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A NORTH SEA DIARY

Most passengers ignore the earnest safety briefings given at the start of every flight. But as water began gushing into the helicopter cabin, I was doing my best to remember. Use one hand to find your nearest exit (in my case, a window that looked rather too small to fit through). Use the other to find the release mechanism for your four-point seatbelt, but do not activate it immediately. Instead, use the same hand to open the compartment on your lifejacket that contains the rebreather. Put it in your mouth, and the noseclip on your nose. Take a deep breath, squeeze the red sphere to close the valve, and exhale into the bag.

At that point, we began to capsize. It is surprising how easily you become disoriented. You struggle to remain seated upright as the rolling cabin carries you into the air, and then as you are plunged into the water your head is forced sideways against the wall. You know, intellectually, that you must remain in your seat for a few seconds to give the rotors time to stop spinning, but strapped into a chair, upside down, and submerged in a confined space, deep-seated instincts are insisting--vehemently--that you do something, and quickly. 

The rebreather helps, by allowing a limited form of underwater breathing (you are actually breathing your own stale air, but that is better than breathing water). But the noseclip is not perfect, and water is beginning to trickle through. We were told that the window would pop out without too much fuss, but my first shove does not move it. That causes a spike of panic, and I shove again, much harder, and the window comes free. I twist the buckle, lean forward, and the seatbelt falls away. In my haste to get away, and fighting against the buoyancy from my rebreather (which is trying to strand me in the cabin), I yank myself through with both hands, painfully wrenching my right shoulder.

Fortunately, I have made my escape not into the freezing waters of the North Sea, but into the heated swimming pool of Falck Nutec, a Denmark-based firm that provides emergency training to workers in the offshore oil industry. Fraser, the cheery Scot in charge, seems satisfied with our performance, and so the cabin is righted in preparation for its next passengers and we are sent off to learn how to pull ourselves into a liferaft (which, when wearing a drysuit and a lifejacket, is far harder than it sounds). 

I am here, along with several other journalists, at the behest of Marathon, a Texas-based oil company that has invited us to see one of their North Sea oil platforms. Before we are allowed to fly out, we must learn what to do should the helicopter come down. To properly simulate the experience of ditching in the North Sea, the swimming pool can be plunged into darkness, a wave machine started up and hoses used to blast participants with spray. Being journalists, and hence pushed for time and rather unfit, we have been given a slimmed-down version of a course which usually takes several days and includes lessons on fire-fighting and common offshore hazards.

I have been offshore in the North Sea before, but this is the first time I have had to do helicopter escape training. But safety is taken seriously in Aberdeen, and has been ever since the Piper Alpha oil platform caught fire in 1988, killing 167 people. It remains the world's worst offshore disaster, and on its 20th anniversary everyone is keen to talk about developments in oil-platform safety. 

Visiting the offices of one big oil firm last year, I was required to watch a video reminding me to hold on to the stair rails, watch for loose cables and keep the lid on any cups of hot coffee. I was assured that this wasn't just for the benefit of visiting journalists, and indeed Falck Nutec's offices are dotted with graphic posters warning of the dangers of "slips, trips and falls". 

The people I speak to seem sincere. But high oil prices make commercial pressures keenly felt, and safety can suffer. Health and safety inspectors rebuked Shell over the state of its platforms in 2006. 

Relentless propaganda can be irritating, too: coming back from a previous trip to Aberdeen, I sat next to an offshore worker who was abandoning the North Sea to work in West Africa. "It's all this health and safety bollocks," he explained. "It takes three times as long to do anything here as it does anywhere else." It is a tricky message to get right.

Picture credit: Strocchi/flickr (top), Jeff Kubina/flickr 

(This is an instalment of a correspondent's diary about British oil, published on Economist.com.)