Fire on Gunashli oilfield in Azerbaijan, searches of 30 missing still continue
After a fire broke out on Gunashli oil platform in Azerbaijan on 4 December 2015, Friday, 33 people have been saved, one is dead and 30 are missing out of the 63 workers on the rig, APA news agency reports.
According to the report, the fire was not put out and the searches for those missing gave no result as of the evening of 6 December 2015, Balamirza Alirahimov, the head engineer at the Azerbaijani production union Azneft, said. The operational headquarters created over the fire also confirmed the information.
Trend agency reports that helicopters, ships and divers were engaged in the searches. A part of lifeboat and vests were found during the search operations. People, however, have not been found, Khalik Mammadov, SOCAR vice president, said, according to Trend.
Leyla Seidbekova, the director of Central Hospital of Oil Workers, told Sputnik Azerbaijan that the state of those saved is stable. She added that they had no information if the missing workers will be taken to the hospital after being rescued. “We were told that in total 31 people were injured and that they needed proper medical care,” Seidbekova said.
Haqqin.az reports that one of the rescued oil workers is in extremely critical state.
SOCAR appealed to the Border Services of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Iran assuming that the strong flow could have taken the corpses of those killed to the water areas of those countries.
On Friday evening, 4 December, a fire broke out on the platform of oil and gas producing department 28 May of Azneft production union in the shallow part of the field Gunashli, which provides over 60 percent of the output of SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan). The fire was the result of an accident on a gas pipeline on the oil platform number 10, which was caused by a wind storm.
Earlier, there were reports about another victim, Bakhman Jafarov, because of an incident on Gunashli field. Jafarov, a motor mechanic, was inside habitable booth number 501 with two others, when the waves washed it out to the sea.
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