s episode chronicled the North Sea tragedies that ran before today’s well-reputed health and safety culture.

Some 200 Norwegians were said to have died in accidents in the first 15 years of the country’s run to oil wealth. Many of the mishaps were blamed on veteran Americans said to have a disdain for safety.

“The Americans were extremely ‘anti-union’,” labour spokesman Lars Anders Myhre is shown saying. Organized labour in Norway is credited with building up the country’s safety culture.

The modern industry is said to have begun when new, specialized assignments brought in workers from land accustomed to working conditions okayed by unions.

Norway’s safety boss in the years since the Alexander Kielland disaster said the whole industry was gunhoe in the 1970’s.

“They were a tough gang,” safety director Magne Ognedal said about 1970's derricks workers.

“They had null understanding of risk, nothing,” he’s shown commenting.

The country would have many brushes with disaster in the years following the Kielland’s capsizing.

The program also shows famed oilfield “firemen” Boots Hansen and Red Adair arriving in Norway to put out the Bravo 14 blow-out of the 1980’s. Rig crew had installed a “blow-out” preventer “upside down” at the first signs of a high-pressure blow-back of gas from the wellhead. Later, gas and oil engulfed the platform and the gusher spilled thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons into the North Sea.

In 2004, this reporter covered the story when only “the right conditions” avoided disaster at Statoil’s Snorre A platform, where a blow-out was contained but much explosive gas surfaced in bubbles from the wellhead.

The NRK docu-drama reported that for years only accidentes involving deaths were reported, Indeed, many North Sea divers — the largest specialist group of victims — are full of horror stories that never made it to print, some smothered by state-secrecy measures.

-writethru- ws@scandoil.com