Venezuelan natural gas platform sinks, Chavez announces

[dipsydoodle]

Source: BBC News

A gas platform has sunk in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela, but the energy minister says it poses no risk to the environment.

President Hugo Chavez announced the incident via his account on the social networking site Twitter.

He said all 95 workers were evacuated from the Aban Pearl platform before it sank in the early hours of Thursday.

The rig's owners, Aban Offshore Ltd, said it was not clear what had happened but that the platform had been listing.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8679981.stm

[lunatica]

1. Nothing to look at here. Move along

Just a little incident. Nothing to worry about.

[troubledamerican]

13. Quite an apt moniker you have there.

[RedCloud]

2. Quick spin this to evil. It's Chávez and no workers died!

Surely our free market system cares more about the lives of its workers and their beautiful environment.

[Ikonoklast]

3. It's a socialist platform, so it's ok.

See, there's a difference when capitalists rape the environment.

[happygoluckytoyou]

4. please ignore the platform sinking behind the curtain.... shhh.... no damage.... shiny thing...

FOX NEWS HEADLINES...... PARIS HILTON GETS NEW PAIR OF SHOES

[Kelvin Mace]

5. Well, here's a thought

It will be awfully hard to hide an oil spill from the rest of the world. However, if their is no spill that would seem to indicate that Venezuela's safety precautions are better than our, and since no one died, that would re-enforce that view.

Just my two cents...

[Xithras]

7. Because it's a gas well, there's a much smaller chance of enviro damage anyway.

One nice thing about natural gas is that it doesn't make big oily slicks on the ocean surface when one of the rigs pops a leak.

[Kelvin Mace]

15. Unless it catches fire

then you have a problem.

[EFerrari]

12. Hugo Chavez demolishes Fox News

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[Xithras]

6. This platform just opened last week!

I guess that's what they get for outsourcing their drilling work to India

[Yeahyeah]

8. They warned Chavez that it was leaning to the left,but he thought that was just fine.

(That communist dictator!)

[RaleighNCDUer]

10. OK, now that was funny. nt

[EFerrari]

11. LOL

[Name removed]

9. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Merchant Marine]

14. Listing...

Probably a failed valve in the ballasting system or a slow leak in one of the void spaces.

Small list begins, slack water and fuel oil in storage tanks flood to the side of the list, list increases and progresses past the angle of flooding and the vessel is lost.

Good thing it was slow and obvious, and that they had time to evacuate the crew.

[Old Troop]

16. I wonder if they had fail-safes to cap the well head?

[protocol rv]

17. Evidently they did

All rigs install blow out preventers when drilling wells offshore. Sometimes they don't work

[Posteritatis]

18. I'm surprised he hasn't blamed the US for it yet. (nt)