Nowhere To Run

Keeping pace with the previous Oily Stuff post titled, Red and Boots and Bay Marchand in Louisiana in 1970-1971, this is a short video clip used in the presentation, The History Of Oil Well Firefighting and Blowing Control.

The first part of the video was a large fire in offshore Egypt, then there is footage of the first successful subsea (sub-lake) capping operation in history in Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela done by Boots Hansen and at about the 1:00 mark is some old footage of the enormously complex, multi-well fire in Bay Marchand in 1970. The video clip ends with actual footage of the Piper Alpha platform exploding in July of 1988.

The photo above is from Tambalier Bay, Louisiana for Greenhill Petroleum in 1992. James Tuppen, Joe Carpenter and Danny Strong were on this platform when it caught fire. They jumped into the bay when it ignited, thus the title, Nowhere to Run.

A lot of this old film was shot with 8 or 16MM cameras back in the day and I had to convert it all to digital format for editing. The quality is not so good, sorry.