CHRISTMAS week has a special significance for Norwegians. Nothing to do with sending Christmas trees to London’s Trafalgar Square to thank the English for their help in the war. That, of course, is a wonderful occasion when the tree is lit and people remember. Norwegians, however, recall something else about Christmas.
The Mayday call from the Alexander L Kielland accommodation oil platform came at 18.33 hours on a vicious March evening in 1980. Seconds before, the workers on the platform had felt a shudder. Fatigue had caused welding on a supporting brace to give way. This in turn meant one of the five support columns was torn free. The rig began to list.
In 20 minutes it was gone, under the huge waves of the North Sea off the west coast of Norway, far out from the city of Stavanger. The worst disaster in Norway’s off-shore history had happened. In all 123 people died, 89 survived.
The accommodation rig was moored at the Edda platform in the Ecofisk field, the field which in 1969 had seen the beginning of the whole Norwegian oil success story. Now that once-proud story was wrapped in terrible human tragedy. Things happened so fast that few people had time to get life-jackets on. Three of the seven lifeboats were smashed while being loaded in vicious gales. No one on board could find – in the dark and panic – the mechanism which would have released inflatable life rafts which were capable of holding 400 people. Seven aircraft, 19 helicopters, nine Norwegian naval vessels and no fewer than 71 commercial craft came to the scene. The ensuing commission of inquiry ordered by the Norwegian government didn’t shrink from admitting the failures of emergency systems and when you walk into the magnificent Norwegian Petroleum Museum in central Stavanger, the honesty strikes you.
This is because the first thing you see is a model of the horribly twisted piece of steel which was fatigued and brought the accommodation area down into the sea in less than half an hour.
Think of a massive circular bucket, the type you see swaying at the end of a steel rope on a crane; imagine it mangled and torn and you get the picture. It dominates the entrance to the museum. Inside you can follow in video, audio and other devices the history of the world, and man’s exploitation of fossil fuels.
More than that, however, it underlines how Norwegians realise and will never forget that their vast income from oil and gas has been taken from the sea-bed at terrible human cost. This is a huge country with a small population. It is a country forever grateful to the men and women who build the rigs, plug them into the sea-bed and service and exploit them so that the rest of us can have a decent, warm, comfortable, quality of life. Small wonder that the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation arm defines off-shore jobs as “the most hazardous in the world”.
There are times, talking to ordinary Norwegians, when their government’s vast oil and gas monies seem to make no sense up against their high rates of tax and penalties for non-membership of the European Union. I recently spent two weeks visiting Norwegian cities and towns that between them protect fjords or snuggle inside them safe from all but the most determined marauders. The cold economics suggest that Norway has vast wealth, deposited all over the world’s banks, saved up for a rainy day. The latest suggestion is that it also has 400 years of fossil fuel resources, at a time when the world is wondering what part – if any – man plays in global warming and what part is down to the natural and recurring phenomenon of climate change, and the spinning of the Earth on its axis. (I also took in Ny Alesund, a small settlement of 20 or so dwellings occupied by scientists researching global warming and boasting the most northerly post office in the world, but that is for another day.)
In Stavanger, a local artist told me that before Norway got all the vast oil revenues, locals were better off. “We had enough money in those days to sand the streets in winter, here in the old cobble-stoned part of town. Now old ladies are falling over and breaking bones whenever we get snow because nobody bothers”.
At the tiny but beautiful port of Olden, the young, cheerful, assistant port manager bemoaned the fact that a car is half price in Sweden, but if you buy one there and want to drive it in Norway then customs at the border check the price in, say, Oslo, and charge you that plus a fine.
“We seem to be giving our money to foreign banks and to people who don’t want to work. Sure, some people can’t work, but if you don’t want to work you get 10,000 kroner a month, roughly £2,000. Why work?”
Where have I heard all this before? The world over.
Norwegians are too pragmatic and too hardy to be overly superstitious, but even they see something almost spooky about the coincidence of the end of their sardine industry and the beginning of their oil bonanza.
In fact, the two things happened almost at the same time, around 1968-69. Time was when Stavanger alone had more than 70 sardine-canning plants. Today Norway has one left, near Bergen. The only remains of sardine history in the city are the museum and the gift shop although they will still point out with a grin that the man who invented the sardine-can key- opener came from . . . Stavanger! When the sardine was king, the city grew in size and importance, but with its demise starting in the 1960s, along came rescue in the shape of oil and later gas.
Within a few years Stavanger was the centre of the country’s oil and gas industry. It remains so to this day.
Norwegians remember too, exactly when the oil began to gush, just as they remember that terrible night in 1980. They remember because it was at exactly noon on Christmas Day 1969 that the crew of Ocean Vikingsecured the first well in what would be called the Ekofisk field. They knew it was the big one and so it was, proving to have the largest resources in place of any North Sea oil field.
Norwegians said, “We have received our Christmas present”. A few months earlier the first moon landing had taken place and the rig manager, Ed Seabourne is alleged to have said as the first drops of crude arrived: “What the astronauts have done is great . . . But . . . but . . . what about . . .this?”.