Drill, Baby, Drill
The BBC reports on the Oil rig blaze off Louisiana leaves at least 11 missing
US coast guards are searching the Gulf of Mexico for at least 11 oil workers missing after an explosion and fire on a drilling platform.
The rig was still burning hours after the blast on Tuesday night, 52 miles (84km) south-east of the Louisiana port of Venice.
…Deepwater Horizon, built in 2001 by South Korea’s Hyundai, is 396ft (120m) long and 256ft (78m) wide, according to the company’s website.
It was working on a part of the block known as the Macondo prospect, in 5,000ft (1.5km) of water.
On its website, Transocean describes itself as the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, with more than 50 years’ experience “with the highest specification rigs” and 18,000 employees.
This was a drilling rig and they were capping the well off after finding oil when something went terribly wrong. In addition to looking for the 11 missing workers, a company is using a remote controlled submersible to attempt to cap the well head and stop the flow of oil that is fueling the huge fire. There will be a spill that the Coast Guard hopes to contain after the fire is finally out.
Such accidents are rare, but they obviously happen, even when the people involved are experienced and have relatively new equipment. This is one of the reasons people along the Florida coast don’t want drilling operations off their snow-white beaches.
Local people are waiting for the list of names because some of the off-shore workers are from this area.
2 comments
(sigh…)
Spill, baby, spill.
I’m as guilty as the next coastal resident when it comes to the amount of work I’ve done for the “awl bidness.” Hell, I’ve even written change management s/w for offshore platforms, allowing visual mock-ups of what they will look like when those six pieces of new equipment replace those two pieces of old equipment… all connected to the safety procedures for installing/deinstalling the equipment. It’s not that they don’t try to get it right… it’s that it goes wrong just often enough to assure several disasters a year.
There has to be a better way to obtain energy. And there have to be ways of using less of it. Drilling offshore is just a bad idea, even with precautions duly taken.
Working under a mile of water is inherently dangerous, no matter what kind of precautions you take. One of my former neighbors was a pararescue diver in the Air Force and got out to do underwater construction on oil platforms. The thing he hated most was spending so much more time in the decompression chamber than actually working because there wasn’t enough room to exercise and stay in shape for the actual job, in his case specialty welding. You need to be in excellent shape just to breathe at the depths he worked in because of the pressure.