"The first thing you do when you arrive on an offshore ((oil)) installation," the British author A. Alvarez wrote in a book on the subject in 1986, "is arrange how to get off it again in an emergency." For the 227 men aboard the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea last week, there was no time for such procedures.
At 9:31 Wednesday evening, a piercing sound that one survivor described as "screaming like a banshee" -- presumed to be a pressurized natural-gas leak -- screeched through the 650-ft.-high structure, whose four massive metal feet were anchored in the sea...
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