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    Rig Explosion off of LA. Coast

    Deepwater Horizon BP Gulf Coast Oil Spill

    At least 11 workers sought after oil rig explosion
    By Kevin Mcgill, Associated Press Writer 41 mins ago



    Ultra-deepwater semi-submersible rig
    FILE - In this undated file photo released by Transocean, the ultra-deepwater semi-submersible rig Deepwater Horizon is shown operating in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Authorities were searching for missing workers early Wednesday April 21, 2010 who evacuated after an explosion at the oil drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana. The explosion happened around 10 p.m. Tuesday, 52 miles southeast of Venice, La., while 126 workers were aboard the platform, Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry said

    NEW ORLEANS – At least 11 people were missing and seven injured after an explosion and fire at an oil drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana, the Coast Guard said Wednesday.

    Most of the 126 people were believed to have escaped safely after the explosion at about 10 p.m. Tuesday, Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry said. It happened about 52 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana's tip.

    The rig was still burning Wednesday morning and was listing about 10 degrees, O'Berry said.

    "It's burning pretty good and there's no estimate on when the fire will be put out," O'Berry said.

    O'Berry said there were conflicting reports coming in but at least 11 — and possibly as many as 15 — were missing.

    "We're hoping everyone's in a life raft," he said.

    Seven workers were airlifted to a Naval air station near New Orleans, then taken to hospitals. He said two of the seven were taken to a trauma center in Mobile, Ala., where there is a burn unit.

    O'Berry said many workers who escaped the rig were being brought to land on a workboat while authorities searched the Gulf of Mexico for any signs of lifeboats.

    The rig was drilling but was not in production, according to Greg Panegos, spokesman for its owner, Transocean Ltd., in Houston. The rig was under contract to BP

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_louisi...NsawNwcmludA--
    Last edited by Jolie Rouge; 09-12-2012 at 05:51 AM.
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    I hope they find them alive and well.

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    oh man i know that rig ,

    Quote Originally Posted by gmyers View Post
    I hope they find them alive and well.
    my dad used to work on that rig when he was alive,,,,,,and if it had an explosion that bad , i dont hold out much hope for them finding any one else.
    they were notorious for violations........... sad,,,,,,,,,,,,
    my son joshua when he was 18 now deceased in 2002 , always remembered always loved

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    Oil rig explodes off Louisiana coast; 11 missing
    By Kevin Mcgill, Associated Press Writer 41 mins ago




    Fire aboard mobile offshore drilling unit Deepwater ...
    In this Wednesday April 21, 2010 photo released by the U.S. Coast Guard, a fire aboard the mobile offshore drilling unit Deepwater Horizon burns 52-miles southeast of Venice, La. Helicopters, ships and an airplane searched waters off Louisiana's coast Wednesday for missing workers after an explosion and fire that left an offshore drilling platform tilting in the Gulf of Mexico.

    NEW ORLEANS – An explosion rocked an offshore oil drilling platform, sending a column of fire into the sky and touching off a frantic search at sea Wednesday for 11 missing workers.

    Most of the 126 workers on the rig Deepwater Horizon escaped safely after the explosion about 10 p.m. Tuesday, the Coast Guard said. Three were critically injured.

    The rig, more than 50 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana's tip, was still burning Wednesday afternoon. It was tilting about 10 degrees. There was no estimate of when the flames might be out.

    Helicopters and boats searched the Gulf of Mexico for any sign of the workers who had not been accounted for.

    "We're hoping everyone's in a life raft," Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry said.

    The Coast Guard said there were 17 workers evacuated by air and sea Wednesday morning but not all required hospital stays. Three were in critical condition, Rear Adm. Mary Landry.

    The other 98 workers were being brought in by boat and were expected ashore Wednesday evening.

    When the explosion happened, the rig was drilling but was not in production, according to Greg Panagos, spokesman for its owner, Transocean Ltd. in Houston. The rig was under contract to BP PLC. BP spokesman Darren Beaudo said all BP personnel were safe but he didn't know how many BP workers had been on the rig.

    Adrian Rose, vice president of Transocean, said crews were doing routine work before the explosion and there were no signs of trouble.

    Coast Guard environmental teams were on standby in Morgan City, La., to assess any environmental damage once the fire was out.

    According to Transocean's website, the Deepwater Horizon is 396 feet long and 256 feet wide. The semi-submersible rig was built in 2001 by Hyundai Heavy Industries Shipyard in South Korea. The site is known as the Macondo prospect, in 5,000 feet of water.

