The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Norway still fighting for answers to rig disaster
Asurvivors’ group has spoken of its fight for answers and its “demand for a completely new inquiry” exactly 40 years on from Norway’s worst industrial disaster.
On March 27 1980, 123 people were killed as the Alexander Kielland rig capsized in the North Sea.
There were 23 Britons among them, including two Scots – Richard Milne, 40, from Renfrew and 25-year-old Robbie Morrison, believed to be from Aberdeen.
Unlike the Piper Alpha investigation eight years later, the 1981 Kielland investigation was not a public inquiry, but a “closed process”, with the public unable to access related documents and archives for years to come.
That, coupled with conflicting accounts of the cause of the disaster, has led to a degree of “mistrust” in the process.
However, new evidence has led to Norway’s office of the auditor general (OAG) agreeing to again review the incident, reporting back to the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, this year.
Kian Reme, leader of the Kielland Network, whose 28-year-old brother was among the 30 people never recovered from the wreckage, is optimistic about that statement to the Storting.
He said: “We hope and expect that when they deliver their report they will recommend a full new inquiry. A very big frustration in Norway is the feeling that many things have been hidden and classified, and so on, while with Piper Alpha, I believe the process was much better in the sense that it was open and you could check their findings during the process.”
Mr Reme said there remains a “big question” on whether the original Norwegian Inquiry Commission’s assessment, that a welding fault was the single cause, was accurate.
He added: “We cannot accept that, in the largest industrial disaster in Norway ever, officials stick simply to one theory which came from the commission in ’81, even before they had visited the rig.”
It took just 20 minutes for the rig, used as a workers’ accommodation vessel, to capsize after one of its five legs tore off while it was stationed at the Edda platform in the Phillipsoperated
Greater Ekofisk area. The official report in 1981, two years before the rig had even been righted, stated the cause was a welding issue that led to a fault in a bracing.
This effectively blamed French firm CFEM, which constructed the rig at its yard in 1976, rather than operator Phillips or rig owner Stavanger Drilling.
Other factors, such as problems with the anchoring system and an explosion at another bracing, are also viewed as potential contributors.
By 1985, there was “complete confusion” over what caused the disaster as the French government produced its own report, conceding there was a welding issue but blaming the accident on rig mismanagement.
Tommas Skretting, an author on Kielland and journalist at the Stavanger Aftenblad, has spent five years researching the disaster and how it threatened Norway’s status as a young oil-producing nation.
He said: “The French investigation arrived at a different conclusion than the Norwegian one and I don’t think this case will be closed before stories match and questions are answered in a credible and consistent way. The original Norwegian investigation has not been perceived as very trustworthy by many people, especially not by the survivors.”
Mr Reme was finalising his training to become a minister of the Church of Norway when he heard of the disaster. One of his first tasks would be to inform his own mother that his brother was among those to have perished.
It came after the police agreed to give him a list of those still missing, days after the accident, on behalf of the families involved.
This would lead to him becoming an inadvertent figurehead for the bereaved for decades to follow.
A first key role was with the Kielland Foundation, established by relatives and survivors to campaign for the rig to be made upright, which it eventually was in 1983, for further investigation and to recover the bodies still lost. It ended its activities in the 1990s and the Kielland Network was set up much later, after new research emerged.
An effort to take forward a legal bid against Phillips Petroleum in the 1980s failed, however, and a new challenge now may not even be possible, even if there is a new investigation.
Alpha process