starofthenorth

Two sad events occurred today in history, both the result (isn’t it always?) of human failure.

In 1977, two aircraft crashed into each other in the fog a Spanish island somewhere in the Atlantic. Still the worlds worst air disaster, Tenerife was the result of many minor factors (a bomb scare, fog, Dutch laws governing how long a flight crew as allowed to work, a football match and cockpit psychology). I was only seven when the accident happened, so I don’t remember anything about it, though the impact in Holland must have been incredible. All 234 people and 14 crew on board the KLM aircraft, PH-BUF ‘Rijn’, lost their lives. Many of the crew on the Dutch aircraft lived in the town I live now yet I don’t think there are any memorials to them here, other than the mass grave in a churchyard on the West side of Amsterdam. Of the 380 people on the Pan Am plane, 61 miraculously survived the inferno, including both pilots.

In 1980, the Alexander Keilland, a Norwegian oil rig, some 230-odd miles of the coast of Dundee capsized in heavy weather. The reason for the disaster was eventually tracked down to some faulty welding which caused a crack in one of the legs. It went unnoticed until, in the heavy weather, the leg sheared off. One hundred and twenty-three people, mostly Norwegians and mostly from the same town lost their lives in the freezing water when the cinema block where they where watching a movie slid into the sea. I do remember this one, as this was just after we’d move to Scotland. In those days I was into building oil rigs. I had built the cranes where out of left-over bits of Mechano. The derrick too. The legs I made out of Pot-Noodle pots. I even built a wee heli-pad on top of the Kellogs Cornflakes accommodation block. I still remember seeing the up-turned platform sticking out the water, the missing fourth leg conspicuous in its absence and wondering how it must have been for the people in the cinema.

What are the odds of two disasters like this occuring on the same day, albeit three years apart?