    The rig is designed to operate in water up to 8,000 feet deep and has a maximum drill depth of about 5.5 miles. It can accommodate a crew of up to 130.

    A semi-submersible rig is floated to a drilling site. It has pontoons and a column that submerge when flooded with seawater. The rig doesn't touch the sea floor, but sits low in the water, where it is moored by several large anchors.

    Last September, the Deepwater Horizon set a world deepwater record when it drilled down just over 35,000 feet at another BP site in the Gulf of Mexico, Panagos said.

    "It's one of the more advanced rigs out there," he said.

    Panagos did not know how much the rig cost to build, but said a similar rig today would run $600 million to $700 million.

    Workers typically spend two weeks on the rig at a time, followed by two weeks off. It is equipped with covered lifeboats with supplies to allow them to survive for extended periods if they must evacuate.

    Total offshore daily production in the Gulf of Mexico is 1.7 million barrels in federal waters; 6.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day is produced in those waters. There are about 35,000 workers offshore in the Gulf at any one time, according to MMS.

    Joe Hurt, a regional vice president for the International Association of Drilling Contractors, said working on offshore oil rigs is a dangerous job but has become safer in recent years thanks to enhanced training, improved safety systems and better maintenance.

    "In recent years, there's been a lot more money available and more money spent on training and safety," he said.

    Transocean has 14 rigs working in the Gulf and 140 worldwide. There are 42 deep water rigs either drilling or doing workovers — upgrades and maintenance — in depths of 1,000 feet or greater in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.

    Since 2001, there have been 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires and explosions in the Gulf, according to the agency, which did not break down the cause of the deaths, the severity of the injuries, or the size of the fires and explosions.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100421/...NsawNwcmludA--
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    Oil rig sinks in Gulf of Mexico; 11 still missing
    By Kevin Mcgill, Associated Press Writers 1 min ago




    NEW ORLEANS – Officials are saying that the 11 workers missing since an explosion on an oil rig off the Louisiana coast may have been unable to escape the rig when the blast occurred.

    Adrian Rose, vice president of Transocean, said Thursday that when some of the workers who survived were interviewed they said their missing colleagues may not have been able to evacuate in time. Rose says he is unable to confirm the reports.

    The platform burned for more than a day after a massive explosion Tuesday. It sank into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday.

    Crews have been searching by air and water for the 11 workers from the Deepwater Horizon, though one relative said family members have been told it's unlikely anyone survived.

    THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

    NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An oil platform that burned for more than a day after a massive explosion sank into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

    Crews searched by air and water for 11 workers still missing from the Deepwater Horizon, though one relative said family members have been told it's unlikely anyone survived Tuesday night's blast.

    Supply vessels had been shooting water into the rig try to control the flames enough to keep it afloat, but couldn't, Coast Guard Petty Officer Katherine McNamara said. The fire was finally out once the rig sank.

    Rescue crews have covered the 1,940-square-mile search area by air 12 times and by boat five times. The boats searched all night, hoping the missing workers might have been able to get to a covered lifeboat with supplies.

    Carolyn Kemp of Monterey, La., said her grandson, Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, was among the missing. She said he would have been on the drilling platform when it exploded.

    "They're assuming all those men who were on the platform are dead," Kemp said. "That's the last we've heard."

    Other relatives waited anxiously for hourly updates. Family members of one missing worker, Shane Roshto of Amite, Miss., filed a lawsuit in New Orleans on Thursday accusing the rig's owner of negligence. The suit said he was thrown overboard by the explosion and is feared dead, though it did not indicate how family members knew that was what happened.

    The suit names Transocean Ltd., which owns the rig, and oil giant BP, which contracted it. A Transocean spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment and BP wouldn't discuss the suit.

    The family of Dewey Revette, a 48-year-old from southeast Mississippi, said he was also among the missing. He worked as a driller on the rig and had been with the company for 29 years.

    "We're all just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring and hoping for good news. And praying about it," said Revette's 23-year-old daughter, Andrea Cochran.

    Transocean Ltd. spokesman Guy Cantwell said 111 workers who made it off the Deepwater Horizon safely after Tuesday night's blast were ashore Thursday, and four others were still on a boat that operates an underwater robot. A robot will eventually be used to stop the flow of oil or gas to the rig, cutting off the fire. He said officials have not decided when that will happen.

