One person was killed and 30 oil workers were missing on Saturday after the rig they were working on in the Caspian Sea was engulfed by a fire, Azerbaijan’s state energy firm, State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) said.
Another 32 people were rescued, the company said on its Web site, listing the names of 62 workers caught up in the disaster.
The office of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said one person had died in the blaze that broke out on Friday, with the rescue operation to retrieve the other staff hampered by a violent storm.
The storm had on Friday damaged a gas line on platform No. 10 in the deepwater Guneshli section of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli offshore oil field, causing the fire, SOCAR said in a statement.
Spectacular footage on Azerbaijani TV showed the platform engulfed in flames in the middle of a raging storm in the Caspian Sea.
“Despite bad weather conditions, 32 people could be saved,” Aliyev said. “According to preliminary information, one person died. At this time, rescue operations continue.”
Azerbaijan’s state prosecutor’s office said the person had died on Friday night when the lifeboat he was in with three others was hit by heavy winds.
Workers on the rig had taken refuge in lifeboats that had been lowered to 10m above the water, it said in a statement.
Prosecutors have opened an inquiry into possible “breaches of fire safety regulations,” it added.
The oil rig’s stricken gas line had been damaged at 5:40pm on Friday by winds of up to 144kph, the prosecution service said.
Aliyev on Saturday signed a decree announcing the creation of a “government commission led by [Azerbaijani] Prime Minister Artur Rasizade” to coordinate the handling of the incident.
A mainly Muslim country of 9 million wedged between Russia and Iran, Azerbaijan is a key partner in projects to deliver Caspian Sea energy reserves to the West through pipelines to Turkey, bypassing Russia.
The Guneshli deposits were discovered in 1981 in the south Caspian Sea, about 90km east of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.
In 1994, the government of Azerbaijan signed an agreement to develop the vast Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field with a consortium of foreign companies, including Britain’s BP, Norway’s Statoil and US oil and gas giants Chevron and Exxonmobil.
The deepwater Guneshli section of the project began oil production in 2008. Platform No. 10 is operated solely by SOCAR.
There have been a number of fatal incidents on offshore oil rigs in recent years.
In 2011, a drilling platform sank in a storm off Russia’s far eastern coast, killing 53 people.
In 2010, an explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
The deadliest incident in recent decades occurred in the North Sea in 1988, when the Piper Alpha oil platform operated by the US-based Occidental Petroleum exploded, killing 167 people.
Pakistani police yesterday said a father shot dead his daughter after she refused to delete her TikTok account. In the Muslim-majority country, women can be subjected to violence by family members for not following strict rules on how to behave in public, including in online spaces. “The girl’s father had asked her to delete her TikTok account. On refusal, he killed her,” a police spokesperson said. Investigators said the father killed his 16-year-old daughter on Tuesday “for honor,” the police report said. The man was subsequently arrested. The girl’s family initially tried to “portray the murder as a suicide” said police in
The military is to begin conscripting civilians next year, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said yesterday, citing rising tensions with Thailand as the reason for activating a long-dormant mandatory enlistment law. The Cambodian parliament in 2006 approved a law that would require all Cambodians aged 18 to 30 to serve in the military for 18 months, although it has never been enforced. Relations with Thailand have been tense since May, when a long-standing territorial dispute boiled over into cross-border clashes, killing one Cambodian soldier. “This episode of confrontation is a lesson for us and is an opportunity for us to review, assess and
The Russian minister of foreign affairs warned the US, South Korea and Japan against forming a security partnership targeting North Korea as he visited the ally country for talks on further solidifying their booming military and other cooperation. Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday in Wonsan City, North Korea, where he met North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un and conveyed greetings from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kim during the meeting reaffirmed his government’s commitment to “unconditionally support and encourage all measures” taken by Russia in its conflict with Ukraine. Pyongyang and Moscow share identical views on “all strategic issues in
‘FALSE NARRATIVE’: China and the Solomon Islands inked a secretive security pact in 2022, which is believed to be a prelude to building a Chinese base, which Beijing denied The Australian government yesterday said it expects China to spy on major military drills it is conducting with the US and other allies. It also renewed a charge — denounced by Beijing as a “false narrative” — that China wants to establish a military base in the South Pacific. The comments by a government minister came as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a six-day visit to China to bolster recently repaired trade ties. More than 30,000 military personnel from 19 nations are set to join in the annual Talisman Sabre exercises from yesterday across Australia and Papua New Guinea. “The Chinese military have
RSS