Every day is a battle

You just have to get on with life

IT TAKES Iain Letham a while to remember where he put his George Medal. In this secluded Angus cottage, bright with the chatter of friends and the shrieks of his small children, the badge of honour and the disaster that gifted it to him are consigned to the corners of cupboards and minds.

''A lot of the people that were involved, unfortunately for them, have not managed to get over it,'' says Iain carefully, as the medal is finally retrieved and laid on the kitchen table in its smart red box. ''They live with it. Personally, I just file it to the back. It has happened and there is no point in dwelling on it. It is one of these things and that's it.''

One of these things that took him in a small rescue craft under the burning rig, six survivors pulled on board and two colleagues, both friends, working by his side. Then the boat became tangled in debris and the riser blew and when the fireball that engulfed them had receded Iain was the only one left alive, hurled into the waves with his life jacket melting across his back.

He was 28 at the time. A bit of a clown, he says himself. Not ready to settle down. Enjoying the life of one month at sea attached to the rig standby vessels, one month off with his beloved motorbikes. He had done his training, seen the videos, taken part in countless exercises, even rescued a man overboard from one the the installations. But nothing had prepared him for Piper Alpha. When the first blast took place he was five miles to the north on the standby

vessel Sandhaven, attached to the rig Santa Fe 135.

''We were watching a video, a comedy video, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. We were just sitting taking it easy when the man overboard alarm went and someone said there's a fire on Piper Alpha. You could see the smoke and we were thinking at that point it's not that bad. If you had said to people in the industry then that a platform would explode, burn, and fall into the sea people would have laughed at you.''

Iain and two colleagues, Brian Batchelor and Malcolm Storey, got into a fast rescue boat and were at the scene within minutes.

''When we approached the scene there was a lot of smoke. We went to the installation and started recovering survivors from the water. We picked up four in total and as we pulled away another two came down so we went back in and picked them up. Then we discovered we were tangled in the debris. We tried cutting ourselves free. It was hot, Jesus it was hot. It was like being under a giant grill. Then there was a big explosion above us that went over the top of the boat and that was the end of my two colleagues, the rescue boat, and the six survivors we picked up. They all perished at that point. Me and Malcolm had been standing beside each other at the stern cutting away the debris. He was maybe three feet away from me then the bang went off and that was the last I ever saw of him.

''I was blown into the water. Everything was totally ablaze, the surface of the sea was on fire and I thought, this is it, there is no way you are going to get out of this. Then I popped my head back above the waves and the fire was above me and I thought I'm going to have to leave here rather rapidly. It was getting very, very hot. I just swam underneath the installation, diagonally across to come to one of the legs. I hung on there.''

Iain realised his only hope was to swim towards the rescue boats. ''As soon as I hit the water I was totally selfish. It was self-preservation. I swam upwind towards a ship I could see there. You could see the rescue boats, the navigation lights skipping across the sea. There were quite a few survivors in the water.

''I got alongside one of the boats but it rolled as I got near and there was this suction which pulled me under again. I can remember thinking I don't believe it, I have come this far and now I'm going to drown. Then I popped back to the surface again and a rope was thrown towards us.''

After an emotional reunion with the crew of the Sandhaven who had expected to find Brian and Malcolm with Iain, he returned to his home in Muir of Ord where he credits a local doctor with helping him to come to terms with the tragedy. ''She was brilliant. I could go and talk to her whenever I felt like it, at times when I couldn't talk to my family.''

Within eight weeks he was back offshore, offered a post training the rescue crews attached to the rigs. The job meant he had to watch the video of the burning rig week in, week out, something he also believes helped him become reconciled to what had happened to him and the others.

''There was no getting away from it. It was there in front of you all the time. I went back to sea to prove to myself that I could. I was asked if I fancied training and I thought I could impart some of my experiences and make the people that are still there better prepared deal with the future. To see if I could make it any better.''

It has been a frustrating experience, however. Despite a wealth of new equipment, Iain does not believe that the rescuers who work offshore are any better prepared to deal with such a situation.

''I think some lessons have been learned but I don't think we have taken enough out of what was said at the inquiry. As far as the rescuers are concerned, I don't think they are in any better a position.''

Like some of the others who survived he initially felt a certain invincibility. He would find himself speeding wildly along the dual carriageway or fixing his motorbike with a cigarette drooping from his mouth, inches away from an open petrol tank.

He met his wife a year after the tragedy and became a dad.

He spends more time at sea these days than he would like, but he is committed to his new role. He blames no-one for what happened.