    Officials had previously said the environmental damage appeared minimal, but new challenges have arisen now that the platform has sunk.

    The well could be spilling up to 8,000 barrels of crude oil a day, McNamara said, and the rig carried 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel. She didn't know whether the crude oil was spilling into the Gulf.

    Coast Guard Petty Officer Ashley Butler said crews were prepared for the platform to sink.

    "There is equipment out there to help with the environment and the potential environmental impact," Butler said.

    Seventeen others hurt in the blast had been brought to shore Wednesday with burns, broken legs and smoke inhalation. Four were critically injured.

    A slow trek across the water brought most of the uninjured survivors to Port Fourchon, where they were checked by doctors before being brought to a hotel in suburban New Orleans to reunite with their relatives.

    One worker said he was awakened by alarms and scrambled to get on a life boat.

    "I've been working offshore 25 years and I've never seen anything like this before," said the man, who like others at the hotel declined to give his name.

    Stanley Murray of Monterey, La., was reunited with his son, Chad, an electrician aboard the rig who had ended his shift just before the explosion.

    "If he had been there five minutes later, he would have been burned up," Stanley Murray said.

    The rig was doing exploratory drilling about 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The federal Minerals Management Service said it had inspected the rig three times since it moved to the site in January and found no violations.

    The rig is 400 feet by 250 feet, roughly twice the size of a football field, according to Transocean's website. A column of boiling black smoke rose hundreds of feet over the Gulf of Mexico.

    Adrian Rose, vice president of Transocean, said the explosion appeared to be a blowout, in which natural gas or oil forces its way up a well pipe and smashes the equipment. But precisely what went wrong was under investigation.

    A total of 126 workers were aboard. Seventy-nine were Transocean workers, six were BP employees and 41 were contracted.

    The blast could be one of the nation's deadliest offshore drilling accidents of the past half-century.

    One of the deadliest was in 1964, when a catamaran-type drilling barge operated by Pan American Petroleum Corp. near Eugene Island, about 80 miles off Louisiana, suffered a blowout and explosion while drilling a well. Twenty-one crew members died. The deadliest offshore drilling explosion was in 1988 about 120 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, in which 167 men were killed.

    Rose said the Deepwater Horizon crew had drilled the well to its final depth, more than 18,000 feet, and was cementing the steel casing at the time of the explosion.

    "They did not have a lot of time to evacuate. This would have happened very rapidly," he said.

    According to Transocean's website, the rig was built in 2001 in South Korea and is designed to operate in water up to 8,000 feet deep, drill 5 1/2 miles down, and accommodate a crew of 130. It floats on pontoons and is moored to the sea floor by several large anchors.

    Workers typically spend two weeks on the rig at a time, followed by two weeks off. Offshore oil workers typically earn $40,000 to $60,000 a year — more if they have special skills.

    Working on offshore oil rigs is a dangerous job but has become safer in recent years thanks to improved training, safety systems and maintenance, said Joe Hurt, regional vice president for the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

    Since 2001, there have been 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires and explosions in the Gulf, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.
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    11 missing in oil rig blast may not have escaped
    By Kevin Mcgill, Associated Press Writer 11 mins ago

    NEW ORLEANS – Eleven workers missing from an offshore oil platform may not have escaped after a massive explosion, officials said Thursday.

    Crews continued to search by air and water for those missing from the Deepwater Horizon, which burned for nearly a day before sinking into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday.

    Adrian Rose, vice president of rig owner Transocean Ltd., said crew members who survived Tuesday's explosion indicated the missing may have been near the blast and unable to escape. Officials had hoped they might have been able to get to a covered lifeboat with supplies.

    The rig was doing exploratory drilling about 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Rescue crews have covered a 1,940-square-mile search area by air 12 times and by boat five times.

    Carolyn Kemp of Monterey, La., whose grandson, Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, was among the missing, said family members have been told it's unlikely anyone survived. Roy Kemp would have been on the drilling platform when it exploded.

    "They're assuming all those men who were on the platform are dead," Carolyn Kemp said. "That's the last we've heard."

    Other relatives waited anxiously for hourly updates. Family members of one missing worker, Shane Roshto of Amite, Miss., filed a lawsuit in New Orleans on Thursday accusing Transocean of negligence. The suit said he was thrown overboard by the explosion and is feared dead, though it did not indicate how family members knew that was what happened.

    The suit also names oil giant BP, which contracted the rig. A Transocean spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment and BP wouldn't discuss the suit.

