Officials Assess Damage From Blast in Gulf of Mexico
"Political News"09/02/2010
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and SARAH WHEATON
NY Times
Published Sept. 2, 2010
NEW ORLEANS — An oil platform exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday morning, forcing 13 workers overboard from the rig. Officials were scrambling to see if any oil had seeped into the Gulf.
Coast Guard officials said there was no sign of an oil leak near the damaged platform late Thursday afternoon, despite earlier reports that a sheen had been sighted.
“The boats and aircraft on scene cannot see a sheen,” said Capt. Peter Troedsson, the chief of staff for the Coast Guard’s Eighth District. He could not explain an earlier report of a visible layer of oil — which he said came from one of Mariner Energy’s response vessels — but simply said that Coast Guard responders could not spot any signs of oil.
The platform’s owner said the structure had not been producing at the time of the accident, and a spokesman for the company, Mariner Energy, told CNBC that there was no evidence of any spill.
The explosion unnerved a region still recovering from the environmental and financial toll of the months-long spill at a BP well this year. It occurred around 9 a.m. Thursday, touching off a fire that had been contained but not extinguished by the afternoon. The production platform was positioned in relatively shallow waters — 340 feet deep — and to the west of where a drilling rig leased by BP blew up and sank in April, killing 11 people and touching off an environmental calamity.
All 13 members of the work crew on board Thursday were accounted for, the Coast Guard said, though there were conflicting reports about whether one worker had been injured. The crew were pulled from the water by a civilian boat that had been in the area, the Crystal Clear, and taken to a nearby rig, Coast Guard officials said.
Rescuers, who arrived about an hour after receiving reports of the explosion, took the crew to Terrebonne General Medical Center in Houma, La. Hospital officials did not respond to requests for comment on the condition of the workers.
It was unclear what had touched off the blast on the structure, known as Vermilion Block 380, but the Mariner spokesman told CNBC that crews had been painting and sandblasting at the time.
In a statement, Mariner said that during the last week of August, the platform had produced about 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas a day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate.
The company said it would begin an investigation into the accident and cooperate with federal officials.
The platform, roughly 100 miles off the Louisiana coast, has been the site of at least four accidents — two of them fires — since 2000, according to federal records.
In June 2007, a welder using a torch to cut a pipe was injured when oily sand in the pipe flared up, reddening his face, neck and ears. In December 2002, before Mariner owned the rig, a mechanic suffered burns when exhaust from a pump fueled by natural gas caught fire.
In May 2008, a crew member was seriously hurt when a chain came loose and struck him in the face. And a pipeline leak was reported in 2000, when the platform was operated by a different company.
The platform was not affected by the Obama administration’s recent moratorium on deepwater oil drilling, imposed on projects more than 500 feet deep in the wake of the BP spill.
The moratorium is currently scheduled to expire on Nov. 30, but Michael R. Bromwich, the director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, is reviewing safety policies and records of the deepwater drilling companies to determine whether the suspension could be modified or lifted sooner.
An Interior Department spokeswoman said that the Nov. 30 date had not been revised in light of Thursday’s accident.
Shallow-water drilling companies have complained that new safety and environmental rules adopted after the BP spill have slowed and in many cases stopped projects in shallow water, imposing a de facto moratorium.
Interior Department officials insist that there is no hold on shallow-water wells and that work on them can resume as soon as operators meet the new rules, which require safety certifications, additional inspections of blowout preventers and other cautionary steps.
The accident was first reported at 9:19 a.m. Thursday when helicopters in the area spotted a rig on fire, Coast Guard officials said. The Coast Guard scrambled seven helicopters to reach the site of the explosion, located 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay in Louisiana.
For Dan Shaw, captain of the Crystal Clear, the radio call for a rescue boat marked a moment he was prepared for, but did not really expect.
“This isn’t something that happens everyday,” said Mr. Shaw. “But everyone out here trains for this just in case.”
His team of four men reached the scene at 10:30 a.m., and by 11 a.m., there were seven Coast Guard helicopters on the scene, five from New Orleans and two from Houston, and five Cutters.
The workers, who “huddled together,” had been in the water for about two hours and floated about a mile away from the rig, which Mr. Shaw could see buring in the distance as he pulled them into his boat, he said.
“They all were remaining calm. They all got aboard pretty quickly. Nobody looked panic stricken,” Mr. Shaw said.
Mariner Energy, which describes itself as one of the largest independent oil and gas companies in the Gulf, has 195 active drilling leases.
A spokesman for Mariner Energy, whose stock slid on Wall Street following news of the blast, told CNN that the platform was not engaged in any active drilling.
Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said that President Obama was in a national security meeting in the White House Situation Room when news of the explosion began to circulate, and he was not certain whether the president had been informed.
“We obviously have response assets ready for deployment should we receive reports of pollution in the water,” Mr. Gibbs said, during a regular televised briefing.
He noted that the experience gained from the BP oil spill could prove useful in dealing with the latest incident, but said that he did not know who the highest ranking official near the scene might be.
On Thursday afternoon, the three ranking House Democrats in the energy field were demanding to know what had happened. Henry A. Waxman of California, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, along with Bart Stupak of Michigan and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, sent a letter to Scott D. Josey, the chairman and chief executive of Mariner Energy asking for a briefing by next Friday.
Workers in Gulf oil fields described an explosion of this magnitude as unusual.
“They’ve got a lot of safety systems out there, a lot of them,” said Jim Shugart, executive vice president of ERA helicopters, of Lake Charles, La., which specializes in oil field operations. In response to the blast, the Coast Guard asked ERA to send two helicopters.
“For the most part, they take care of any abnormality, just like on an automobile or a helicopter,” said Mr. Shugart, who said his company gets a call for help like the one on Thursday less than once a year.