Rescue workers searched Louisiana's Gulf Coast all day Wednesday after an offshore drilling platform exploded and left 11 workers missing. The 400 x 250 ft rig known as Deepwater Horizon and owned by Transocean, Ltd had 126 workers on the platform at the time of the explosion. Most of the workers were believed to have safely escaped the blast; however, 11 are still said to be missing and 7 are badly injured.
At the time of the explosion, Deepwater Horizon, currently under contract with oil giant BP, was not in production but doing exploratory drilling. It is not clear how many BPO workers were on the rig, nor what exactly caused the explosion.
According to Ted Bourgoyne, a retired Louisiana State University professor of petroleum engineering, the explosion was probably caused by a mixture of natural gas and oil and seeped through the well combining with an ignition source of some kind. Modern day rigs have numerous defenses to prevent something of this magnitude. Such as weighting the fluids used in drilling with barium sulfite to prevent gas from traveling up the well. There are also alarms built in to alert workers of gas, and machinery is now built to prevent sparking. However, in the case such as this, it probably was not one thing, but a series of things that caused that accident.
The rig was originally designed in 2001 to operate in depths up to 8000ft deep and drill 5.5 miles down. The crew had drilled the well to its final depth (18,000 ft) and was cementing the steel casing at the time of the explosion.
Working on offshore oil rigs is an extremely dangerous job but thanks to improved training and safety systems and maintenance the job has become safer.