    The family of Dewey Revette, a 48-year-old from southeast Mississippi, said he was also among the missing. He worked as a driller on the rig and had been with the company for 29 years.

    "We're all just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring and hoping for good news. And praying about it," said Revette's 23-year-old daughter, Andrea Cochran.

    Transocean Ltd. spokesman Guy Cantwell said 111 workers who made it off the Deepwater Horizon safely after Tuesday night's blast were ashore Thursday, and four others were still on a boat that operates an underwater robot.

    Seventeen others hurt in the blast had been brought to shore Wednesday with burns, broken legs and smoke inhalation. Four were critically injured.

    Officials had previously said the environmental damage appeared minimal, but new challenges have arisen now that the platform has sunk.

    The well could be spilling up to 8,000 barrels of crude oil a day, the Coast Guard said, and the rig carried 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel.

    Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said crews saw a one mile by five mile sheen of what appeared to be a crude oil mix on the surface of the water. She said there wasn't any evidence crude oil was coming out after the rig sank, but officials also aren't sure what's going on underwater. They have dispatched a vessel to check.

    BP said it has mobilized a flotilla of four aircraft that can spread chemicals to break up the oil and 32 vessels, including a big storage barge, that can suck more than 171,000 barrels of oil a day from the surface.

    The federal Minerals Management Service said it had inspected the rig three times since it moved to the site in January and found no violations.

    The rig is 400 feet by 250 feet, roughly twice the size of a football field, according to Transocean's website. A column of boiling black smoke rose hundreds of feet over the Gulf of Mexico.

    Rose, the Transocean vice president, said the explosion appeared to be a blowout, in which natural gas or oil forces its way up a well pipe and smashes the equipment. But precisely what went wrong was under investigation.

    One worker said he was awakened by alarms and scrambled to get on a life boat.

    "I've been working offshore 25 years and I've never seen anything like this before," said the man, who like others at a hotel where workers were taken after they reached land declined to give his name.

    Stanley Murray of Monterey, La., was reunited with his son, Chad, an electrician aboard the rig who had ended his shift just before the explosion.

    "If he had been there five minutes later, he would have been burned up," Stanley Murray said.

    A total of 126 workers were aboard. Seventy-nine were Transocean workers, six were BP employees and 41 were contracted.

    The blast could be one of the nation's deadliest offshore drilling accidents of the past half-century.

    One of the deadliest was in 1964, when a catamaran-type drilling barge operated by Pan American Petroleum Corp. near Eugene Island, about 80 miles off Louisiana, suffered a blowout and explosion while drilling a well. Twenty-one crew members died. The deadliest offshore drilling explosion was in 1988 about 120 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, in which 167 men were killed.

    Rose said the Deepwater Horizon crew had drilled the well to its final depth, more than 18,000 feet, and was cementing the steel casing at the time of the explosion.

    "They did not have a lot of time to evacuate. This would have happened very rapidly," he said.

    According to Transocean's website, the rig was built in 2001 in South Korea and is designed to operate in water up to 8,000 feet deep, drill 5 1/2 miles down, and accommodate a crew of 130. It floats on pontoons and is moored to the sea floor by several large anchors.

    Workers typically spend two weeks on the rig at a time, followed by two weeks off. Offshore oil workers typically earn $40,000 to $60,000 a year — more if they have special skills.

    Working on offshore oil rigs is a dangerous job but has become safer in recent years thanks to improved training, safety systems and maintenance, said Joe Hurt, regional vice president for the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

    Since 2001, there have been 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires and explosions in the Gulf, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.

    ___
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    Burning oil rig sinks, setting stage for big spill
    By Kevin Mcgill And Holbrook Mohr, Associated Press Writers 22 mins ago


    NEW ORLEANS – A deepwater oil platform that burned for more than a day after a massive explosion sank into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, creating the potential for a major spill as it underscored the slim chances that the 11 workers still missing survived.

    The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, which burned violently until the gulf itself extinguished the fire, could unleash more than 300,000 of gallons of crude a day into the water. The environmental hazards would be greatest if the spill were to reach the Louisiana coast, some 50 miles away.

    Crews searched by air and water for the missing workers, hoping they had managed to reach a lifeboat, but one relative said family members have been told it's unlikely any of the missing survived Tuesday night's blast. The Coast Guard found two lifeboats but no one was inside. More than 100 workers escaped the explosion and fire; four were critically injured.

