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When a Dinner-Plate Killed 165 Men: The Piper Alpha Blind Flange Mystery
When a Dinner-Plate Killed 165 Men: The Piper Alpha Blind Flange Mystery
A single hand-tight metal disc smaller than a dinner plate, left invisible above a gas module, lit the North Sea sky and killed 165 men on the night of 6 July 1988 - thirty bodies were never recovered and no one was charged. How could a platform producing 125,000 barrels a day continue operating with a critical blind flange pressed only finger-tight and a permit that vanished?
In this episode, we follow the sequence of failures on Piper Alpha: the missing permit, the hand-tight blind flange on PSV 504, the diesel pumps…
The skinny
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