Oil Sheen Seen Near Damaged Platform in Gulf of Mexico
"Political Issues"09/02/2010
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JACK HEALY
NY TIMES
September 2, 2010
NEW ORLEANS — An oil platform exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday morning, touching off flurries of conflicting reports about sightings of oil slicks in the water and whether any workers had been injured in the blast.
Coast Guard officials said a sheen measuring one mile long by 100 feet wide had been spotted near the damaged production platform on Thursday afternoon. But 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 prospect of a second oil leak would be unnerving for a region still recovering from the environmental and financial toll of the months-long spill at a BP well this year. The explosion 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 Terrebone 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 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.
Rescuers 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.
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.
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.