    Carolyn Kemp of Monterey, La., said her grandson, Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, was among the missing. She said he would have been on the drilling platform when it exploded. "They're assuming all those men who were on the platform are dead," Kemp said. "That's the last we've heard."

    Jed Kersey, of Leesville, La., said his 33-year-old son, John, had finished his shift on the rig floor and was sleeping when the explosion occurred. He said his son told him that all 11 missing workers were on the rig floor at the time of the explosion. "He said it was like a war zone," said Jed Kersey, a former offshore oil worker.

    An alarm sounded and the electricity went out, sending John Kersey and other workers scurrying to a lifeboat that took them to a nearby service boat, his father said. "They waited for as many people as they could," Jed Kersey said. He added that his son wasn't ready to talk publicly about his experience.

    As the rig burned, supply vessels shot water into it to try to keep it afloat and avoid an oil spill, but there were additional explosions Thursday. Officials had previously said the environmental damage appeared minimal, but new challenges have arisen now that the platform has sunk.

    The well could be spilling up to 336,000 gallons of crude oil a day, Coast Guard Petty Officer Katherine McNamara said. She said she didn't know whether the crude oil was spilling into the gulf. The rig also carried 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel, but that would likely evaporate if the fire didn't consume it.

    Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said crews saw a 1-mile-by-5-mile rainbow sheen with a dark center of what appeared to be a crude oil mix on the surface of the water. She said there wasn't any evidence crude oil was coming out after the rig sank, but officials also aren't sure what's going on underwater. They have dispatched a vessel to check.

    The oil will do much less damage at sea than it would if it hits the shore, said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network. "If it gets landward, it could be a disaster in the making," Sarthou said.

    Doug Helton, incident operations coordinator for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's office of response and restoration, said the spill is not expected to come onshore in the next three to four days. "But if the winds were to change, it could come ashore more rapidly," he said.

    At the worst-case figure of 336,000 gallons a day, it would take more than a month for the amount of crude oil spilled to equal the 11 million gallons spilled from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

    The well will need to be capped off underwater. Coast Guard Petty Officer Ashley Butler said crews were prepared for the platform to sink and had the equipment at the site to limit the environmental damage.

    Oil giant BP, which contracted the rig, said it has mobilized four aircraft that can spread chemicals to break up the oil and 32 vessels, including a big storage barge, that can suck more than 171,000 barrels of oil a day from the surface.

    Crews searching for the missing workers, meanwhile, have covered the 1,940-square-mile search area by air 12 times and by boat five times. The boats searched all night.

    The family of Dewey Revette, a 48-year-old from southeast Mississippi, said he was also among the missing. He worked as a driller on the rig and had been with the company for 29 years. "We're all just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring and hoping for good news. And praying about it," said Revette's 23-year-old daughter, Andrea Cochran.

    Adrian Rose, vice president of rig owner Transocean Ltd., said Thursday some surviving workers said in company interviews that their missing colleagues may not have been able to evacuate in time. He said he was unable to confirm whether that was the case.

    Those who escaped did so mainly by getting on lifeboats that were lowered into the gulf, Rose said. Weekly emergency drills seemed to help, he said, adding that workers apparently stuck together as they fled the devastating blast. "There are a number of uncorroborated stories, a lot of them really quite heroic stories of how people looked after each other. There was very little panic," Rose said.

    Coast Guard Petty Officer Kevin Fernandez was the flight mechanic on a helicopter that was the first to respond, about 15 minutes after the explosion. Fernandez said he could see the fire from 80 miles away, with flames rising about 500 feet. "I was kind of expecting worse" in terms of fatalities, he said. But all the survivors already had made their way from the lifeboats into a supply boat. Fernandez and his crew plucked two critically injured survivors to a nearby rig that had a paramedic on board.

    Family members of two missing workers filed separate lawsuits Thursday accusing Transocean and BP of negligence. Both companies declined to comment about legal action against them after the first suit was filed.

    The U.S. Minerals Management Service, which regulates oil rigs, conducted three routine inspections of the Deepwater Horizon this year — in February, March and on April 1 — and found no violations, MMS spokeswoman Eileen Angelico said.

    The rig was doing exploratory drilling about 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana when the explosion and fire occurred, sending a column of boiling black smoke hundreds of feet over the gulf.

    Rose has said the explosion appeared to be a blowout, in which natural gas or oil forces its way up a well pipe and smashes the equipment. Precisely what went wrong is under investigation.

