A total of ten vessels were involved in fighting Wednesday’s fatal fire in the southern Gulf of Mexico.
The fire at Pemex’s Abkatun A- Permanente processing platform in the Bay of Campeche has been extinguished as the company begins to assess the damage.
Wednesday’s explosion and fire claimed the lives of four people and injured 16 others. An update on Thursday from Pemex said that in total 45 workers received some sort of medical care, including two who are being treated for serious injuries at a hospital in Ciudad del Carmen. The total number of workers evacuated from the platform stands at 302.
The deceased include one Pemex employee, one contractor from the oil services company Cotemar, and two workers that were not identified as of Wednesday.
Following the explosion and fire early Wednesday morning, the facility was disconnected from the pipelines that fed into the platform, minimizing extent of the fire and any oil spill to what was remaining in the pipeline. What oil did spill into the sea was limited to runoff and was skimmed up by response vessels, Pemex said.
Pemex said that the incident will have minimal impact on production because the platform is used for processing, not production. Because of this, Pemex will redirect crude from nearby wells to other processing facilities.
The cause of the accident is being investigated by the National Agency of Industrial Safety and Environmental Protection Sector Hydrocarbons (ASEA). Pemex said previously that the started in the dewatering and pumping area of the platform.
The platform is part of the Abkatun-Pol-Chuc complex, which produced 251,000 barrels of crude and 405 million cubic feet of gas a day from March 1-29, according to weekly production reports from Pemex’s Exploration and Production unit obtained by Bloomberg. The complex is between the states of Campeche and Tabasco, about 82 miles northeast of the port of Dos Bocas.
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