Azerbaijan: 29 staff nonetheless lacking from offshore oil platform that

SOCAR eventually confirmed people were missing, but put the number at 30.

Four workers were killed and one went missing after a fire broke out one of SOCAR’s platforms in the Caspian Sea in October 2014; overall, fourteen died on the company’s offshore rigs that year.

The storm has been hampering rescue efforts and the company was still working to extinguish the blaze as of Monday, the Wall Street Journal said.

The platform, which was built in 1984, produced 900 metric tons of oil a day, the equivalent of 6,700 barrels, said Xosbaxt Yusifzada, the company’s first vice-president.

The platform caught fire when an underwater gas pipeline was damaged in the heavy seas.

SOCAR is a wholly state-owned national oil company headquartered in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku.

“Fire did not affect BP’s work as this platform is far away from our platforms”, Tamam Bayatly, a spokeswoman for BP Azerbaijan, told Reuters.

DAKAR, Senegal – A triple suicide bombing at a market on an island in Lake Chad on Saturday killed at least 27 people and injured 90 others, said security officials. “As a result of the powerful storm may be missing workers will be found in their territories”, it said.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday after talks in Baku with Azerbaijan’s President İlham Aliyev that the TANAP gas project could be completed before its original target, 2018.

“Despite bad weather conditions, 32 people could be saved”, Aliyev said. As of this publishing, the SOCAR oil workers were still missing.

The incident in the Caspian Sea yesterday happened on Platform 10 on the Guneshli field offshore Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan appealed to the coast guards of neighboring Turkmenistan and Iran to help retrieve the bodies, he said.