    Transocean Ltd. spokesman Guy Cantwell said 111 workers who made it off the Deepwater Horizon safely after the blast were ashore Thursday, and four others were still on a boat that operates an underwater robot. A robot will eventually be used to stop the flow of oil to the rig. He said officials have not decided when that will happen.

    Seventeen workers brought to shore Wednesday suffered burns, broken legs and smoke inhalation. Four were critically injured.

    Rose said the crew had drilled the well to its final depth, more than 18,000 feet, and was cementing the steel casing at the time of the explosion. They had little time to evacuate, he said.

    The explosion is not expected to have a major impact on the oil industry. There are 90 rigs in the offshore Gulf of Mexico either drilling wells or performing work on existing wells, according to the MMS. "It's a personal tragedy," Arthur Weglein, director of the Mission Oriented Seismic Research program at the University of Houston. "Besides that, it's just one rig less in the deep water."

    The explosion came less than a month after President Barack Obama's decision to open portions of the East Coast to oil and gas exploration, and opponents of the move have seized on the blast as a reason to reverse course. "The bottom line is that when you drill for oil, there is always a risk that not only puts lives on the line, but a risk that puts miles of coastline and the economy on the line as well," Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, both New Jersey Democrats, said in a statement.

    Working on offshore oil rigs is a dangerous job but has become safer in recent years thanks to improved training, safety systems and maintenance, said Joe Hurt, regional vice president for the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

    Since 2001, there have been 69 offshore deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires and explosions in the gulf, according to the Minerals Management Service. Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O'Berry said accidents are rare given that 30,000 people work on rigs there every day. "They're highly trained. They know the dangers," O'Berry said. "The safety precautions they take are extreme. A testament to that is of the 126, 115 are home today with their families."

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100423/...5pbmdvaWxyaQ--
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    Amid search for Deepwater Horizon oil rig survivors: What happened?
    By Patrik Jonsson Thu Apr 22, 12:13 pm ET


    Atlanta – The Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig is one of the most advanced engineering feats in the world, having drilled deeper than any other waterborne platform. But when the massive fifth-generation rig exploded late Tuesday night, injuring 17 workers and leaving 11 still missing, the accident proved even the most modern deepwater platforms are not immune to an age-old danger of tapping the earth: what roughnecks call, simply, blowout.

    As Coast Guard planes and helicopters resumed the search for survivors Thursday morning, rescued rig hands arriving in Kenner, La., said that everything happened very fast. The Houston Chronicle quoted an unidentified survivor as saying, “It blew out and we had like zero time from the time the alarm went. It was all in flames.”

    The Deepwater Horizon is on the cusp of global oil exploration, which is venturing ever further out to sea and deeper into the earth's crust.

    IN PICTURES: Louisiana oil rig explosion

    The rig is in essence a giant flexible drill bit that can poke and prod for deposits up to 32,000 feet deep. It is run by roughnecks, roustabouts, tool pushers, directional drillers, and mud men, all directed by a "company man," employed, in this case, by BP, which is leasing the rig from Geneva-based Transocean.

    The semi-submersible rig had anchored 41 miles off Louisiana, completing a concrete casing for a well drilled to 18,000 feet in an area called the Macondo Prospect.

    The company acknowledged that something happened in the hole, evidenced by the fact that the fire was being fueled by escaping oil or gas. “There was undoubtedly some abnormal pressure buildup,” Transocean safety director Adrian Rose said, according to Business Week. Rose gave no other clues about why the rig blew or why the pressure couldn't be controlled.

    But former oil rig mud engineer Rusty Galloway in Lafayette, La., explains one possible cause. So-called mud hands on the drill floor mix chemicals into a stream of mud that backstops the gas or oil while allowing the bit to continue to turn its clockwise rotation into the earth.

    "Basically, what can happen is you've got no weight or not enough weight to keep gas from coming out, from coming free," says Mr. Galloway.

    The blowout theory surprised at least one industry expert. Rigs have complex safeguards to keep gas from escaping in case of an accident, including mechanisms that can physically shear the pipe to stop the flow.

    "As soon as an incident takes place, a number of valves both underwater and on the rig will shut down the flow of hydrocarbons," says Jorge Pinon, former president of Amoco Latin America. "It's the same mechanism where if you hit a gas pump with your car, a valve will close the pipe that goes into the underground gasoline storage tank."

    As the Coast Guard and the federal Minerals Management Service get ready to start an official investigation into the cause, survivors are hailing the response of the rig managers. Survivor Jim Ingram told the Times Picayune that weekly safety drills paid off as workers filed into life rafts that were lowered to the water.

