Rig 83

Working that close to such danger heightens the feeling of being alive. It was a magnetic pull. I wanted to get onto the drill floor. It was where life was. Two hundred miles from land, on the towering hulk of a rain-lashed platform three hundred feet above the waves, twelve men drill a hole amid deafening noise and danger. Once complete, it will be three miles deep, the width of a human head, and it will unlock the vast liquid riches of the Ninian oil field. It’s 1980, and the risk of injury or death is extreme. Like many, Jonathan Lichtenstein signed up knowing the pay was good but little about what lay ahead. But while others have left – exhausted, injured or worse – something keeps drawing him back. Reconstructing a single two-week shift at the height of the oil boom, his account of this hidden and exceptionally hazardous world captures the power and sublime beauty of the rig in the notoriously treacherous conditions of the North Sea. It offers a true encounter with the people – hard-working, precarious, disposable – and an exhilarating reckoning with the work – filthy, skilled and toxic – that made us rich, and on which every facet of our modern lives has come to rely. It reveals how risk becomes normalised, why proximity to death makes us feel alive, and our profound inability, individually and collectively, to imagine our own demise.