This morning the New York Times published an article entitled After Another Close Call, Transocean Changed Rules that points to Transocean’s critical changes to its own policies for handling oil well safety just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon incident.
Four months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, another oil rig owned by the same company faced a strikingly similar emergency in the North Sea that was contained only because its safety equipment functioned properly, according to confidential internal documents.
In response to the near disaster, Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, ordered critical changes to its own policies for handling oil well safety. But it is not clear whether those policy changes reached the Deepwater Horizon crew before that rig exploded.
Like the disaster in the gulf, the North Sea emergency involved dangerous pressure levels, a failure to detect those pressures in time, a risky plan for sealing the well and an emergency order for the crew to evacuate to lifeboats. Full Story
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Additional sections of a bridge across the Elbe River in the East German town of Dresden collapsed over the weekend, again prompting a 72 hour halt to shipping.
A crew member on a Singapore-registered chemical tanker was injured due to an "unauthorised boarding" of the vessel on Friday and is being medically evacuated, Singapore's port authority said.
Russian authorities are tightening measures at ports, including employing divers to inspect the underside of vessels, in response to rising threats to merchant shipping and infrastructure, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
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