Oil rig explodes in Gulf of Mexico

NEW ORLEANS - The U.S. Coast Guard says it is searching for some missing workers after an explosion at an oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana's coast.

Coast Guard senior petty officer Mike O'Berry said Tuesday that authorities hope all the workers are aboard life boats in the area.

The explosion was reported around 10 p.m. Tuesday, O'Berry said. There were 126 people aboard the rig, which is 52 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana, he said.

OhSoOrdinary said:
So....

Efforts to contain the damage from the burning rig became profoundly more complicated when it sank, leaving a one-by-five-mile sheen of what the authorities said was “crude oil mix.”

The authorities also do not know if some 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel aboard the rig were now part of the leak, having possibly been released in a series of explosions that responders observed Thursday morning before the rig sank.

Admiral Landry said the sheen on the surface appeared to be residual oil from the explosion Tuesday night and the raging fire that followed. But, she added, “we don’t know what’s going on below the surface of the water.” Link

OhSoOrdinary said: Fuckin' right! Offshore drilling!

A Coast Guard official said Friday morning that oil was not spilling from a deep-water well off the coast of Louisiana, apparently easing concerns of a potential environmental disaster days after an explosion on an oil rig left 11 workers missing and a one-by-five-mile sheen of oil on the Gulf of Mexico

“It does not appear that oil is emanating from the hole,” said Katherine McNamara, a fireman with the Coast Guard.

Ms. McNamara said the assessment was made by using a remote-controlled device equipped with a camera and sonar. Officials with the Coast Guard and BP, the company leasing the rig, said they were still trying to determine why oil was not escaping from the well, and whether that remains a possibility. Link

IDGAS said:

Good news it look like the well is NOT leaking!

Robotic devices monitoring the deepwater well where a giant oil rig exploded and sank last week have discovered oil leaking from the well, a development that a senior Coast Guard official on Saturday called a “game changer.”

The oil was coming from two places in the riser — the 5,000-foot pipe that connects the well at the ocean floor to the drilling platform on the surface. The rig, the Deepwater Horizon, which sank Thursday 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, detached from the riser.

The riser, following a circuitous route underwater, now extends from the well to 1,500 feet above the seabed and then buckles back down.

On Friday, a remotely operated device began scanning the riser to determine if there were any leaks, said Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry, commander of the Coast Guard’s Eighth District. The discovery of the leaks was made Saturday morning.

Roughly 1,000 barrels of oil a day are estimated to be emanating from the riser, officials said. They said that both leaks were on the seabed.

Mr_Matt_ said:
IDGAS said:
We are back to fucked again


I can't wait until they put a few off of Ft. Lauderdale and South Beach. They make excellent aids to navigation.

IKCSmiley said:
Word is this thing will be bigger than Exxon Valdex (11 mil gallons) - this thing is spilling 200,000 gallons a day