Six more bodies found after Azeri oil platform fire

BAKU – Reuters

REUTERS photo

The bodies of six oil workers missing from an Azeri oil platform in the Caspian Sea that caught fire on Dec. 4 have been found, the state energy company SOCAR has said.

It said Dec. 8 that a helicopter search for the other missing would continue at daybreak. Out of the 62 people who were on the Guneshli oil rig when the fire started, one was confirmed dead on Dec. 6 and 33 were rescued. 

Efforts were also continuing to try to put the fire out. “As of now, at least one well is on fire,” said Balamirza Alirahimov, chief engineer at Azneft, SOCAR’s production union. 

The fire started on Dec. 4 after a storm caused some of the platform’s production equipment to collapse, damaging a natural gas pipeline. 

The platform had daily production of 920 tonnes of oil and 1.08 million cubic metres of gas. But it is also a transit point for about 60 percent of SOCAR’s oil production, most of it from other fields, which can for now no longer be pumped to shore. 

The British oil major BP, which operates a number of fields in the Caspian, said on Dec. 7 its operations in Azerbaijan were not affected by the outage. 

SOCAR also said the search had stopped for three workers who were swept into the sea in an accident on another oil platform on Dec. 4.