    "The standards out there are extremely high, when it comes to safety," said Mr. Ingram.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100422/ts_csm/296222_1
    Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

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    Gulf towns pray for news from Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion
    By Patrik Jonsson Wed Apr 21, 7:48 pm ET



    Atlanta – In the roughneck communities of coastal Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, families gathered and prayed Wednesday amid conflicting news reports about the plight of 11 oil rig workers missing after the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion Tuesday night.

    Dora Ezell prayed, too, although hers had already been answered. Her husband, Miles Richard Ezell, a career rig worker on the state-of-the-art deepwater drilling platform, had earlier in the day been listed among the missing, but had been located in good shape.

    "Definitely people need prayers," says Ms. Ezell, reached at her Hattiesburg, Miss., home on Wednesday. "The rig has received excellence awards, so I don't know what could have happened. It's always been a very, very safe environment. I just thank God I have a husband."

    The small bayou towns of America's oil belt have a precarious relationship with the oil fields. Jobs ranging from roustabouts to roughnecks, galley hands to mud hands offer a lot of money, often for people with high school degrees or less. The rewards and time off is great, but the danger is always in the background, says Lafayette, La., lawyer Rusty Galloway, a former rig worker.

    "They come from small towns where the oil field is their life," says Mr. Galloway. "The fears that these people have, it's life and death out there. You risk your life for a lot of money."

    The first news was wrongNews from officials in Plaquemines Parish first indicated that a lifeboat had been sighted after the 10 p.m. Tuesday explosion and then that the 11 workers were "safe and sound." But the Coast Guard quickly dismissed that report, indicating that they'd neither heard of a lifeboat nor located the 11 missing crew members. The confusion could have come about from a missing or partial crew manifest, says Galloway.

    Coast Guard crews in cutters, helicopters, and an airplane expanded their search cordon Wednesday as they remained "optimistic that we can find them," as Petty Officer Mike Blakney told the Los Angeles Times.

    But at a press conference later in the day, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said, "We have no idea where the 11 unaccounted-for personnel are."

    The majority of the rig workers are veteran third-party contractors while 26 are directly employed by Houston-based Transocean, which built and owns the rig. Six others are employed by BP, which is leasing the rig at about $500,000 a day to explore oil deposits lying as deep as 30,000 feet below the Gulf's floor.

    Drilling miles below the Gulf floorThe crew had been involved in some of the most dramatic drilling ever done. The Deepwater Horizon last year broke the world record drill depth of 32,000 feet as it uncovered vast new oil reserves in an area known as Tiber.

    "The new technology on this rig is state of the art, and they don't let a bunch of rookies operate this equipment," says Jorge Pinon, former president of Amoco Latin America. "These are experienced professionals who know what they're doing."

    Much of rig work is "hurry up and wait," Galloway says, but "things also happen fast when you're working offshore."

    It's not yet clear what caused the explosion. The fire is apparently burning on-board fuel, but has proved stubborn. Along with rescuers, teams of environmental disaster experts are also on scene, although the damage isn't expected to be widespread.

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100421/ts_csm/296139_1
    Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

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    my dad used to complain about their shortcuts.

    he worked for BP and he did work on the drill bits,,,,,, he said they always were shortcutting on their parts and used some of them longer than they were allowed to cut back on costs......... and those inspections , were a joke , he said most of the rigs were bombs waiting to go off,,,,,,,,
    my dad died over ten years ago of cancer that we thought he got being exposed to chemicals on that rigg........ they are so lax there. he got splashed with chemicals all time when he was cleaning those drills casue they were always in a hurry to pump,,,,,,,,,,,,
    this is sad and all those men probley didnt have a chance...........
    my son joshua when he was 18 now deceased in 2002 , always remembered always loved

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    Cook on La. oil rig that exploded recalls escape
    [/b]By Kevin Mcgill, Associated Press Writer Tue Apr 27, 7:25 am ET

    NEW ORLEANS – Oleander Benton, a cook on an oil rig that exploded off the Louisiana coast, was sitting at a laundry room table with a friend when the lights went out. Then, there was the blast.

    The Deepwater Horizon platform shuddered, debris fell from the ceiling and Benton hit the floor, as she had been trained to do. She scrambled through hallways littered with rubble, following a man in a white T-shirt. "I could not see anything but that man. He just kept on saying 'Come this way, come that way.' It was like he was coaching me to my lifeboat, because I couldn't see," she said.

