Azerbaijan mourns following deadly rig fire

Rescuers continue to search for 29 missing oil platform workers who had evacuated when an offshore rig in the Caspian Sea caught fire. Two workers have been confirmed killed in the mishap.

Deutsche Welle, 6 Dec 2015

Efforts to locate the missing offshore oil workers continued Sunday, two days after high winds damaged a gas line and caused a fire to break out on the No. 10 platform in the Caspian Sea.

Rescuers evacuated 33 people from the deepwater platform in the Guneshli offshore field, where they had been hanging in lifeboats 10 meters (35 feet) above the stormy sea.

The platform is owned and operated by SOCAR, the state energy company. In a joint statement with the emergency ministry it said two bodies have been recovered.

That's far fewer than the 32 people that an independent watchdog has claimed had died in the accident. The Azeri Press Agency reported there were 63 workers on the platform when the fire started Friday, but SOCAR has so far not released precise figures.

Inquiry opened

A still image from video footage shows
 the burning platform on December 5,
2015.

There were also indications that safety regulations had been violated, a judicial spokesman told the DPA news agency. A presidential commission was appointed Saturday to oversee the investigation into the incident.

Meanwhile, the president's office has announced that Sunday would be a day of national mourning for the lives lost.

"Flags will be at half-staff in Azerbaijan as well as its diplomatic missions in other countries," an unnamed government official told the AFP news agency. "Entertainment events and television concert program have been canceled.”

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

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.

jar/sms (AFP, dpa)