NEW ORLEANS — A deep-water oil platform that exploded Tuesday night and burned for more than a day sank into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, creating the potential for an oil spill as the chances of finding 11 missing workers alive dimmed.
The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, which burned until the Gulf’s waters extinguished the flames, has raised fears that oil is spilling into the Gulf, though officials say they aren’t sure what’s going on underwater and have dispatched a vessel to check.
Crews searched by air and water for the missing workers, hoping that they had managed to reach a lifeboat,but one relative said family members have been told that 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.”
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. The rig also carried 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel, but that would likely evaporate if the fire didn’t consume it, officials said.
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 crudeoil mix on the surface of the water. She said Thursday that there wasn’t any evidence that crude oil was coming out after the rig sank.
An oil spill would 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 reach shore in the next three to four days. “But if the winds were to change, it could come ashore more rapidly,” he said.
With 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 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.
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.
“We are determined to do everything in our power to contain this oil spill,” said Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive. “There should be no doubt of our resolve to limit the escape of oil and protect the marine and coastal environments.”
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 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 that some surviving workers related 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.
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, agency spokesman 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 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. But precisely what went wrong was under investigation.
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 workers taken to shore Wednesday suffered burns, broken legs and smoke inhalation. Four were critically injured.
Most of the uninjured survivors made a slow trip across the water to Port Fourchon, where they were checked by doctors before being moved to a hotel in suburban New Orleans to reunite with their relatives.
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 in the Gulf every day.
Transocean had leased the rig to BP for use on an 18,000-foot well.
Energy companies are delving 10 times deeper than a decade ago in the search for untapped reservoirs of oil and gas. The threat of pressures urges, or blowouts, that can smash steel equipment and create gushing columns of fire increases as drillers probe ever deeper into layers of rock, said Neal Dingmann, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities.
“Offshore drilling has always been high-risk, but when you talk about wells going to these kinds of depths, the risks go even higher,” Dingmann said in a telephone interview from Houston. “Once you go anywhere below 10,000 feet, all of a sudden the pressure and temperature become a lot more difficult to contend with.”
President Barack Obama last month proposed expanding offshore drilling in some U.S. coastal areas.
“This accident happened at exactly the wrong time,” said Jud Bailey, a Houston-based analyst for Jefferies & Co. “The offshore industry has a good safety record, but this is something environmentalists can grab onto and say, ‘See, this is why you shouldn’t drill.’” Information for this article was contributed by Kevin McGill, Holbrook Mohr, Mike Kunzelman, Cain Burdeau, Janet McConnaughey, Alan Sayre, Chris Kahn and Sofia Mannos of The Associated Press; by Joe Carroll, Jim Polson, Katarzyna Klimasinska and Jessica Resnick-Ault of Bloomberg News and by Campbell Robertson, Clifford Krauss, Jordan Flaherty and Liz Robbins of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/23/2010