    She made it across the sweltering, mud-caked deck to a lifeboat — one of 115 people to safely escape the platform after the explosion a week ago. Eleven others are missing and presumed dead.

    Benton, 52, recalled her tale as crews used a remote sub to try to shut off an underwater oil well that's gushing 42,000 gallons a day from the site of the wrecked drilling platform. If crews cannot stop the leak quickly, they might need to drill another well to redirect the oil, a process that could take about two months while oil washes up along a broad stretch of shore, from the white-sand beaches of Florida's Panhandle to the swamps of Louisiana.

    The oil, which could reach shore in as little as three days, is escaping from two leaks in a drilling pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface.

    Nightmares have haunted Benton since the explosion April 20. She remembers following the man who knew his way around the platform, which is about the size of two football fields. She stumbled as he led her to the deck. "Mud was everywhere ... This was mud that was shooting up from the well. It was oily mud, real oily," she said.

    The fire made the already muggy night almost unbearable. Benton's name was checked off as she boarded a lifeboat, then there was a roll call to make sure everyone was accounted for. "It looked like it was taking forever to get that boat in the water," she said, but "I think that's just because I was so anxious to go."

    Benton didn't want to discuss her injuries, other than to say that she was bruised. Her attorney, Stephen Rue, said she was having trouble sleeping and is suffering symptoms of post traumatic stress syndrome. She has not yet filed a lawsuit in the case.

    As of Tuesday morning, oil that leaked from the rig site was spread over an area about 48 miles long and 80 miles wide at its widest. The borders of the spill were uneven, making it difficult to calculate how many square miles are covered, Coast Guard Petty Officer Erik Swanson said. "Right now, the weather's in our favor," Swanson said, explaining that the wind was blowing the oil away from shore Tuesday. But Swanson said the winds could shift later in the week and there was concern about oil reaching the shore.

    So far, skimming vessels had collected more than 48,000 gallons of oily water, Swanson said. "Our goal is to fight this thing as far offshore as possible," he said.

    The rig was owned by Transocean Ltd. and operated by BP PLC.

    Crews used robot submarines to activate valves in hopes of stopping the leaks, but they may not know until Tuesday if that strategy will work. BP also mobilized two rigs to drill a relief well if needed. Such a well could help redirect the oil, though it could also take weeks to complete, especially at that depth.

    BP plans to collect leaking oil on the ocean bottom by lowering a large dome to capture the oil and then pumping it through pipes and hoses into a vessel on the surface, said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP Exploration and Production.

    It could take up to a month to get the equipment in place. "That system has been deployed in shallower water, but it has never been deployed at 5,000 feet of water, so we have to be careful," he said.

    The spill, moving slowly north and spreading east and west, was about 30 miles from the Chandeleur Islands off the Louisiana coast. The Coast Guard said kinks in the pipe were helping stem the flow of oil.

    From the air Monday afternoon, the oil spill reached as far as the eye could see. There was little evidence of a major cleanup, with only a handful of vessels near the site of the leak. The oil sheen was a shiny light blue color, translucent and blending with the water, but a distinct edge between the oil slick and the sea could be seen for miles.

    George Crozier, oceanographer and executive director at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, said he was studying wind and ocean currents driving the oil.

    He said Pensacola, Fla., is probably the eastern edge of the threatened area, though no one really knows what the effects will be. "We've never seen anything like this magnitude," he said. "The problems are going to be on the beaches themselves. That's where it will be really visible."

    Concern Monday focused on the Chandeleur and Breton barrier islands in Louisiana, where thousands of birds are nesting. "It's already a fragile system. It would be devastating to see anything happen to that system," said Mark Kulp, a University of New Orleans geologist.

    Oil makes it difficult for birds to fly or float on the water's surface. Plant life can also suffer serious harm. Whales have been spotted near the oil spill, though they did not seem to be in any distress.

    The spill also threatened oyster beds in Breton Sound on the eastern side of the Mississippi River. Harvesters could only watch and wait.

    "That's our main oyster-producing area," said John Tesvich, a fourth-generation oyster farmer with Port Sulphur Fisheries Co. His company has about 4,000 acres of oyster grounds that could be affected if the spill worsens. "Trying to move crops would be totally speculative," Tesvich said. "You wouldn't know where to move a crop. You might be moving a crop to a place that's even worse."

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100427/...NsawNwcmludA--
    Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

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