Azerbaijan: Many missing in fire on oil platform

A major fire has broken out on an offshore oil platform in Azerbaijan’s waters.

“The fire in the gas pipeline has not been completely extinguished and it has not been ruled out that it could spread to oil and gas wells near the platform”, it stated.

The head of Azerbaijan’s Oil Workers’ Right Protection Committee, Mirvari Gakhramanly, said on December 5 that 32 workers were killed and 42 were rescued.

The company said late on Friday that there had been a fire at a platform after heavy seas damaged a subsea gas line.

However, the office of President Ilham Aliyev referred in a brief statement to “numerous deaths” and declared a day of mourning in solidarity with the “families of those killed”. A search-and-rescue operation was underway, it added.

That’s far fewer than the 32 people that an independent watchdog has claimed had died in the accident. A presidential commission was appointed Saturday to oversee the investigation into the incident.

The Guneshli deposits were discovered in 1981 in the south Caspian Sea, some 90 kilometres (55 miles) east of the Azeri capital Baku.

The deepwater Guneshli section of the project began oil production in 2008.

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.

The numbers were not immediately confirmed by SOCAR.

It is still not clear how many people worked on the rig.