11 still missing as US rig workers arrive home
Thursday 22 April 2010
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EmailUS coastguards are continuing to search for 11 missing workers after a massive blast rocked an oil rig off the Louisiana coast injuring 17, four critically.
About 100 workers who made it to a supply boat after Tuesday night's explosion arrived in Port Fourchon on Thursday morning, where they were welcomed by their families before undergoing medicals.
Adrian Rose, vice-president of rig owner Transocean, said the explosion appeared to be a blowout, in which natural gas or oil forces its way up a well pipe and smashes the equipment.
But precisely what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon was under investigation.
The blast aboard the rig could prove to be one of the deadliest offshore drilling accidents in the US in half a century.
In 1964 a catamaran-type drilling barge operated by Pan American Petroleum Corp in the Gulf of Mexico ruptured and exploded while drilling a well, killing 21 workers.
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