Boing Boing Staging

4 dead and 16 injured in Mexico oil rig fire, no word yet on how much fuel spilled

Xeni Jardin
Reuters


Reuters

Looks like Deepwater Horizon all over again. Mexico’s state-controlled oil company Pemex reports that at least four are dead following an explosion and fire on an oil platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche, in the south of the Gulf of Mexico, early today.

Some 300 workers were evacuated, and as many as 45 workers were injured in the blaze, which broke out overnight on the Abkatun Permanente platform in the Bay of Campeche. The oil field beneath the platform produced approximately 12% of Mexico’s oil in 2013.

Eight firefighting boats were combatting the blaze, and a contractor for Mexican oil services company Cotemar was among the dead, according to Pemex.

A survivor of the blaze on the Abkatun Permanente platform in the Campeche Sound told the New York Times that workers “jumped into the sea out of desperation and panic.”

“There was nothing you could do but run,” said Roger Arias Sanchez, an employee of Petroleos Mexicanos’ contractor Cotemar who escaped the burning platform in an evacuation boat. He spoke in Ciudad del Carmen in Campeche state, where most of the injured and evacuated workers were taken.

Pemex’s media office told the Times it was unclear if a significant amount of oil spilled from the shallow-water Abkatun Permanente platform, “which largely serves to separate gas, oil and other petroleum products, and pump them to refineries onshore.”

Pemex has suffered a number of accidents in recent years. Some 37 people were killed in a blast at the company’s Mexico City headquarters in 2013, and another 26 were killed at a fire in a Pemex natural gas facility in September 2012.

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