''I don't know if prosecution, finger-pointing makes it any better. If you can go forward and learn from what happened and make sure that it does not happen again that would be more beneficial.

''You just have to get on with life. I will carry on as I am. I'll still be trying to do my bit to make things a little bit better.''

The Father

He said, Dad, there's been an explosion

IN A prominent position in the sitting room of Gavin Cleland's Glasgow flat is a brightly coloured sign, the kind of flippant, inspirational message that executives pin up on corporate noticeboards. There are three kinds of people in the world, it says. Those who watch things happen. Those who make things happen. Those who wonder what happened.

Gavin must fall into the second category. However, it is not a role this 70-year-old former miner would ever have chosen to play. The hardened campaigner who has emerged from the aftermath of the Piper Alpha disaster has always been secondary to the dad he is, and was.

You might have seen Gavin sometime over the last decade. A small bespectacled figure half obscured by banners and fliers, caught in the TV backdrop outside the General Assembly or the Court of Session or any of the major political, social and business events held across Scotland every year. He has been to them all, challenging Prime Ministers and oil tycoons, MPs and lawyers, and papering half of Scotland with leaflets demanding that Occidental be punished for the death of his youngest son and the 166 others who were killed with him.

Robert Cleland's body was one of the last to be recovered from the sea below the stricken rig, pulled to the surface by the mechanical grab hand of a remote control submersible four days after the disaster. He was 33, a husband and a father of two himself.

''I was sleeping there when the phone went,'' says Gavin, pointing to the single bed in the corner of his small Glasgow flat. ''It was Gavin, my eldest boy. It was about 7am on the Thursday morning. He said, Dad, there's been an explosion on Piper Alpha, we should go up. So I switched on the TV and it was focused on the shell that was left. I'm thinking Robert might have been saved; there were all these boats around it. Then they said there were so many missing.'' He stops for a moment. ''Robert's body was found on the Sunday evening about 9.30pm by one of the remote control vehicles which had a grab on it. And so young Robert was brought up and we got his body back.''

Robert is still a huge presence in his father's life. The spur that keeps him fighting for all the dead and the broad smiling face that beams out from countless family photographs on the mantelpiece and dresser. The youngest of three boys with no more than three and a half years between them, he had lived above his dad in Easterhouse for most of his life, only moving out to Cumbernauld with his wife and family two years before his death.

Gavin's wife, Hetty, had died in her early 30s and the raising of Robert and his two siblings fell to their ''wee Daddy'', as Gavin calls himself. They were a close unit, the four men.

''Robert had a hearty laugh, he liked a laugh. He was a very keen football player when he was young,'' says Gavin. ''He was seven years on the rigs. Before, he had been in the army for three and a half years and he served in Ireland and I was so glad when he came home safe. When he was on the rig I always looked forward to Robert coming home every two weeks or so. He was a good lad. Fair minded. A good humanitarian.''

That's as much as Gavin wants to tell about his boy. His death was public enough. His life is for the family's own private memories.

Even in the early days after the disaster, numbed by shock and grief, Gavin says he had a sense that no-one would ever be brought to task for what had happened. He remembered Robert and others talking in vague terms about the dangers of the rig.

''Robert told us that if anything happened it would happen on Piper Alpha. A lot of the lads reckoned that's where it would happen. I realised very quickly that with all the machinations then between the oil company and the Government that these people would probably not be prosecuted. Once I began to wake up from all the shock of Robert's getting killed and the thought that I would never see him again I realised that I would need to campaign. That September I wrote to the Prime Minister and Government Ministers. I knew by the tone of the letters and the answers that they are going to masquerade here.''

It was the start of an endless campaign. There's not a day, a date, a fact, or a fudge that Gavin doesn't remember. His flat is filled with plastic bags stuffed to bursting with documents and reports and copies of letters sent and received.

He has been knocked back at every turn by Tory and Labour. Most officials ignore his demands for a prosecution, some return bland little messages scripted by subordinates. Yet he has managed to make himself such a presence that he is convinced there is now an official directive giving advice on how to deal with him.

''I'm convinced the directive is this,'' he says with a smile. ''Just ignore it. He will go away or he will die. But I'm going to try to live. I'm eating all my veg and my fish and I'm smelling the buttercups to keep alive. I always hope it's a good day to go out and hold up a banner or hand out leaflets. I will never ever give this up.

''My message to Tony Blair is to pick up the Piper Alpha brief and proceed to prosecute Occidental to the full. It would be totally justified.''

Every point he makes, he says, is based on the facts of the case. ''My claim is based on Lord Cullen's own facts. It is not something I'm doing for myself. It is for justice. It is for Robert. And it is for the others.''

