The Weekly Reflektion 09/2025
At the end of March, it is the 45th anniversary of the Alexander Kielland catastrophe where 123 people lost their lives. These accidents have ripple effects which touch many people around the oilfield workers who lose their lives. Remembering this should help us to work safely.
Do we always go the extra mile to deliver top quality work to keep people safe?
Alexander Kielland rig after capsize (NTB)
It is almost 45 years since the Alexander Kielland accident where 123 people lost their lives when the rig capsized after a crack in a brace led to a leg breaking off. I have just attended the Norwegian Oil Museum in Stavanger and the opening of an exhibition called ‘Pappa’ which tells the stories of children affected by the accident. The museum has been able to track down over 300 children of the oil workers who lost their lives, and those who survived. The children who grew up with no father, and those who grew up with a father who was irreversibly changed by the experience even though they survived helps us to appreciate that the ripple effects are often serious, and long lasting. I recommend a visit to the exhibition which will give an insight into the accident and the aftermath.
I have been working in the oil and gas industry for 50 years this year and often think how lucky I have been involved in an industry and had a career I have thoroughly enjoyed every day. Well almostevery day! I lost 2 colleagues on Alexander Kielland, although I did not know them well. Until that time, I had not even considered that a semi-submersible could sink. The accident has had a lasting effect on the Norwegian oil industry.
Sometime later, I had responsibility for a drilling operation where a person was killed while working on one of my rigs. His father, who worked in the oil industry convinced his son, who was then in the army, to get a job in oil because of the better pay and improved time off. The son had recently got engaged and bought a house together with his partner. He did not come home from his offshore trip. His father, his mother, and his partner will never recover fully from the loss. I still ask myself if there was anything I could have and should have done that would have prevented the fatality. Of course there was. If I had only checked this, or asked that, or demanded something else, gone that extra mile, maybe he would have survived. The father’s son could have been happily married with children, but that was not to be, and I was partly responsible since I was in charge of the rig.
The oil and gas industry has brought enormous wealth to Norway, to the state via the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, but also through the wages paid to the workers. It is easy to take this wealth for granted, but it has come at a cost, and for certain people, a huge cost. We must not forget that the oil industry can be a hazardousworkplace, where people rely on each other, where poor quality work can have consequences. Please remember this and it may help to motivate you to go the extra mile to deliver a quality job which may help save a life.