As we leave his flat he stops just outside the front door and points to a small tree directly below the balcony. It is almost dwarfed by a larger neighbour but has still managed to grow straight and strong, branches spread wide towards the light.

''When Robert moved away from Easterhouse and I moved in here I thought I might settle, but I wasn't able to. He was with me for most of his life and I don't suppose I'll ever settle now. That tree down there . . . there used to be another one there but it got knocked down by a lorry, so we got that cherry tree. It has these lovely small white flowers in the spring.'' The mask of the campaigner has slipped. ''You know what,'' says Gavin, a father still grieving for his youngest boy. ''In my mind and in my heart, that's a tree for Robert.''

The Survivor

Injustice shakes me to the core

TEN YEARS ago Ed Punchard escaped down a rope as the blazing structure of Piper Alpha disintegrated around him. He has been struggling to get away ever since. Unable to come to terms with what happened, he became obsessed with the tragedy. He campaigned endlessly and wrote a book. His marriage failed and he fled to Australia where he reinvented himself as a filmmaker, crafting documentaries on the benign wonders of the natural world.

But the shadow of the rig stayed with him and as the tenth anniversary approached, Ed, now 41, finally turned his camera on himself and came back to the North Sea to confront his demons.

The result, Paying for the Piper, which will be screened by Scottish Television on Monday night, is his tribute to the colleagues he lost and his attempt to address not only what happened but his continuing rage at the circumstances of the tragedy. It is a powerful, painful, and deeply personal film. His memories of the night have always retained a terrible clarity.

An experienced diver, Ed had been on Piper Alpha for 10 weeks, helping to supervise the dive teams from a small suite of offices directly below the gas compression module where the first explosion took place.

''The first blast completely knocked the stuffing out of our offices. They were designed for explosions because they were in such a dangerous position, but the ceiling came in on our heads and the filing cabinets were sent flying.'' Ed was sent to the nearest muster station to try to find out what had happened and saw the colossal fire around the well-head.

''I climbed back up and said to the others, we've to get away from here. Someone found a rope and they threw it down and we climbed on to it. We got down onto the spider deck a few feet above the sea.

''There were huge objects the size of cars falling into the water around us all blazing away. Then the boats came alongside and eight of us got onto the Silver Pit.'

''After the first explosion we knew it was tremendously serious and there must be loss of life. But we thought that in the next half hour or so people would start coming out of the accommodation block and climbing down ropes. When the riser blew we knew the people around us were virtually all the survivors. There were people on the helideck. You could see them and then you could see that explosion and they just vanished.''

Despite a second brush with death, when he was blown from the deck of the Silver Pit, Ed's memories of the night are of feelings of exhilaration and power, a fact which has troubled him greatly.

''It was extraordinary and all perfectly clear. It was like time had slowed down. I felt powerful and clear-minded and it actually was an easy experience. It was like all the rehearsals were over and now you are going to perform. You know that everything you do will make a difference.

''That realisation didn't make it heavy or difficult. It made it light and clear and simple. Absolutely extraordinary, that, and I have struggled with that enormously.''

It wasn't until he saw the film Fearless, starring Jeff Bridges, which deals with a survivor's feelings of invincibility that he was able to admit how he had been feeling.

His own film was given a screening in Parliament yesterday. He hopes it will help spur politicians and the public to address the issues left by the tragedy, most notably the need for an offence of corporate killing.

''This is my personal experience of wanting to do something good from something bad. The truth is I find it very hard to live with the appalling extremity of what happened to me. I can live with what I went through on the night. What I find shakes me to the core is that fact that such a powerful injustice could occur.

''When you see that this terrible thing happened and all these people were killed and all these lives, all the families and friends so devastated, it just blows my mind that an oil company could get away with it. And it is not simply that they could get away with it but that it could happen again. If you don't have deterrents then there's the danger that it could happen again. That I find really disturbing to the extent that I could run out into the street screaming. What keeps me sane is just doing what I can.''

One of the things he hoped to do was to persuade Occidental to consider the creation of 167 scholarships, one each in the name of those who died. He travelled to the firm's headquarters in Los Angeles but got no further than the lobby where a nameless employee was sent down to ''thank him for his interest''.

That interest will never leave him. ''What I have come to realise is that I will never actually put it behind me, but by doing things like the film and pushing as hard as I can to make a difference I can at least live with myself. It makes up for the fact that I survived.''

n Paying for the Piper will be shown on Scottish at 8pm on Monday.